When I was 15, I began feeling a lot of seemingly random pain in my joints and arms. Our family doctor suspected fibromyalgia and directed me to a neurologist. The man was extremely dry and barely looked at me while conducting a bunch of strength and movement tests, but I didn't care. I just wanted him to make the pain stop. He finished the tests, sat behind his desk, looked at my mom, and said: 'Where's this girl's father?' My mom said: 'We've been divorced since she was a baby.' Then the doctor said: 'This is not a health problem. She's just missing her father.'
My mom and I were speechless. We left his office and never came back. Even our family doctor got very angry on our behalf. You don't dismiss a patient's pain without a more thorough investigation. Even if he asked all the right questions about my life and decided I had mental health issues related to my family situation, he should have referred me to see a therapist and maybe a psychiatrist. That's what the family medicine doctor said.
More than a decade later, I was diagnosed with autism, and I was told the chronic pain was related to the neurological differences in my brain. The autism diagnosis is also something that the neurologist missed because he didn't do a proper investigation.
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