I still occasionally receive calls and emails from men (and sometimes from their wives), based on my article three years ago about my personal experience deciding on a course of treatment after having been diagnosed with prostate cancer (for more details and a link to the article, see "About me". This past weekend I received one of those calls, from a 72-year-old man who had just received the prostate cancer diagnosis. He was quite anxious, as you would expect, but he was also confused. He had visited with several doctors, and just wasn’t sure whether to go with radiation or surgery. And if he went with either one, which doctor and hospital should he select? I repeated the warning I gave in the Boston Magazine article of three years ago about avoiding Boston surgeons, but beyond that, it was difficult to advise him on which approach was preferable. Although I try to avoid being too specific in my advice because I’m not a medical professional, I also know there is much confusion within the medical establishment about what treatments work best in what situations.
Literally an hour after that conversation, the current issue of BusinessWeek was delivered, with this headline on its cover: "Medical Guesswork: From heart surgery to prostate care, the medical industry knows little about which treatments really work."
The real point of the various articles that comprise this cover section is that doctors tend to recommend the treatments they know best, or those they actually perform, and make their livings from. When you think about it, this makes sense. No one can know everything there is to know about medicine and health, so professionals focus on the area(s) they are most familiar with. The same thing applies to alternative care providers. Consult with an acupuncturist, and he or she will prescribe acupuncture for nearly anything that ails you. Same with chiropractors, or nutritionists.
Bottom line: It’s up to you, the patient, to do a lot of homework and determine what the research, and your own instincts, tell you about how to handle a threatening condition. That’s what I told the man who called me. It wasn’t exactly what he wanted to hear because, like most of us, he’d like to be taken by the hand and led to a cure. But that’s the way it is, especially in our super-competitive health-care marketplace.
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