Hello,

My wife has been dealing with chronic illness for most of her adult life. We have been seeing quite a few doctors and a lot of testing has been done to rule out certain things, but we're still not getting to the bottom of it. MCTD has been suggested, we're strongly considering or hoping to rule out Lupus and MS. She has many of the common symptoms of both of these diseases in addition to being celiac and having a TON of food triggers (she does AIP, she's done mono diets, elimination diets, etc.). She is extremely pro-active (teaches chair yoga and stretch). And yet her symptoms keep getting stranger and more debiliatating year over year (a ton of joint and netve pain, muscle weakness, fatigue, brain fog, trigeminal neuralgia, pins and needles, strange shooting pains, etc).

She has now been in contact with the Mayo Clinic, and they are reviewing her case to decide whether or not she's a good fit. She's got to do some kind of in-depth survey in the next 24 hours, and if they decide she should come they've given her two options:

1) She can pick two specialists to see in order to look into specific conditions

OR

2) She can opt to see an Internal Medicine Dr. who will review her as a whole, and either order testing, or possibly have her come back a second time to see an additional specialist.

We're trying to figure out the best option for her and thought we'd ask the group for some input. On the surface seeing the Internal doc and getting a "comprehensive review" would seem to be the good option, on the other hand our experience with Dr.'s has been so lousy, no one wants to do any work, no one is interested in understanding or treating anything rare unless one is dying, etc. Three tests can be off and not make sense, but if they can't find it in the "multiple choice answer" format their database spits out, they're done. But maybe Mayo dr.'s will be different? It just seems like such a gamble.

On the other hand, because we're dealing with something likely autoimmune and elusive, if the specialists can't turn up anything in 'their jurisdiction" then we're out of luck. Also, specialists who you think would work with autoimmune things, like immunologists or rheumatologists have been, in our experience so far, as useless as a lot of the GP's, unwilling to do any investigative work or consider anything remotely rare or left field.

Any input would be much appreciated! If she did see a specialist, which would be the best one to rule out MS? I know the brain legions don't always show up on tests until later stages. It's so hard to catch early!