Trusting professionals?

KittyeeTrix

I brought my youngest son to my GP when he was about 10 months old as I felt there was a problem with his ability to sit up straight and hold up his own head... He said he was fine as did the PHN when I had him at one of those child assesment appointments(child development).
He was eventually diagnosed with Dyspraxia when he was 6.

A friend has just been told her son yesterday has a classic case of ADHD after being told last year by her GP and PHN that the child was fine.

Have any of ye been told your child was fine and then subsequently discovered a problem.

Ayla

Of course, medical professionals are just as human as the rest of us. I agree that it is their job to listen to concerns & get to the root of the problem, but they have their own biases and training which may or may not pursue any issues being presented.

We took our second daughter to the GP surgery several times in her first year and saw all the different GPs in there (one of which was a pediatric consultant). Our only symptom was perpetual crankiness...no fever, no vomiting, so the GPs (and PHN) all fobbed us off saying that some babies are just cranky & that the only thing to do was wait it out.

Of course we weren't satisfied with that diagnosis but it was only through taking her to a chiropractor and eventually a food intolerance test by kinesiology that we discovered she had a severe intolerance to wheat. A few days on gluten free and we had a completely different child.

If I let myself I can get fairly raging about the GPs in the surgery and the "diagnosis" they gave. But they took the symptoms they were given and made a general assessment...not one that was in anyway fair in hindsight - I would have appreciated them at least having the respect for our concerns to mention testing for a food intolerance.

But that is our jobs as parents. If we don't think we're getting the right info/diagnosis somewhere it is our responsibility to search out other professionals.

liliq

I think that although I'm sure there are cases where diagnoses are missed, that a lot of the time when the child is younger that whatever symptoms they have for certain conditions can fall into a "normal" range, and even though a parent might correctly feel that something isn't as it should be, so many people are being accused over over diagnosing things like ADHD these days that they're probably quite cautious before they do diagnose anything, and then it's only later, when the symptoms are more pronounced, and out of the "normal" range, that the diagnosis is made.

Sorry that's turned into such a long sentence, hope it makes sense!!

Mothman

Big time!
I'm not going to give the details, but alls well that ends well AND we got a written apology from the GP, but had we got the issue sorted when we first raised it, my little son would not have lost a years development and his recovery would have been a year or less instead of 3 years.

But a GP is jack of all trades (I is not my intention to be disrespectful) and I'm slow to criticise with picking up on something so unusual. But the fact we went to GP, something we rarely do, didn't register with the GP that there was something seriously wrong.

To sum up, we as parents have an extraordinary instinct, an instinct to know when there is something wrong and it needs to be listened to! But it is all too easy to accept a professionals word....

How Strange

I think if your gut is telling you somethings not right but the gp or phn is fobbing you off then you have to challenge them. My nephew has dyspraxia and there were a few signs which in hindsight were big markers-not feeding himself, very late sitting up and walking but it wasn't until he started school that a teacher noticed his behaviour and told my sister and advised she get an assessment carried out.

There was a very good article in last weeks Irish Times health supplement about dyspraxia and it said awareness of it as a condition is very low in Ireland.

KittyeeTrix

In my sons case he was the last of my 4 children so I kinda knew a thing or 2 about babies development by then.....

I knew I was half killed trying to support him at 9-10 months old when he'd be having a bottle!! I remember we used to have a little giggle about how he walked like Ozzy Osborne when he started walking:o:D

I know the GP's and PHN are only human but looking back I do feel that my sons diagnosis was delayed by 4-5 years as a result of inaction.....

With dyspraxia the misdiagnosis or lack of diagnosis wasn't thankfully related to a life threatening condition or even a deteriorating condition thank goodness!!

But it certainly has left me way more cautious when dealing with medical professionals and I'd be much more questioning these days:)

Zambia

At some piont we will have to trust some doctor?

KittyeeTrix

Zambia wrote: »

At some piont we will have to trust some doctor?

Of course we will........
This is genuinely not a Doctor, nurse or Public Heath nurse bashing thread:)

For the most part my experiences with medical professionals have been positive ones but this experience has just led me to the conclusion that they don't always get it right and as parents we sometimes have to be more focal in voicing our concerns

aniascor

I agree with Mothman that GPs are jack of all trades, and therefore not specialists who may be able to give a more accurate diagnosis. I also think that like all of us, they can get jaded by their jobs, and sometimes they forget that just because 99% of the time X, Y, and Z symptoms are not indicative of anything, they might just be looking at the 1%.

The biggest diagnosis that I think was missed for us was swine flu when my son was 14 months old. My husband got a really bad flu, and then my son got it. We thought it was just a bad cold at first, but after two days of high fevers, diarrhoea, listlessness, etc. we brought him to the doctor to be told that we were right and it was just a bad cold. My parents decided to come up to visit to give us a break, and my mother caught the flu. She was sicker than I have ever seen her in her life, and it was her GP who gave the swine flu diagnosis. As soon as we heard it, it made perfect sense. I was vaccinated the winter before, so I obviously had some immunity left.

I thought it was an obvious one for a GP to miss to be honest, because we were right in the middle of the swine flu outbreak.

But it obviously worked out okay for us, and it taught me an important lesson - to trust myself when I feel that all is not well, and not be dismissed when I can see for myself that something is not "just a cold." After all, the doctor sees my son for 5-10 minutes, whereas I see him all the time.