“Nothing but the truth”

Perhaps that’s stretching facts a little too far, to claim that anything is the absolute truth. Rather I ought to say my perception of the ‘doctor’s line’. Without needlessly bothering you with what you don’t want to hear, let me start off with a reality so many suffers share - a good number of hyperhidrosis suffers, or let me dare say, all hyperhidrosis suffers at least once in their life-time have gotten a bad vibe from a doctor regarding the condition. While this ‘line’ has been delivered with varying degrees of diplomacy, ranging from a polite ‘don’t worry about it, it will stop as you add more years’ to ‘if this is why you came here you are wasting my time’. Following the frustration that one immediately feels, one wonders why these doctors just CAN’T GET IT. How can one explain such insensitivity – or shall we say negligence – considering that patients are in actual fact clients – be served and not beneficiaries of charity. I hope by exploring the underlying factors behind this behaviour – hyperhidrosis patients may find their frustrations with doctors more bearable and perhaps even more might empower them to change this situation. The first and most obvious explanation is ignorance i.e. that lack of knowledge of the condition might cause them to not treat the patient satisfactorily. While there is a lot truth in this, but by intuition when doctors meet something they are ignorant about their curiosity must be raised causing them either to do more research about the issue or condition or to refer to more experienced colleagues. The second, underlying yet more intricate issue is misconception about hyperhidrosis – this in my view does explain a greater part of the attitudes and behaviour of doctors. Of course the major misconception is on the true impact on the life of the patient. Its imaginable that doctors thinking logically would not regard hyperhidrosis as having the same level of impact or even greater as a condition like psoriasis – and yet that’s exactly what research reports. Ironically even among doctors who have strong knowledge of hyperhidrosis, their perception of the impact of the various forms of hyperhidrosis i.e axillary, palmar-plantar, is often in contradiction to what patients experiencing these forms of hyperhidrosis have reported. Of course there are more issues to this problem, but let me stop there for now. So what is the way forward? Clearly it’s not enough to sing “Amazing Grace” to them; they have to be taught the lyrics as well, so that they can sing along. Raising awareness of the condition while being a very important goal, is not the end of the story, the ultimate is to enable doctors to see things from the perspective of the patient – this will be the day of liberation to the hyperhidrosis suffers.