Doctor who died of cancer criticised colleagues for calling her a ‘hypochondriac’ : news

referring to news

Doctor who died of cancer criticised colleagues for calling her a 'hypochondriac'

Doctor who died of cancer criticised colleagues for calling her a 'hypochondriac'

Simone Mitchell news.com.au @simonemitchellA BRITISH GP who died of cancer earlier this year criticised her colleagues for failing to diagnose her illness and inferring she was a "hypochondriac".A blog post written by Lisa Steen, 43, has been posthumously published in the British Medical Journal and tells how Dr Steen first went to a doctor in 2012 after she started to experience odd symptoms."I had felt unwell in terms of dizziness and visual symptoms since August 2012, and presented to my GP in September 2012, nearly two years before my diagnosis was made in July 2014," she wrote."So I spent two years wandering in the wilderness of the medically unexplained."Dr Steen reflected that even though she was a GP herself, she had difficulty describing her symptoms to her colleagues: "primarily visual disturbance; a sense of being behind a wobbly TV camera; also of diplopia — another image slightly below causing blurring, and negative palinopsia, prompting the GP to refer me to the eye clinic urgently, where all examinations were shown to be normal".


coupled with theguardian

GP labelled hypochondriac criticises colleagues after dying from cancer

GP labelled hypochondriac criticises colleagues after dying from cancer

A GP who died from a rare form of kidney cancer has warned of the difficulties doctors face in getting treatment for themselves, in an emotional blog published posthumously.Dr Lisa Steen described her anger at colleagues for failing to go the extra mile to help identify the disease and for dismissing her as a hypochondriac, in the essay published on BMJ.com.The 43-year-old mother-of-two from Cambridge wrote of spending "two years wandering in the wilderness of the medically unexplained" before finally being diagnosed in July 2014, by which time the cancer had spread to her bones.She died in February.


let alone independent

GP criticises colleagues who branded her a hypochondriac and failed to diagnose her cancer

GP criticises colleagues who branded her a hypochondriac and failed to diagnose her cancer

A GP and mother of two, who died of a rare form of cancer after her condition went undiagnosed for two years, has spoken out about being dismissed as a hypochondriac as she searched for a diagnosis from her colleagues.Dr Lisa Steen described her years of "wandering in the wilderness of the medically unexplained" in a posthumously published blog post.She also criticised health professionals for being "reluctant to lay their hands on and examine a fellow medic" before she was diagnosed with kidney cancer in July 2014, by which time the cancer had spread to her bones.The 43-year-old from Cambridge, who was a GP and had trained as a psychiatrist, had complained of a vast series of symptoms, including dizziness, visual disturbance, fatigue and memory problems, since 2012.