Managing MH + regular health

Does anyone else here have difficulties getting MH and regular doctors to coordinate care? I go to the psychiatrist/psychologist and he blames my regular doc. I go to my regular doc & he blames the p-doc. I can't ever get them to talk civilly to each other and I have tried different sets of doctors (especially psychiatrists/psychologists) and it doesn't seem to make much of a difference.

Neither set of doctors wants me on the other ones' medicine. Personally, I'd prefer to be on no medicine at all, but that's probably not very realistic for the time being. Has anyone encountered this? What have you done to get the doctors to work together? I really miss the one doctor I had years back that actually coordinated my care & treated me as a whole person, rather than 3 sets of textbook subjects. I feel like mental health and physical health can be like the whole chicken & egg thing. The two problems feed each other, so you can't just deal with one and ignore the other. I have a very real physical issue as evidenced by scans, blood work, surgical reports & exams. I also have a very real stress disorder that I am trying to heal. How do I get each doctor to accept that s/he doesn't have all the answers & needs to work with the other one so that both sets of problems can be healed together? I've tried the whole "let's get X better first & then we can work on Y" for too many years. It doesn't work. Ideas? Please.

You bring up some really good points that I do think many of us have problems dealing with.

Often, it can be the other way around, where the primary doesn't want to even delve into any MH aspects, and actually prefers you seek outside care. It can mean one or two less drugs they have to worry about.

I completely agree with you, that we're "whole" people that comprise a mental, physical, and spiritual self, and they all need to be taken care of.

I wish I could offer more insight as to why they might possibly not communicate. Is it that they don't speak directly with each other in person, (ie: phone), or that they do but they disagree?

Perhaps writing down, while you're there, each docs specific "objections" and then get those specific questions answered, might be a place to start. But you do have every right to be expected to be treated as a whole person. Yes, they're all connected.




M.

It's not my PCP. He doesn't want to do anything at all with me but write referrals (and often, not even that).

It is a specialist that is really who is primarily responsible for my medical care. Mostly the doctors will not ever speak with each other -- even by phone. Which often leaves me to pass messages that I don't even fully understand (sometimes I wonder if it's actually English. lol). On the occasions that they do talk, usually it's the p-docs telling the specialist that he ought to pull me off all my medications. My specialist has never agreed to do that, but I have demanded it in the past and quit taking medications. Every time, it landed me in the hospital for a week or more, seriously ill. I finally promised my specialist that I would stop being stupid, buying into this whole nonsense that I'm not really sick and I can overcome all my physical injuries/illnesses simply by using mind-over-matter.

The past 2 years I've had an HMO, so the doctors are in the same medical group, but that group is spaced out over several towns. They all have privileges at the same hospital, but other than that never see each other. I totally agree that they ought to be communicating & working together, but this seems to be the new norm. They send formal reports to each other about what they each have done, sometimes including opinions that more/less should be done by the other provider. Then that person receives the report and a petty turf war begins. To make things worse, when there are phone calls, they are usually between the assistants, not the doctors, and the message gets badly mangled. I miss the days when I could book a "coordination of care" appointment and the only thing the doctor would focus on for that visit was making phone calls and trying to understand how the pieces fit together. I cannot really switch to a different PCP because most are unwilling to accept new patients with my medical condition (I literally phoned every other available provider in the group 2 years ago & they all turned me down). *sigh* I don't know what I'm going to do.