Mousesmom, I'm not sure - are you saying the doctor blames the mono for causing the depression, like the depression is an aftereffect, or is the other way around like hippimom said ?
Right enough, doctors' default setting seems to be "tired, can't find an illness - must be depression" and that does nothing at all to find the cause. But in a way they are correct, because the term "depression" originally meant a depressed level of arousal, which was a way of saying that the nervous system is ticking away slower than usual. Nowadays, people think of depression as an illness, but originally it meant a malfunction which caused a specific set of symptoms - rather like a mechanic saying "Your car has a problem with the electrics" when all the lights etc switch on and off at random.
The problem is, many doctors think an antidepressant will help all depression, so until they've screwed up going down that road - which can take forever - they never look for the underlying cause. Hippimom is so right about
the other things to check out.
The other things I would add are, mono tests are not always accurate - doctors tend to treat tests as if they are gospel, but very few are even 95% accurate. (I think you will find previous threads in this forum discussing this - if you search for posts by mono_girl, something like that, you may find out more.) If you want to challenge medics on this score, you will need to find out what the different tests done are, and discover from the FDA or somewhere how many false positives/negatives they give. Then ask the doctor, if you cannot tell which patient will be the 1 in 20/10/8/whatever who gets a wrong answer, don't you have to assume that all the test results you see will be inaccurate ? Any doctor who does not appreciate this point, I would ditch.
Also, vitamins are not as important as good nutrition, because it is the combinations of nutrients that tend to be important, and there is a lot more than vitamins that is vital - magnesium, Essential Fatty Acids, zinc, salicylates...basically, foods are nutritional supplements that we are tailormade to digest (when we are not too ill and they are not deficient due to poor growing conditions). Because some vitamins are "antagonists" - they stop the actions of other vitamins - the wrong dosage of some can be counterproductive, particularly the B Complex ones.
I have never had lupus, but I have a friend who had it years ago, and has had repeated bouts of ill health as a result. Prolonged periods of fatigue are not that uncommon whenever she overdoes the partying, as well as the sore throats, opportunistic infections etc. In her, it is a very distinctive pattern, and the cure is basically rest and missing out "wrong" foods. (Not partying is not an option in her mind !
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