My father had a bit of a health scare today. For the past 12 hours or so he was suffering from breathlessness and he had trouble sleeping last night as a result of it. We were terrified of course. Worried about what was wrong. Was it a mild heart attack? Was it something else? What is it?
So he went to see a doctor today and did all sorts of tests. The good news is that the test results all came out positive. There was nothing wrong with him.
He still has more tests tomorrow but in the mean time the doctor said it could be due to stress.
Stress. That seems to be a common word a lot of doctors are using these days.
Online you’ll see a lot of literature or studies that link stress to cancer or health in general. But I’m personally skeptical of these things. Why? It’s because of the following story.
When my sister was a teenager she had developed some kind of rash on one side of her face. It was bright red and took up one whole side of her face almost like a bright red carpet with bumps. So my parents brought her to a well-known skin specialist in Penang (we were living in Penang).
The skin specialist took a look at it and then said it was eczema and gave her medicine and said it would subside in a week or so. She applied it diligently only to see a week later it hadn’t gotten better. In fact it had gotten worse.
She went back to see the doctor and he recommended a different dose. And then he said that this was stress related and her facing stress was making this worse.
My mom was very worried. She kept asking what my sister was stressed about but my sister said nothing but the usual school/exams stress. Well.. and the rash. That was the one thing that was really stressing her out at that point because going to school with that rash on her face was really affecting her self-esteem.
Then my mom decided to seek a second opinion. She brought my sister to see another skin specialist who immediately diagnosed the problem. It wasn’t stress. In fact it wasn’t related to stress at all. It was some kind of fungus or something. Turns out the previous doctor didn’t diagnose this right and instead of saying that he didn’t know what it was… he just blamed it on stress. In fact we found out that the medicine he gave in the second visit wasn’t to solve the fungal infection but really to cover it up.
My mom was angry and we never went back to that skin specialist again. I don’t want to name and shame this skin specialist because it was really a long time ago and that’s not the purpose of this entry anyway.
The purpose of this entry is to share this story and why it had led to my personal belief that I don’t believe it at all when doctors say your problem is because of stress. Why? Because it’s so hard to argue against that and most people just take it literally.
Think about it… which one of us doesn’t face any form of stress? At work we face stress, at home we face stress, heck even among our friends we face stress whenever we have a fight or if someone says something bad about us behind our backs.
Heck even my 17 month old son faces stress. Whenever he’s holding on to any of our phones and I take it away he cries like it’s the worst thing ever to happen to him. To us we wonder why cry over such a trivial thing but to a baby who has never experienced stress in other ways yet, taking something away from him that he wants to play with could very well be the most stressful thing to him yet.
Stress after all… is relative since everyone has different stress thresholds.
Why doctors blaming anything on stress bothers me is because of what happened to my sister. It misled my mom and sent her on a wild goose chase on what the root of the problem was. It made my sister suffer longer than she needed to and after all that… the doctor suffered nothing. Why? Because society accepts that. We accept stress as the argument for a lot of our health problems. Heck many studies show it and sure there could very well be truth in it but it’s a word that I think is used too loosely in the medical profession.
Whenever I hear a doctor tell me about how any of my problems are because of stress I immediately think he’s not a good doctor and run to find a second opinion.
I do believe that this thinking of mine can’t be fully accurate though and perhaps that’s what I want to know from sharing this experience. For anyone reading this or if you’re a doctor, please share your experience on why you think stress really is the cause of our problems or why doctors aren’t “exaggerating” the use of that word.
And if the problem is stress… then what is the solution? It’s impossible to live without stress in this world. Sure you can do things to lower stress but how do you measure that? Isn’t the medical profession supposed to be about science? Where everything is measurable before a claim or diagnosis is made?
Please help enlighten me.
Timothy Tiah – Co-Founder of Colony, Kuala Lumpur Co-Working Space