ORTHOSTATIC TACHYCARDIA: Ailment Can Steal Youth From the Young.

Patrick Fox, now 14, considers himself lucky. It took only a year to find out why he was always tired, his heart raced and he ached all over, why he became overheated easily and had terrible headaches almost every day. Once a happy, active child and good student who enjoyed school, by age 12 he could hardly get out of bed. Various medical specialists — pediatrician, cardiologist, rheumatologist and geneticist — failed to find a physical cause for his symptoms. Some said he should see a psychiatrist because he was a malingerer, lazy, depressed, manipulative or overly anxious.

Instead, after his racing heart caused chest pains that felt like an impending heart attack, his mother whisked him off to the Mayo Clinic in Rochester, Minn., where in just two hours he learned he had a form of autonomic dysfunction known as POTS, short for postural orthostatic tachycardia syndrome.

It has taken some youngsters with the syndrome as long as a decade to get a proper diagnosis, by which time their teen years are a washout.

In my experience, whenever medical doctors offer a psychological diagnosis, it’s a copout. I’m sure that’s not always the case, but it has been my experience. After Helen had her heart attack, she got all sorts of psychological diagnoses, when she was really suffering the after-effects of an undiagnosed heart attack.

UPDATE: Steven Den Beste emails:

In 1971 my father complained constantly about increasing pain in his abdomen. The doctors did the usual tests and didn’t find anything, and eventually recommended that he be put into a psychiatric institution to treat what they thought was an imaginary pain.

A few days after that began, some test came back that they hadn’t bothered waiting for. What they found out was that he had advanced cancer of the pancreas. An exploratory operation determined that it had spread to his liver, and there was no hope.

In 1972 it finally killed him.

I’m with you on this: “In my experience, whenever medical doctors offer a psychological diagnosis, it’s a copout.”

(I should mention that it didn’t actually cost him his life. By the point where he finally got doctors to start trying to find out what
was wrong, it was already too late.)

So they just added insult to injury. Okay.