Joint and muscle pain can have multiple causes and it is difficult for Donna to connect with her health professionals to discuss the side-effects.
Transcript
Five years of Letrozole, which is challenging. It’s giving me hot flashes and they say there’s joint and muscle pain as a possible side-effect but if I phone about it and say that I’m having joint and muscle pain, then they tell me I’ve probably got arthritis; possible osteoporosis and high cholesterol are all possible outcomes. I already have high cholesterol and I talked with my doctor before when they found this out and I had decided not to do medication to deal with it and that I would deal with it through diet and exercise and things like that. So when the medical oncologist told me that high cholesterol was a possible problem and I said “I already had high cholesterol”, he said, “Well just take medication for it.” And I said, “Well I don’t want to take medication,” and he said, “Well you have to.” So it’s just, they’re so entrenched in the medical model that it becomes a challenge.
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