Last week US News & World Report ran a “slide show” (series of short pages) with tips from 10 empowered patients. They’re all good – I recommend you go read them. (Click the graphic, or click here.)
Knowing that other patients would be giving lots of tips, for mine I decided to focus in mine on something that’s been on my mind a lot lately:
We’ve learned that the patient movement shares patterns with other cultural awakenings. Who knew?
I’m 64 years old. In the ’60s I learned that step one of empowerment is to know what you want. Step two is consciousness raising: Realize who’s saying what to whom, and what assumptions that might imply. Perhaps it’s what you’d like; if not, step three is to ask for it.
Enlightened patients (and clinicians) know that nobody knows everything – neither patient nor clinician – and approach it as a partnership, in what we call ‘participatory medicine.’
It feels a little odd to be teaching empowerment principles (which I learned in college long ago) to a mass market audience, but increasingly I see this is what we need to do.
This is no small issue – it’s not just about patient rights per se. If people haven’t thought about what they want, and haven’t become conscious of what’s happening around them, and haven’t asked for what they want, then when advocates request change, earnest physicians have every right to say, “Look, my patients aren’t asking for this.”
So think about what you want, and see whether things are going the way you want. That applies both in a hospital and in a doctor’s office – anytime you’re tending to someone’s health, including your own.
Have you ever thought that perhaps doctors don’t want us to have our data? I mean, I can see them saying, “Sure, Dave, you’re smart enough to handle the content flows, but what about the uneducated, unwashed masses who can’t tell the difference between a mercury salt and mercury? We’ll have to deal with loads of stupid questions from folks who barely passed High School science, and I did not get my MD to babysit every patient’s unfounded fears! Why are you trying to ruin our proud profession?”
Of course my biggest suspicion is that doctors are terrified of having their feelings of “rightness” challenged by those they consider “beneath them.” It’s oike the old joke, “Doc, i think id like to get a second opinion.” “Okay, you’re ugly too.”
The truth is, doctors only get things right about 30% of the time, but of course they’ll tell you they’ve never made a mistake in their career. They won’t let you know that there’s a second part to the statement, “I’ve never made a mistake…” and that’s “…that I got sued over.”
“It doesn’t matter what you know, only what you can prove,” so why give your biggest threat all the evidence? Doctors know that the biggest threat to their career isn’t other professionals or even the authorities, it’s your own patients. Malpractice insurance can cost as much or more than your salary. Those rates are not going to go down if more people see the true number of errors.
Regardless, it is still a worthy windmill to tilt against, even if we can do nothing about them. And of course, I’ll cheer you on the whole way! ^_^