In an excerpt from her book You Bet Your Life! The 10 Mistakes Every Patient Makes: How to Fix Them to Get the Health Care You Deserve, Trisha Torrey examines how your doctor may not be telling you all there is to know about the treatment options available to you.

There are many reasons a doctor doesn't explain all your options.

 

  • With such limited amount of time to spend with you, she may simply provide you with the most likely one or two approaches to treatment, the ones she is relatively confident will work, choosing not to waste time by raising the others. She would rather spend your allotted time discussing the ones she thinks will be more successful.

  • Another possibility is that something about you and your health eliminates possible treatment options that might work for someone else with your diagnosis, but won't work for you. For example, if you have more than one health problem, the second one might rule out a drug regimen that might have been otherwise helpful. Or perhaps you have an allergy to a drug that is the usual prescription for others with your diagnosis.

  • In such a case, that treatment option isn't the one the doctor will tell you because it's not really an option for you anyway.There may be a treatment or approach that is too new and your doctor doesn't know about it yet. Doctors usually know about those treatments that make a big splash in the news and may be appropriate for millions of patients. But new treatments are discovered or approved every day with little or no fanfare from the media. Medical science moves way too fast and few doctors can keep up.

  • In some cases, for certain diseases and conditions, doctors will only discuss with you a single, recommended "standard of care." These standards of care are developed by researchers who have tested large groups of people and determined one approach that helped the most patients. Therefore, a standard-of-care is actually an outcome of research, usually in the form of clinical trials, also called "evidence-based medicine." The doctor's thought process goes like this: If the most people benefited from that approach, then you are most likely to benefit, too.

  • The problem with standards of care is that we patients are individuals, not groups. By definition, a standard could be determined because 51 percent of patients benefited. It begs the question--what if you are part of the other 49 percent? Shouldn't you at least know what approach worked for the large minority? Everyone's body is unique. Just because treatment worked for the majority doesn't mean it will work for you.

    Choosing your medical treatment isn't like an election where the majority rules. It should be a conscious, researched, pinpointed, individual choice.

  • There may be options for your treatment among complementary or alternative (CAM) therapies. In recent years, these forms of therapy are not only more accepted, many patients are seeking them out to help with problems that range from chronic pain to stomach or skin problems, and everything in between.


    Examples of CAM therapies are meditation, acupuncture, yoga, nutritional, and herbal remedies. The problem is, allopathic and osteopathic doctors (the terms used for Western, mainstream medicine such as that practiced by the majority of healthcare professionals in the United States) know too little about CAM approaches. Your doctor won't tell you about something she doesn't understand.
  • One option is not shared with patients often enough. That is the option of doing nothing. Not every patient wants to try a drug or have a surgery or make other proactive, curative treatment choices. Depending on who you are, what your goals are, and your belief in how life should be lived, you should know that choosing no treatment at all is always an option, and one doctors may not bother to mention.

These are the reasons why a doctor might not recommend an accepted treatment possibility. Each is understandable in a world where all else is equal.

But there are a number of unacceptable, even unethical reasons a doctor will withhold valuable information, too. An [empowered]Patient needs to be aware of these reasons so she can take steps to overcome them, if necessary.

For more, visit the book's website where you'll find information about the author, reviews, and reader responses.