Thanks friends for your support. The point I was trying to come to was that so long as you have one patient complaining to their doctor about side effects, sleeplessness, sexual difficulties and so on, there seems to be the common thread that either they are imagining it altogether, or perhaps they have a teensy weensy touch of this or that, but the literature doesn't support the patient's statements that this is a common and widespread problem. When pressed about the patient's statement, and it comes to light that they are members of groups such as ours, (but not exclusively) it seems that dismissive statements are made. such as it being apocryphal or exaggerated symptoms put forward to support groups as a sort of one uppance of what a dreadful time we're having. Of course "Oh did you get that off of Facebook or Dr Google is just as common a put down. As in my reference to my past, as long as people were isolated from one another, they couldn't share common problems. They weren't aware that they weren't the only person suffering thus. As soon as people came together, these things came into focus as being far from isolated, or highly unusual, and probably stemmed from problems north of the eyebrows. In today's world of the internet, the medical profession can't still hold their previously godlike status and hide behind their white coats, whilst paternalistically patting wan little hands. Patients are becoming more empowered and if certain personages feel threatened, they belittle the person so doing as being keyboard doctors who really should take up tatting or somesuch, and leave the medical stuff and decisions to those with all that alphabet soup printed after the names stated on the gilded degrees hanging on the walls. Rant (sort of ) over.
