Primary care diagnosis and management of Polymyalgia rheumatica: an autoimmune disease anomaly
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Every time I think I’m on solid ground, as I did with Polymyalgia rheumatica, the ground starts to shift when I take a deeper dive. What I Thought Was Solid Ground As a nurse working in primary care—also known as your internist’s, general practitioner’s, family medicine doctor’s, adult medicine doctor’s office—there were a lot of patients with co-occurring autoimmune diseases that complicated the conditions their primary care physician treated. There were not a lot of autoimmune diseases the primary care physicians diagnosed or treated themselves. Usually the primary care physician would conduct some preliminary testing and based on those results, refer suspected autoimmune cases out to a specialist (rheumatology, neurology, gastroenterology), etc. The exception to this rule was Polymyalgia rheumatica and, sometimes, Hashimoto’s thyroiditis. The physician I worked with had a standard workup regimen and treatment protocol for Polymyalgia rheumatica. At the time, it didn’t even occur to me to ask questions about the anomaly of a primary care physician diagnosing and treating Polymyalgia rheumatica alone, out of all of the autoimmune diseases that exist. But this week, it’s a question I can’t get out of my mind.
Primary care diagnosis and management of Polymyalgia rheumatica: an autoimmune disease anomaly
Primary care diagnosis and management of…
Primary care diagnosis and management of Polymyalgia rheumatica: an autoimmune disease anomaly
Every time I think I’m on solid ground, as I did with Polymyalgia rheumatica, the ground starts to shift when I take a deeper dive. What I Thought Was Solid Ground As a nurse working in primary care—also known as your internist’s, general practitioner’s, family medicine doctor’s, adult medicine doctor’s office—there were a lot of patients with co-occurring autoimmune diseases that complicated the conditions their primary care physician treated. There were not a lot of autoimmune diseases the primary care physicians diagnosed or treated themselves. Usually the primary care physician would conduct some preliminary testing and based on those results, refer suspected autoimmune cases out to a specialist (rheumatology, neurology, gastroenterology), etc. The exception to this rule was Polymyalgia rheumatica and, sometimes, Hashimoto’s thyroiditis. The physician I worked with had a standard workup regimen and treatment protocol for Polymyalgia rheumatica. At the time, it didn’t even occur to me to ask questions about the anomaly of a primary care physician diagnosing and treating Polymyalgia rheumatica alone, out of all of the autoimmune diseases that exist. But this week, it’s a question I can’t get out of my mind.