15 May 09 WHY YOU ARE THE BEST PERSON TO MAKE DECISIONS ABOUT YOUR OWN TREATMENT – IMPORTANCE OF THINGS
However good and caring your practitioner is, he or she can only consider the medical side of things when recommending treatment. You are the only person who can combine the facts about possible treatments with your own ‘inside’ knowledge in order to arrive at the best decision for you. You know whether it is important for you to live as long as possible whatever the cost. You know how important the changes in lifestyle likely to result from your disease or treatment are to you. You know how important your body image is to you and what things about it are most important for you. Provided you can get the necessary ‘outside’ information, this all makes you, without question, the best person to make the decisions.
I’ll just mention one thing that makes these decisions difficult for anyone, not just for you. Nobody can look into the future and predict definitely what will happen to you, as an individual, if you take a particular course of action. Your practitioner should be able to tell you what is average or likely, what is possible but unlikely and what is so unlikely as to be a miracle if it happens. To start with you should base your decision on what is likely. All patients hope they’ll be the exception—the one who makes a miraculous recovery. By all means keep hoping for this, but base your decisions realistically on what is likely or average. Say your practitioner tells you that one in ten patients get a remission on a particular treatment— that means that nine in ten patients do not. If you have this treatment, you are not likely to get a remission.
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Tags: Cancer
