MALAISE: TREATMENT
Your answers to the above questions will determine the form of treatment your physician will advise, since treatment will depend largely on what is causing your malaise. For instance, if you have recently lost weight and noticed that your bowel habits have changed, the cause could be the fact that you’re worrying about one of your children who recently moved across the country to take a new job. At worst, you could be suffering from cancer or bleeding in the gastrointestinal tract, but this is a very rare cause of malaise. The more specific you are in narrowing down your symptoms and your recent health history, the better your physician can treat you.
If you’ve lost weight and are frequently thirsty, it’s a cleat sign of diabetes. And if you’ve recently traveled to an area where deer roam freely and you feel tired and under the weather, you may have been bitten by a deer tick; a rash will help alert your physician to a possible diagnosis of
Lyme disease. There is also always the chance that your discomfort is caused by menstrual changes that are leading you toward the onset of menopause. Then again, a general feeling of malaise may simply be due to physical deconditioning if you have recently adopted a more sedentary lifestyle.
Your age, of course, will have some bearing on your physician’s final diagnosis. If an elderly person complains of malaise, her doctor will be looking for signs of cancer, a blood disorder, or lymphoma. For people in their 40s, 50s, and 60s who are feeling unwell, a physician will probably investigate certain infectious diseases first.
You should keep in mind that the above are only a handful of the possible causes of malaise; there are, in fact, many different illnesses in which this symptom is present. Because of this, make sure your doctor has as much information as possible so she can prescribe the most effective and fastest-acting treatment possible. I feel that an investigation of both your recent and lifelong medical history is vital to ensure proper diagnosis and course of healing.
Special Mention for the Elderly
In an elderly person, other factors may be causing malaise. These can include thyroid disease, a rheumatological disorder such as temporal arteritis, polymyalgia rheumatica, heart disease, and interaction among several of the medications she is taking. Again, making sure she is as specific as possible about recent changes in her health will help guide her treatment.
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