Fighting Ignorance: Our Biggest Obstacle

It's astonishing that, here we are in 2014 and we still have tremendous ignorance amongst the medical establishment about what PCOS is, what the treatments should be and how best to help women like me. 

Here's an example:

This week, I was called to my GP practice. 

A GP assigned as my doctor (arbitrarily when I was a child), but who has not been in any way involved with my care or the treatment decisions which I have made with the doctor overseeing my case, decided, arbitrarily that he needed me to come in for a blood pressure check. Fine in itself, but he was so adamant about this that he decided to unilaterally stop my prescription of metformin until he had his test result. 

I have no history of blood pressure problems and guess what? the reading was just the same as it always is and has been for as long as I can remember, which is probably about 20 years. 

It didn't seem to matter that I had been in for a routine meeting with my actual doctor only three months previously, and that she took a test then. Unfortunately, the result doesn't seem to have been recorded. 

This week's test was a complete waste of my time, and that of the NHS (Itake my BP at home regularly, and so didn't need to be convinced myself). 

Here's another from the same visit: 

I was chatting to the nurse and mentioned that this test was taking place because I have PCOS and am taking metformin to combat its effects. To my surprise and horror, she had never even heard of the syndrome. 

It really seems as though this is the biggest problems we face as a group: disbelief, a culture of blame and an insistence that many women are making up their symptoms in a bid for some kind of attention. 

Essentially, this is the enemy that we can't see - suffering with the syndrome is bad enough but fighting against such resistance from the establishment makes the battle all the harder. 

Charities like Verity are trying to redress the balance but raising awareness is key to earlier diagnosis, improved treatment, and better outcomes for sufferers. Improved awareness is as important as the treatment itself.