Inside the Turbulent Journey of Rachel Weaver: The Untold Story Behind Dizzy
J Michael Lennon: It seems abundantly clear that a good deal of medical research and treatment is siloed, unknown, unavailable, or ignored by the profession. Can you say something about this?
Rachel Weaver: I think being a clinician is a tough job. The medical educational system encourages specialization with rigid boundaries between houses of knowledge. Clinicians are expected (by themselves, by society, by patients) to come up with an answer to the problem quickly. When they can’t, it’s frustrating for everyone involved. When you have a complicated, long-term, seemingly undiagnosable problem, you need a team of people brainstorming from different specialties, you need a long conversation, you need wide thinking, you need collaboration. The system is not set up for this. The Mayo Clinic is this. But it was cost prohibitive for a person in an average socio-economic situation like myself. Even with health insurance there would be additional clinical costs, there would be time without pay from work, there would be a hotel to cover for up to a couple weeks. It was economically out of reach.
