Trust but Verify When It Comes to Health Care

So many of us grew up trusting our doctors implicitly. Today we are living in a different time and place. It is a time when doctors are busier than ever (partly due to good Health Care plans such as in Canada) and they simply don't have the time to devote sufficient care (in my opinion) to some of their patients. Who cares more than you do about your own health - right?

In this day and age we have the internet. Medical information is at our finger tips. Discussions about medical problems are at our finger tips. We now have the ability to go online and within minutes have some information that we can bring to the table when we next visit the doctor. If you have a query, go to the internet, but also ask the advice of your doctor. Fact is, we don't have enough medical background (most of us) to discern the information accurately 100% of the time. However, we can also research some of the advice the doctor gives us.

Frankly, had I fully trusted my doctor and hero-worshipped him the way some people would, I'd be in a spot of trouble. See, my doctor upon discovering the goiter on my thyroid quickly made an appointment for me with the doctor in town (a big man, almost 7 foot and an ex-basket ball player!) to remove my thyroid. It was not meant to be, because he had quit operating a few months prior, plus I had already declined anyway, as I was determined to explore other avenues. Can you imagine that big man's hands in my throat? The very thought scared me to death! The long and the short of it is that I still have my thyroid. Once one removes that, it's not possible to put it back.

Think about statins....too many people are being prescribed statins and their side effects are numerous. In fact, with many medicines, such as that used for restless leg syndrome, the side effects outweigh the possible benefits. I don't know about you, but those are not good odds.

My dear friend, Jeanne, who has passed on now, was taking so many medications (close to 20 and you can bet no one has done any studies to find out how these medications interact with one another), she had to have a chart to figure it all out, as to when to take them, etc. She had type 2 diabetes, pulmonary and heart problems (had a pacemaker), rheumatoid arthritis and macular degeneration. She was almost 80 years old. The thing is that they put her on prednisone (something that is best taken for short periods) for years, during which she gained 40 lbs and soon thereafter was diagnosed with diabetes. I have to wonder if the eye problems were not exacerbated by her diabetes. Anyway, I do believe, and I could be wrong, that perhaps she would have been better off had she been proactive in her own health care. For one, she would have adopted a low-carb lifestyle, taken prednisone for a short period of time and taken only the most essential medications. Her research on the internet could have led her down that path instead.

Hysterectomies - how many of these operations are unnecessary? How many times do surgeons remove everything - ovaries included? How about C-sections? How many of them are truly necessary? Doctors do these operations often unnecessarily in my opinion and they make lots of money doing them!

No matter what the diagnosis, do some leg work yourself. Research it as much as possible as knowledge is key, besides, of course, first and foremost asking the best physician in the universe for help - God!