Sensitivity and Expertise

A few days ago, I blogged about the apology from an oncology nurse after she was diagnosed with cancer herself. I do feel strongly about this issue. This morning I received a comment from someone (anonymously) on this post:

"I totally disagree with the premise that people must actually have a disease to understand or help those with the disease. Sensitivity is a wonderful characteristic and we hope that our care givers have it. But expertise, with or without sensitivity, is invaluable,and may spell the difference between survival or not."

I disagree with this statement and wanted to clarify my position on this point. 

There is nothing wrong with sensitivity or expertise. We hope that our medical professionals have these qualifications. But the point of my statements is that what medical professionals, who do not have personal experience with the ailment they are treating, lack is the understanding of what a patient is going through. 

What is the patient going through when someone says 'you have___' (fill in the blank with the nastiest ailment you can think of). Their life probably just completely turned upside down. They have no idea of what treatment protocol they are facing. They are concerned about their finances. They are concerned if they will still be able to work. They are concerned if they are going to live.

Then they are here are some tests you need. And you get to wait for the results. How long? 'Oh, a few days maybe. We'll call you as soon they come in.' (Unless of course we forget to call you and you have to wait a bit longer.) Will we call you before the weekend so you aren't stuck in limbo for two more days? No promises there.

And that test we sent you to? Oh, it won't hurt. You will only feel a pinch (that is what they told us to say but we aren't really sure because we haven't had this on ourselves). 

Side effects? Here's the list of what we are allowed to say. 'Some patients feel nauseous. If it lasts longer than 48 hours or you really can't keep anything down, call us for more meds.' (Unless its the weekend or after 5pm....)

Thank you for your sensitivity and expertise but sometimes its not enough.

On ignoring doctor's advice

I am not going to say doctors are gods or anything, but they did go to school for many years more than I did so I can easily admit that they might know more about medical crap than I, even if their bedside manner really sucks at times.

I also strongly believe that as patients we owe it to ourselves to do our research, listen to our options, and do what we feel will help us best. And if this includes juicing, yoga, fasting, acupuncture, turmeric, coffee cleanses, or whatever, we also owe it to ourselves to listen to the advice of our medical professionals.

It is a real shame that some people die when they choose to ignore medical advice and advancements. New research out of Australia focuses on young cancer patients who are ignoring medical advice to cure their cancer through diet changes and result in unfortunate outcomes. These popular bloggers are not properly trained medical professionals so its not that surprising that these are the results are what they are.

If diet could cure us, we wouldn't need doctors.

We must listen to our doctors advice, and sometimes question it, but heed it for the most part. If we don't listen to our doctors and heed their advice, we can't fully question it and then make our good decisions based on our experience with it.

Statistics dont tell the whole story

I have been very happy and comfortable with the quality of my health care. I live near Boston the home of many world class hospitals and the quality of care available in the area is very good. Or so I thought. HealthGrades.com just released their latest list of top cities for health care. So I wanted to see where Boston was on the list. Its not. Neither is New York City.

I was surprised to say the least.Then I started thinking - a very dangerous proposition at times. This is a classic example of how statistics can be misleading. These numbers are looking at the level of care across an entire metropolitan area. While this includes the leading hospitals, it also includes small and large medical centers that may be underfunded or serving a sicker population who are going to have statistically worse than expected outcomes due to their overall health.

So I went through and looked up where I am treated and feel slightly better. Then just for the hell of it I looked up Dana Farber. They have all sorts of physicians listed, many of them have no ratings. And they had no surgical procedures listed. Hmmm.... So what is their rating? I don't know.

More advice on statistics. Ignore them.