Panic and Anxiety Case 2
Over the past 2 months I've treated another patient suffering from panic and anxiety. This patient is a retired female in her 60s who other than panic attacks has a multitude of other problems. She has problems essentially from the top of her body all the way down to her legs.
I told her Chinese Medicine works very well for conditions such as hers. It's like a country that's been flipped upside down and everything everywhere you look is wrong. This is where Chinese Medicine comes in. I told her we need to tackle her problems one by one, and therefore patience and dedication is required. With absolute commitment to treatment though, she will be able to walk towards to the path of recovery.
Her panic and anxiety is multi-faceted. It causes fear, irritability to noise, sweating, sudden diarrhea, coldness, and strong burst of vomiting. I took note that such attacks could arise at any time and out of nowhere without any obvious trigger.
The rest of the time she frequently feels depressed and fatigued. But thank goodness she's wise enough not to be taking drugs. (The last patient I saw who took depression drugs for her depression looked more depressed.) After finishing the complete assessment of her condition through authentic Chinese Medicine diagnostics, I determined her problem was basically an issue with the body's inability to properly circulate fluids and water.
This concept appears peculiar to her because she has mostly been given disease names, not something like what I told her. She finally said to me, "Doctor Wang, you're my last hope". I replied, "don't worry, I'll try my best." I prescribed a specially formulated Chinese Medicine herbal combination for her and told her I'll be following up on her condition.
She came back smiling on the 2nd visit. And told me she felt so much better. She's having more energy and feeling more optimistic and much more stable. I cannot describe the look on her face but it was the stuff that makes me happy as a doctor, to be able to let patients know that drugs and perpetual disease are not the end-all-be-all.
Over the next 2 months she regularly came back for further treatments and I continued to modify the herbal prescription as her body adjusted accordingly towards recovery. Now the treatment has, for the time being, been taken away from the emphasis on the anxiety, and shifted to tackle her other problems(fibromyalgia and edema).
This is because she is much much more stable and panic attacks occur ever only so rarely, and at much reduced severity if they were to occur at all. She has also learned to manage them very well, so they no longer pose a threat to her.
When this patient came to me during the first visit she told she had been to certain groups where people with similar health problems such as fibromyalgia are gathered together. I'm familiar with these types of patient groups. The purpose for setting up these groups is great, but they're not as noble as most people think they are.
I've personally tried to contact multiple of these groups to see if they would welcome me to give these patients seminars on how Chinese Medicine and Acupuncture can be an effective alternative treatment for their conditions, so they don't have to perpetually be labeled with a disease without any obvious meaningful treatment other than "management", as they typically call it in their circles. Unfortunately none of them identified with my purpose. One of them even told me my treatment style was not aligned with their "goal". So it came to me that these groups are not really meant to help people.
It feels to me that it is just another type of environment to perpetuate the notion that disease is permanent and that these people just have to "deal with it". One might as well say it's "too bad" for these unfortunate folks. And essentially, meaningful treatment does not exist.
The patient in this case told me the same thing. Her peers in such a group were generally negative in outlook, because they have, in one way or another, been lead to believe their condition is sort of a permanent thing. She told herself that she cannot succumb to this type of thinking and subsequently found me online. I told her if more people thought like you, the world would be a better place. I can only pray.