Carrie 2 is a doctor. She explains why it's important to draw on the lessons learned from caring for people with other post-viral chronic illnesses.
Transcript
I was always very interested in working with my patients who had chronic illness and fibromyalgia. This gives me a different understanding and there’s been evolving understanding of how to deal with activity and pacing, which – I mean what I was taught is not accurate. I was taught when I was in school not about pacing. I was taught about slow increase in activity – which if done without a patient-centered approach just leads to crashes. I’ve learned that myself personally. So I think I’ve learned from a personal perspective, all of the harm that was done to people with some of these chronic post-viral illnesses, so I’ve certainly been able to share that with my colleagues, who have taken a different approach … It’s like – we talk about a patient-centered approach – but we pay it lip service – but pacing is truly a patient-centered approach. You don’t just say you’ll do more tomorrow because you did this amount today, you pay attention to what your body is telling you. And allowing people to respect themselves and their own experiences, is probably something we need to do a lot better in medicine overall, as opposed to following formulaic ways of telling people to get better.
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