Despite waiting weeks for an appointment and filling out all those forms, you can tell from the get-go, you’re being regarded as an inconvenience. Maybe, despite your persistent symptoms, you “look” too healthy to have anything seriously wrong with you and your new doctor has scheduled you for a cursory history/physical/basic blood work before she moves on to the next warm body.

Maybe she’s discouraged by the stack of records you’ve brought in and your opening statement “Doctor, you’re the fifth…sixth…etc.” doctor I’ve seen for my problem and no one can figure it out.”

“Maybe,” your new doctor thinks, "Because there’s nothing wrong with you.”

Many times, an even worse start is that you have done some homework, or (Heaven Forfend!!) seen an alternative practitioner. “My chiropractor thinks I should be tested for chronic Lyme Disease.” (What would a chiropractor know about that, she mumbles to herself).

Now we get into the land of the ‘no such disease’ and if you find yourself there, or worse yet, “oh, it’s the latest fad disease,” start gathering your belongings and glance around for the closest exit.

The “no such diseases” were of course pretty much all diseases before their causes were discovered. Right now, we’re on the cusp of a bunch more, moving from being too easily dismissed by the terminally incurious and intellectually slothful to being fully accepted. Twenty five years ago, Rheumatology Department at Northwestern sent all their fibromyalgia patients to psychiatrists as hypochondriacs. Then, when a research pharmacologist at Northwestern literally invented the fibromyalgia medicine Lyrica, Northwestern earned an astonishing $1.5 billion in royalties, stopped sending fibromyalgia patients to shrinks and advertised themselves as a “Center of Excellence” in the treatment of Fibromyalgia. You can bet everyone got Lyrica and there was no acupuncturist in sight.

Doctors often answer your inquiry about fibromyalgia, chronic fatigue, chronic Lyme, mast cell activation, adrenal fatigue, subclinical hypothyroidism, adrenal fatigue, intestinal parasites, Morgellons, mold biotoxin illness, and a dozen others with a pleasant, “It’s really not fully accepted as a condition. I don’t know how to test for it or treat it.”