There is a wise old saying that there is no such thing as a free lunch. Even when something seems as though it may be free, there is always a price being charged or paid somewhere. This is true of medicine as well. There is nothing in medicine that is without some risk. The key to successful medical treatment is accurate assessment of the risk of the proposed treatment and accurate assessment of the benefits of the proposed treatment.
Certainty in life would be helpful. Unfortunately, we live in an imperfect world in which there are very few certainties. This is true of medicine as well. There is no medical treatment which can be guaranteed to cure you, regardless of the nature of your problem. No surgeon is going to guarantee that the surgery she proposes to perform on you will be a success. She can quote you statistics about how often the procedure is successful and how skilled she is at performing it, but she cannot and will not guarantee that your surgery will be a success.
No medication comes with a guarantee that it will work as intended for you and relieve whatever problem it is prescribed to make better. No medication comes without some side effects or risks of adverse reactions. We take the medicines we are prescribed because we trust the doctor prescribing them and because the risk of the medicine is usually relatively low, if used in accordance with its instructions.
In order to be an informed consumer of medical treatment, it is important you ask about and understand the risks and benefits of the proposed treatment. Doctors are usually positive about the benefits of the treatment they have recommended for you. They will happily tell you all about it. They are usually less talkative when the subject is the risks of the proposed treatment. These will usually be downplayed. “Yes, there are some risks, but they are highly unlikely.” You have to ask and be a little persistent to get the information you need about risks.
Fortunately, today’s patients have the internet to help with risk information. There are resources on the internet that can tell you all you need to know about the risks of medications or surgeries or other treatments. That said, you need to be careful when you go to the internet as not all information you find there is reliable. You should be wary of anecdotal stories where a person posts about what happened to them or a family member or friend. These exceedingly small sample sizes are not a reliable guide, even assuming the story these people tell is true. There are a lot of people on the internet with agendas that may involve peddling false information or conspiracy theories.
Always consider the source of any information you find on the internet. Does the person or group making the post have a motive? Are they trying to sell you something? This is always a bad sign. Is the person or group making the post qualified to speak on the issue? What is the basis of their expertise? In what way are they qualified? Does what they say stand alone or does what they say appear to represent a consensus position? Does the source appear balanced or does it push one viewpoint or the other?
When it comes to a particular doctor performing a particular procedure, there is another layer of risk/benefit analysis and it involves the doctor herself or himself. This is vital information you should consider before letting a doctor perform a significant medical procedure on your body. Not all doctors are created equal. Not all doctors are equally skilled. Not all doctors are equally diligent. Some doctors, for example, are much better surgeons than their peers and routinely get better results. Some doctors have a significantly higher percentage of poor outcomes.
In an ideal world, you would avoid the doctors who get poorer results and place yourself in the hands of the more successful doctor. You would be a fool not to. Of course, we do not live in an ideal world and, human nature being what it is, the less successful doctors make it difficult to discover who they are. Doctors who commit medical malpractice and settle lawsuits against them insist that the fact of settlement and the money paid remain a secret. Hospital proceedings involving the privileges of doctors to practice there are also routinely kept secret as are hospital investigations into deaths or injuries to patients. Even bad doctors claim to be highly successful and they present testimonials on their social media from happy patients. You will need to do your homework and fight through the noise to find the truly successful doctors. The medical profession will not make it easy on you.
So even though there is no free lunch, there is good medical care and good medications out there to help keep us healthy. We just have to recognize that there can be no certainty and that we will inevitably face some risks. We need to minimize the risks as much as we can, then cross our fingers, say a prayer, and go forward.
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