Choosing A Doctor: Part 2

Building a therapeutic relationship with your doctor is essential to your eventual recovery, so it is vital you both recognize each other's strengths and limitations.

A therapeutic relationship is one in which your doctor accepts you as an active, not a passive, partner and acknowledges that the role you adopt can improve your chances of survival. Your doctor can provide you with all the ammunition modern medicine has to offer, but it is up to you to decide whether you wish to fight or throw in the towel. You can bring out the best in your doctor if you ask the right questions and make it clear that you intend to take responsibility for yourself. It will make you feel more confident, and it will take the pressure off your doctor to "perform." Be prepared to take a risk. Be prepared to say "No," and "I don't agree with you."

A therapeutic partnership recognizes that your body carries the miracle of healing from within as a natural function of the body's immune system. You and your doctor have shared responsibilities in this process. Defining your disease and the treatment needed to overcome it is your doctor's responsibility; regarding your disease as unacceptable and trying to get better as quickly as possible is yours.

For any given treatment, some people get better, others do not. There are many possible reasons for this. How far a disease has progressed before treatment can make a difference to the outcome, so an early diagnosis and treatment is better than a late one. Some diseases are chronic, others are acute; some treatments are effective, others are not. The skill of one doctor may be superior to that of another. The nursing care in one hospital may be more attentive and caring than in another. I believe, however, that your response to the challenge and the degree to which you retain control can help to tip the scales in your favor.

A therapeutic relationship with your doctor will be difficult to achieve if your expectations of each other are unrealistic. For example, some people feel cheated if their doctors don't hand them a prescription and send them for X-rays or blood tests. Yet if your doctor sends you for endless tests, a cycle of expectation and disappointment can be set in motion.

The media and inadequate medical education are undoubtedly major causes of unrealized expectations. Many "soaps" with a medical theme show someone with a serious disease rescued in the nick of time by an ever-present, all-knowing doctor. Ambulances arrive within moments of being called, heroic efforts at saving people are invariably successful, and patients seem stoic, cheerful and almost never in pain. It's a quite misleading picture. News reports, too, often raise unrealistic hopes with sensational accounts of discoveries in medical research, leading their readers and viewers to believe that the cure for a disease will be immediately available. The cure for AIDS is a typical example

If you leave every decision to your doctor s/he will, most certainly, make some or all of the following assumptions about you:

• You are a victim of circumstance.
• You have a negligible role to play in your recovery.
• You don't understand what is going on.
• You accept everything s/he tells you, and s/he knows everything about your particular condition.
• You accept your role as a passive spectator rather than as an active and interested participant, and so
• You don't wish to know anything about your condition or the treatments for it.
• You are prepared to be treated without any regard to your particular individual character, fears and expectations.
• You will blindly follow all his or her instructions, no matter how you feel about them.
• You believe that nothing will save you, so you will do as you're told as this is what your doctor and your family expect of you.

If you have any health or illness related questions you would like me to answer, please don't hesitate to email me at joel@healthnews.com. My answers to your questions will be posted on our blog and it is my sincere hope these will be helpful to you.
In light and peace

Joel