Dealing with doctors

A recent event in the family where my brother had a brain haemmorage and was rushed to the hospital turned my thoughts to the way we deal with doctors. In the East, doctors occupy a place almost close to God and most of us are unwilling to question their diagnosis or indeed even ask probing questions.

Most doctors that I know would, on the other hand, welcome patients who have done at least a little modicum of research about their afflictions and are indeed willing to discuss the possible paths to a cure with them in some detail. My own experience with this fraternity over the past decade has been uniformly of this nature and these encounters have taught me a lot about dealing with them in critical situations.

A few years ago, a toe infection landed me in the local hospital. My cardiologist was concerned that the infection could spread and my weakened heart would not be able to handle the infection. At the hospital, they summoned their top most expert who took one look at my toe and diagnosed that the only solution was to amputate it to prevent the threat to my life. I appealed to my cardiologist to have another opinion on this rather cavalier assessment. She called in a colleague of hers, who was also the head of the department. His assessment was rather more hopeful and opined that perhaps a prolonged course of antibiotics with some strong medicines, could avert the amputation. Here I was stuck between the diagnosis of an expert- who I later found was a Nobel prize winner in medicine- and the head of the department. I finally decided to go against the recommendations of the Nobel Prize winner and opted for a slower and more careful, graduated program of medicine. I still retain my toe.

Most good doctors recognize their own frailties as well. Dr Jerome Groopman wrote a book " What doctors think" in which he reports on a conversation with a world-renowned cardiologist about the times in his career when he made mistakes in patient treatment.To the query, Dr. Lock gives the cryptic response, "All my mistakes have the same things in common" elaborating thus :

"Impeccable logic doesn't always suffice. My mistake was that I reasoned from first principles when there was no prior experience. I turned out to be wrong because there are variables that you can't factor in until you actually do it. And you make the wrong recommendation.... There are aspects to human biology and human physiology that you just can't predict. Deductive reasoning doesn't work for every case. Sherlock Holmes is a model detective, but human biology is not a theft or a murder where all the cues can add up neatly".

My personal encounters have  taught me some lessons: one, even the most renowned of experts can be wrong, two, always obtain a second opinion and finally learn enough about your condition to make a reasoned judgement about what the doctors are telling you.