Posted by Andrew on 15/7/2009, 9:01 pm, in reply to "Progress"

Hi Roy and Pete I can understand your frustration and your need to jump up and down. Now let me be devil’s advocate. A GP is just that: a General Practitioner, with the accent on general. It is not possible for a GP to know about every condition, and especially not the details of every condition; it is their job to know when to refer a patient to a specialist. Their knowledge comes from their training, their reading in the job, and their experience on the job. Their training is long and arduous; seven years of long hours. Shy bladder is only one example among many of a social anxiety; social anxiety is only one of many anxiety conditions; anxiety conditions is only one of many psychological conditions; psychological conditions are the stuff of psychologists, not doctors; they may get only one one hour lecture on anxiety sometime in that seven years! Their experience on the job depends on clients giving them that experience; in our case, we are known among ourselves for not coming forward to admit our problem. If every person with shy bladder went to their doctor, you can be sure the condition would get noticed. Thirdly their reading: as one GP said me: “we get deluged in literature” There are only so many hours in the day, and they are under pressure to bone up on things the patients and the government shout about e.g. swine flu, infant meningitis. So to say “they really seem to blank us out completely and sweep us under the carpet as an embarrassment to mankind.” is both a generalisation, and an example of self-consciousness: implying the GPs a deliberately targeting us – no they are not! What is being done? The National Phobics Society, now Anxiety UK, was funded to do a PR campaign for toilet phobias generally. This resulted in articles in newspapers and magazines, and stuff on radio and TV. Those of us who have been around a long time have noticed that the term shy bladder is significantly better known than when we first got involved. I was told by the CEO of a charity for an unrelated condition that it takes ten years of constant repetition to get a term known let alone accepted. In the last two years we have had several referrals to workshops by the medical profession; that is a major step forward, but I have no idea what specifically brought this about. The PR campaign, medics getting more Google savvy, who knows? There is little that the UKPT can do, due to lack of serious money and lack of personnel: so we concentrate on what we do well: this forum, the website, the workshops, email support etc. However that does not stop us from thinking about what we could do on a small scale. Sorry if this sounds like a rant, it was not meant to be; I do want you not to feel that medics have got it in for you. I think GPs have a tough job; we have known GPs that were very helpful, and others that were clueless; they are human after all. Cheers Andrew

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