Why we exist
Most people who come to us have been unwell for years, sometimes decades. They have seen many specialists, had many tests, and been given many – sometimes contradictory – explanations, or none at all. Each appointment looked closely at one part of them, or a few symptoms at a time. How many have ever looked at the whole?
This is rarely anyone’s fault. Medicine is organised by specialty, and records are kept in many places. Specialists, even within the same hospital, do not always see one another’s notes.
Symptoms are recorded at a single moment rather than followed as they change. Details that seem small, such as two medications prescribed by different clinicians that interact with each other, can matter a great deal, and are easy to miss when the records are never seen together. Year by year, the picture becomes harder to see, not easier.
Gradually, care turns to managing symptoms, and the question of why they began can quietly fall away. Medications added along the way can bring effects of their own, until it becomes hard to tell where the illness ends and the side effects begin.
Many of the people we meet have learnt to tell their story in the few minutes an appointment allows. With us, there is time to tell it properly.
That is where we begin.