Prescription medication is not the only dangerous part of medicine of course. Many surgical procedures are fraught with danger and dubious, often disastrous outcomes. Even some of the tests work against your well-being. Much has been written that questions the risk/reward ratio of many common testing procedures ranging from biopsies, to spinal taps, to mammograms.
I can't offer a survival course in these few lines; however, I can offer some advice that may save your life, or at least, may help you avoid a whole passel of pain and suffering that could result form ill-advised and perhaps unnecessary medical intervention.
The words of wisdom that I offer my readers are the 4 B's. Next time you need to visit a doctor or hospital, please consider following this bit of advice:
- Be informed
- Be assertive
- Be skeptical
- Above all - Be proactive
Be informed. Knowledge is power. Learn all you can about whatever test, procedure, surgery or drug you are about to experience. Today, learning is so much easier than ever, thanks to the Internet. Everything you need to know is out there; whether on a chat line, a website, or a virtual library like the one you are now browsing. Besides the Internet, your friends, neighbours and family can be sources of information and common experience, as many of them may have already been through the journey upon which you are about to embark.
Be skeptical. There's simply no excuse for placing blind faith in doctors the way our parents did. It didn't do a lot of them much good now did it? It's not for nothing that we are living longer. Although we have a long way to go, we, at least to a partial degree, opened our minds and looked at what we are eating, drinking and breathing to a much larger extent than did our parents. As a consequence to that bit of self-awareness, we now take vitamins, try to watch our weight and we exercise much more diligently, as a group, than did the last generation. I know I'm generalizing here, but, as a whole, our parents trusted their doctors implicitly. I suppose this absolute faith came from living through horrendous disease epidemics and seeing people die from simple infectious diseases that made the early vaccination programs and penicillin seem like miracles. And although procedures such as heart by-pass and joint replacement surgery are quite miraculous, we really should regard them more like a reprieve. Could these surgeries simply become license for us to live badly knowing that we can be absolved later?
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