Deceptive Symptoms - A True Story

This is a self-experienced, true story about how symptoms can deceive and what we can learn from that.

In my early teens, I suddenly felt pain in my heart. In those days I had no professional education in medicine so I was clueless to what this could be. I was in good shape and healthy otherwise, a versatile athlete and should by all standards have had a strong heart.

I did.

I went to a hospital to have my heart examined, and went through all possible examinations. Absolutely nothing wrong could be found. My heart, they said, was in excellent shape. Moreover, my pain always came when I was at rest. As soon as I increased my pulse by exercise, the pain disappeared, which is quite contrary to how it works when a genuine heart problem is at hand.

So okay, my heart was fine.

But after a couple of months it became worse, now also with pain in the back and the veins of my legs swelled up. I returned to the hospital; now they suggested I search a lung specialist, perhaps it all originated from there.

I did. Again I went through a massive set of tests and examinations. The same result. Nothing wrong could be found.

After another few months, my heart started to vibrate. This became so bad that every blood vessel in the body vibrated. When it was as worst, the whole body was shaking slightly and my vision was disturbed by that the blood vessels of the retina shook. When I focussed my eyes on something, I saw a view that was vibrating, just as I was vibrating.

Every time before that I had had myself examined, I felt quite reassured that my problems were not indicating anything serious, but now I became afraid. This was just too much. And still everything became normal with physical strain. When I raised the pulse, all the problems stopped; at that time a very puzzling fact.

Another symptom also turned up: coughing. I had my lungs examined by another specialist, but he found nothing wrong with my lungs, indeed, he could see or hear nothing there that indicated any presence of extra mucus.

Finally, I also got headache. Then I had myself figured out that mucus came running from the head down into the abdomen, and there, somehow, it caused pain and disturbed the heart rhythm. When I suggested this to a physician, he first almost laughed at me: who had heard anything like that before? How could mucus from the head disturb heart rhythm to such an extent that the whole body vibrated and the veins of the legs swelled up? This was not possible, he said.

I insisted, and finally, after consulting many colleagues, he gave in to my explanation. The mucus was thick and hard; it caused pain, almost as cramp, on the way down where it pressed the tissues and nerves. It also pressed on nerves leading electric signals related to the heart, signals that at times went totally crazy. This, everyone realised, could be dangerous. But as long as nobody found anything wrong, it was ignored.

At this stage three years had passed since I first suffered pain in the heart. Finally it appeared as if a solution was on its way. What remained was to find out exactly from where the mucus came and why – and how to stop it?

The obvious assumption was sinusitis.

There was mucus in the throat, alright. It seemed to come from the cavities of the nose. But x-ray did not show anything in the nose. And no medicine normally used for dissolving or diminish the release of mucus did affect anything in the slightest.

I was given antibiotics, a long cure, but it did not do anything else than giving me bad side-effects.

At that point, every physician gave up. “There must be something, but our examinations do not show anything, so what can we do?” With some variation in wording, that was what they all said. And my body still vibrated. Not all the time, but when I was still or if it was cold. With hindsight, the reason for why it came just then is quite obvious, the mucus became softer and more fluid when I became warmer, and when it became softer it didn't cause these symptoms any longer.

I had to live with this. Meanwhile I tried many natural remedies myself and tried to eat or not to eat a large number of foods to see if that affected anything. After several years, I decided to close myself in and eat huge amounts of garlic. I did eat at least five whole raw garlics per day.

After two weeks, the release of mucus increased enormously. It was as if it wanted to drown me, I could hardly breathe. That continued for six days, after which it completely stopped. All symptoms disappeared! And they have stayed away since then, and that is more than 30 years ago.

Garlic cured me! After almost 10 years with this problem, I was finally well again.

So what was all this about?

I cannot say that with 100% certainty, but I probably had a chronic sinusitis. On two occasions as a child, I had difficult acute sinusitis, which was cured with antibiotics. I know now, that antibiotics don't cure, but just push back acute symptoms; infections and inflammations enter a dormant or chronic stage, from which they can slowly work and destroy without being noticed.

I also now know that chronic inflammations are not always visible on x-ray. And I certainly learned something I have later observed on many occasions, noticeable symptoms don't always point straight at their source. In my case it started as pain in the heart, and the problem was in the nose!

If you have pain in the heart, you are going to a cardiologist. He examines the heart; indeed, in his mind is nothing else than hearts, he neither cares nor knows very much about anything else. That's it and often it ends there! That's the curse of too extreme specialisation. If you have a problem with your heart, are thoroughly examined and the result shows that nothing wrong can be found, there is an obvious risk that you take that as conclusive and ignore to take further action.

Later in my life, I came to work with the police; during a a couple of years I was a police and forensics doctor. You have all seen him in movies, the first one at a murder scene. It was a nasty but interesting work, from which I learned much. I also came to be involved in criminal investigations beyond the medical point of view; I found diagnostic thinking (at its best) to be closely related to criminal investigation. Both are about reconstructing a plausible truth, based on a number of sometimes confusing clues. Indeed, this is a feature criminology and medicine share also with history, most tangibly with archaeology and palaeontology and other sciences related to them – although the latter are completely dedicated to the past. In criminology and diagnostic medicine, however, one reconstructs the past in order to understand the present and – above all - affect the consequences of the past: to catch criminals or cure illness.

In modern healthcare, a patient is judged by current symptoms and test results – and only rarely by past health issues. In reality, his or her whole history must be mapped in order to fully understand a complex health problem and get to the bottom of its roots. This is a work for a “medical detective”. But unfortunately modern healthcare is focused on symptoms and curing symptoms, not on finding and curing root causes. It is more cost-efficient that way; it takes less time. There is neither time nor money for a medical detective.

Another lesson from my own story is the power of garlic. If I had not experienced it myself, I would never have believed it that powerful. But note that it first increased the symptoms for six days, before removing them. This is what we call a “healing crisis”; it is often a part of natural healing. You must get worse before you get better. This is especially true about chronic illness, inflammation or infection in particular, which must often be pushed to an acute state before it can be cured. The reason is that the immune system, your own defence, has more or less given up on the chronic illness. It might isolate it instead of fighting it, if it at all cares for it. When it blooms as acute, your own defence attacks it again, and that is necessary if you should ever get rid of it. But, as we can learn from my example, when the crisis starts it can be tempting to stop the treatment instead of continuing. During six days there came so much mucus that I could neither eat nor breathe without trouble, not to mention sleeping. Still I continued to eat my five daily raw garlics. You wouldn't do that if you were unaware of how a healing crisis works.

A consequence of this experience was that I started to study medicine seriously and it strongly influenced my approach to health and illness. On the whole, it triggered my serious interest in health, a fact that also teaches us something: coincidental factors can determine in which direction we will take our life. Someone you meet, a book you read, or an event, good or bad, can change the direction completely. Especially in youth when life still lies unshaped ahead of us; the older, more experienced, and – above all – the more conscious we become and the more self-knowledge we acquire, the less receptive we will be to coincidental stimuli. For youth, and even more for children, they have a tremendous influence. Anyone in that age, who breaks the pattern of the herd in any way whatsoever, is doing so as a result of coincidental stimuli. You must discover that there is a pattern to break, before you break it. You also must discover that there are alternatives; you cannot make choices as long as there is only one alternative: to follow the herd. Someone or something opens your eyes and triggers your change; it doesn't happen in a vacuum.

Finally, an observation I have often made and also mentioned, namely that a physician who has never been ill can never understand illness. Education is good, experience by observation as well, but if you have not the first-hand experience of being ill yourself, and I mean serious illness, you can never fully understand illness or what or how a seriously ill individual thinks and feels. Just imagine: how can someone who has never experienced almost unbearable pain understand what suffering such pain is about? First-hand experience, self-reflection, and analysis are indispensable for profound insight and understanding. That goes for everything.

(This article is based on material previously published in Meriondho Leo.)

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