Well, hello there. Thank you for joining us on this daily podcast from Body and Soul called Healthish. Of course, in fact, I hope you are feeling really healthy ish today. I am your host of Felicity Hawley. I'm joined today by doctor Gillian Deacon. She is a GP with more than thirty years experience. Now she has treated hundreds of patients for symptoms that are pretty much unexplained by Western medicine.
So she decided to write a book to help us all out, to help us make sense of undiagnosed ailments, and she's going to talk to us about all of that today. If you do like what you hear from Jillian, and I know you will make sure you're listening to our full chat on extra healthy Ish, where she talks more about symptoms of functional illnesses. You can catch that wherever you get your podcasts. Jillian, thank you for joining us today.
On healthy It My pleasure, Felicity.
And well done on your new book, No easy Feet writing a book.
Thank you very much.
Yes, you're right, or a thesis or a doctorate, you know you've done them all. Anyway. So many of us, you know, walk around with symptoms of illness. And I know many of our listeners and colleagues and friends of mine struggle to get that medical diagnosis. What can you share your experience, what you've seen over the years with people feeling this way.
So every day for the last forty years I've been working as a GP, I've seen people, some of whom have very clear medical diagnoses, and that's my first job. Is this something that is needing medical treatment? Now, you know? And that's the first thing that every doctor wants to address when someone walks in. But I'm telling you that every single day of my life, I see at least two to three people who have symptoms but there is no medical diagnosis. And I've done the due diligence, I
promise you, And so then what do we do? That's the question. A lot of the times, patients are left without any answers. And I've written my book for this very group of people who have been to the doctor. The tests have all been done, they've been told of things normal, but they're still unwell. So that's where that's where I like to start the conversation.
I feel like so many of us been in this situation, whether it's you know, with a long term illness or something you know that's just risen and passes, it's functional illness. You refer to this term as how do you describe that?
Look? Functional illness. It's a lousy term, but there isn't really any better. They get caught, these symptoms get caught all sorts of things. One thing, the nicest term is actually just simply persistent symptoms, brackets, no diagnosis, persistent symptoms. That's actually a really simple way of explaining it. I'm using the word functional just to differentiate it from symptoms connected to a proven disease. That's the way I am using the term functional symptoms. That can be any symptom.
But you've mentioned some of the common ones, you know, fatigue or nausea, headache, pains, dizziness, tingling. People get many, many symptoms and all the tests come back normal. So I'd like to say that I've done the research. I've gone all around the world, studying research in a lot of the centers who treat functional conditions, and I've put together a simplified version of where the research is at.
Now that's what my book's about. I think I can pretty well translate where the sophisticated research is what it says, and I've put it in language I think is pretty understandable by the averageree.
Test that I'm halfway through the book, and yes it is. It's very easy to understand. It can be incredibly frustrating as a patient and you come up against it. You know you want that diagnosis, but then there isn't one. I mean, what sort of words of wisdom do you have to people who are struggling with something like this.
Well, the first thing I shouldn't let people know about all the medical diagnosis. There is not actually any training except in Germany. There are guidelines, formal guidelines, so GPS doctors all of the world work to guidelines, proven methods that have been shown to work. Again again, when it comes to functional things, it goes good, Oh, you haven't got any diagnosis, Off you go take it easy. See me again. If you've got any problems, it's very unsatisfactory.
So there aren't any guidelines, but I've done my very best to put together what is happening within the specialist centers where there are strategies that have been proven to work, and that's what I've done, so I understand people's frustration.
So when it comes to these functional conditions. A lot of people, you know, put it on stress, because I suppose stress is hard to pinpoint as well. Body's response to you know, our stress aws as you call them, is this true?
Yeah, that's right, Felicity. You've read in my book that I don't use the word stress. I find it very unhelpful. It's not a term that helps to get people better. Right. So ah, look, sometimes you can say some people can say, look, I was really stressed just before my exam and I felt my tummy, you know, upset, and I nearly vomited or something like that. Okay, there's a stress relation. Everyone
can understand that. One an exam finishes, the tummy settles down. Okay, But what if you wake up and you've got chest pain and you've suddenly got tingling in your left hand or something, you know, and you're not at all convinced there's any new things in your life like stress, and the doctors are saying it's stress. That's really problematic. So what I've tried to do my book is to explain the word using the word stress or which is quite different. I've tried to say that the body has to deal
with whatever is happening to it. So it can be an illness, it can be an operation. It can be worry about you know, your sick, ranny or something. It can be a vaccination. It can be poor sleep habits. It can be competitive sports pushing the body beyond its
natural limits. It can be nearly anything. So anything that puts the body under strain and stress is what I call stress or And when we look back at people's lives and look at what was happening before they got their symptom, we often find a whole list of quite commonplace events in their life. You know, long hours of work, not being able to eat properly, eating on the run. You know, a lot of factors that come into play, and sure enough, if you stack them all up, you
get sick. You may notice in the book there's stories of people who've had silk illnesses, and many of them you can see there's a kind of coming together of a number of pretty commonplace events that they would not necessarily call stress, and I wouldn't either. That's why I sort of using this other term. Yeah, and that's some co It's sometimes helped for people to really step back a little bit and see, well, yes, things are happening.
So the big question for you to answer in a few short sentences is where do we start? How do we start to heal?
Right? Well, the first thing is to have done your due diligence, gone to the doctor and they've said good news or your tests are normal. What a lot of people are upset about that. I think that's great. I think that means your body is actually healthy. I use the term that you've got not a hardware problem, which is a disease, which is a worry. You've got a software problem that means you need a little reprogramming, a reboot, a restart, and how to do that is sometimes extremely simple.
Simply hearing that it's only a functional symptom helps people to recover and give themselves a bit of time. Some people need a whole multidisabriline, new teams, psychologists, physiotherapists, speech therapists, a whole team of people. There are places where people are admitted. Those units are quite rare, unfortunately, but so it is complicated, so every single person needs their own
very unique treatment. I want to put a big plug in for my alternate practitioner colleagues because I think they have a lot to offer in this space. And I think if you go to someone to say the doctors say, there's quote nothing wrong with me, but I have this
symptom a lot of times. A good yoga practitioner, someone who can take you out to help you learn to settle your or settle your physiology down by learning massage or having a massage or having doing some Shei gung many any many strategies can help to begin the healing process. And I say begin it because it does take time.
Yeah. Absolutely, Gillian, well done on your book, and thank you for coming unhealthy it.
It's a pleasure for listening.
I am sure many of you could appreciate what Gillian was talking about and have probably felt those symptoms and not had any answers from western medicine. If you do want to read more about well how to recover from paying, fatigue, weakness, and all those other symptoms, grab it Jillian's new book. It is out now. It is called What the Hell Is Wrong with Me? If you did enjoy this chat, tell us rate and review it, or of course you can subscribe to this podcast, share is It with a friend,
someone who needs to hear Jillian's wisdom. Anything else head to body, and soul dot com Dot you for US and socials. Grab our print edition, which is out in your local Sunday paper and until tomorrow. Stay healthy it