I went to Mzimba District Hospital, normally you would find long queues. This day, I found the place empty with a lady in the out-patient department who clearly seemed to have been working and had just finished. The time was around 2:30pm. If they had gone out for lunch and come back at 1:30pm, a lady would sit in out of the examination room if there was a big crowd waiting to see a doctor. But then an empty opd at 2:30pm just means the crowd was gone in one hour!
That's a big improvement worth noting.
Now, one problem I noticed. When you record medical records in a medical diary, the past ailments influence the doctors decision on subsequent diagnosis. And usually this diagnosis is wrong and to the disadvantage of the patient.
Look, several diseases have very common symptoms some of these would be found in people who have chronic illnesses and some without chronic illnesses but under an infection or some other short-term disease.
But because he has had several illnesses with symptoms seemingly leading to chronic illness, it takes one doctor to make a wrong diagnosis and it will then be difficult for the rest of the doctors to change this diagnosis.
There is this say of medications to chronic illnesses that once started you cannot stop them. And once you stop them you are treated with a worse kind of stigma by your family members especially making your life worse that you would want to stop the medication. A kind of slavery to a medication. I don't like this.
How many chronic diseases exist? I think very few. Why not study these in detail so that you are able to rule out a wrong diagnosis? There is such information in vast amounts on wrong diagnoses. If to this day, I managed to break a chronic medication, its because I studied these in detail, looked at my personal experience and even had a full medical review.
After being prayed for by many preachers, trying various ways to get well and be off this medication which was now becoming more destructive than the illness itself, I resolved to just yield and go on with the medication. But if I was to take this for life, then I had to understand the illness I had. For all the while, nobody had told me for they thought being a disease of the mind, I cannot understand, yet from all the treatment I was getting, and the symptoms I was expected to have, there was no connection. I was more suffering from the side effects from the medication themselves than the disease and every time I went for a medical review, I was being asked only about these side effects than any symptom that was supposed to be my illness.
It made the appearance of me not having the symptoms of the illness due to the medication I was taking.
What if, I as a patient chose not to take this medication for life? Why should I have no choice on what treatment I can get? Why destroy my life earlier with side effects of the medication? What if I decided to die earlier anyway than suffer a chronic disease on top of that, side effects of the medication? It's my choice. Who suffers with my death? Me. For the rest of my relatives and society have already ruled out my ever being importance in the society.
I become like a living dummy, a statue, or a picture on the wall. Everybody takes a glance and passes by without a care. Who can miss it anyway if this statue fell down and was destroyed? None, it will just create more space for more important people. That's all it is to them.
Does anyone like being in a place and be treated as though he does not exist? I am very sure none.
I wouldn't either. So best, of my disease to die faster than die a slow painful death due to the side effects, than with the disease itself. Because 99.9% I am wrongly diagnosed, I have 0.1% living to my life expectation on medication and 99.9% living to my life expectation without medication.
Do you know what my life expectation is? Do you know how many years I will live? You don't. Only God knows. Did not God create me? Did He not raise the dead? Even raised up Jesus to eternity? He can raise me too from death to life and everything in between and today, healthwise, death is very far from me. Beyond a horizon. But who knows my roof can fall down and kill me even now as I write.
Of some reason due to all the political impasses some body just decide to drop a bomb over my roof as in Libya?
So my life expectation is with the range of seconds from now and 120 years. And maybe more if God wills. Do not limit my life expectation by putting me on a medication that limits my life without my acknowledgment.
It matters not whether you think I have the disease of the mind. For the mind suffers no disease but that which a body can suffer. If the body has malaria, the mind too has malaria, yet I just think and reason like everybody else. The only disease of the mind in which within this body I don't think is death. For even a person in a comma, has a well function mind though unresponsive for one reason or another. For when he does come out of comma, he is just like anyone else.
So, there is need to reconsider the way doctors have been making decisions on these chronic diseases.
I would like to study these and see what I can find out about each of these diseases for each seem to have some little and simple detail which medical research seems to have neglected for a long time indeed.
As I said, on my twitter, there have been very few innovations in the recent years. I would put the blame to the way education is delivered generation to another.
People like Isaac Newton and the rest of inventors had a very different style of learning altogether than what we have nowadays.
Maybe in mass education, we end up wanting everybody to be like everybody else according to someone else decision. More like Soldiers who are not supposed to think or question but obey an order as a master gives it.
That's bad.