Hot:

The New Doctor Specialist – Truth And Effectiveness

Issues: … finding competent people … being competent yourself … decision making … being truthful … testing situations and people … never be fooled … decide no as well as yes …

Key Teaching: Keep searching until you get what seems like a really competent doctor in the area you need him or her in.

You may think this teaching obvious, but consider this.

Making Reality Decisions

Should your health care helper be smarter than you are? This means should your health care worker know a lot more about you than you know about yourself in a given area? And if they don’t, will they take the time to find out what they need to know about you and your body and your attitudes?

Today I went to a new cancer specialist. My third home doctor had recommended this man at a separate lung clinic affiliated with the university hospital but not inside it as with the former doctor I used as a specialist, Dr S.

What was wrong with Dr S? Nothing at the beginning. She made a diagnosis from my x-rays and scans that I had lung cancer.  That’s easy enough to do when you have an x-ray and then scans.

• Yes, but how did she do it? And what conclusions did she draw from the evidence before her?

As an Identified Cancer Patient what do I need to know about how the doctors see me?

The obvious reality is that doctors are putting medications into my body and sometimes strong stuff like cutting parts of my body out through surgery, or trying to reduce tumor size via radiation and chemo therapy. So what decisions do I have here about my own body, if any?

• How may identified patients need to, or want to know, about what their chosen doctors are doing making decisions for them about their bodies?

Reasons For Wanting To Know About Your Doctor’s Competence

Doctors make mistakes. They don’t take the time with you. They don’t tell you what they are thinking. They don’t share their thinkning with you. Some of them are not honest. They hold back on the information they think they have about you. They are more interested in managing your patient emotions so as to keep themselves in charge over your treatments they give you.

Ultimately you cannot tell if a particular doctor wants you to live or not. Here is how it can run.

1. -does the doctor want you to live longer, if possible? Does he or she have the means to make this happen?
2. -does the doctor want to make quick decisions about your medical conditions, your tests, and then your treatments, such as surgery, chemo and radiation?
3. -how competent is the doctor to work on you? What results do they get? Will they reveal these results honestly to you when asked or even as part of their procedure?
4. -if the medications that a doctor gives you are debilitating to you, even if somewhat effective, does the doctor know this and communicate this to you? Answer: in my experiences now with more than one doctor, they do not tell you the debilitating side effects of your taking their prescribed medications. They are not honest with you, nor do they include you as an equal partner in their treatment plan, even though it is your life and death body dependent also on the decisions the doctor makes. Bad, bad, bad!
5. -is the doctor competent as a doctor, or have they gotten in somewhere with other home doctors or a department at a hospital where they are simply accepted as part of one big family, as tends to happen in the Netherlands it seems? Therefore this ‘family feeling’ yes expressed to me by a home doctor, is not good for the patients since it places a subjective feeling of family relatedness first over scientific objectivity, is the doctor in question doing the best possible competent job with his and her patients?
6. -the answer to the about question in my direct experience is No. The first home doctor I was assigned to, Dr Jacobs, messed up with my tennis friend and apologized, but was not fired as an incompetent doctor. Again, if you impose a ‘family feeling’ as the reason for you doctors being together this is going to protect an incompetent doctor and therefore not be best for patients, me included who was over-dowsed by such an incompetent doctor and now I am still dealing with the medication imposed, which I did not want in the first place since it was cortisone, a debilitating medication with strong side effects.
7. -so one of your first barriors as a sick person is someone recognizing and getting past the incompetent doctors that the Netherlands government let’s practice medicine, just as her fellow doctors do. Yet, it is youe the patient who suffering the incompetence, even unto death.
8. -You as a patient dealing with cancer have a difficulty understanding your condition and what competent help is. One of my doctors had prostate cancers two years ago, he told me, and went to Germany, a special clinic to be operated on for prostate cancer. Now he is in remission and presumably is not linking urine or not having sexual erections because the operation was done right in Germany, which this doctor did not trust could be done right in his own Netherlands. But how is a patient to know enough to make this distinction? So as a patient you are at a disadvantage, especially if you have little or no experience of doctors before hand. So much the worse for you. It is a lottery out there. You go to your friends and acquaintances for their experiences of competent or incompetent doctors, and hope for the best.

Should you as a cancer patient study your case so thoroughly that you can make informed decisions about your doctors and their treatments for you?

You may realize that you just don’t have the time and the brains for this kind of discovery work. What do you do then? You rely on someone else of course. Should that person you rely on be a doctor? Better first to find a patient who has been through a similar process as you and had a good doctor or two to truly help them through their sickness process. If you can’t do all the evaluation work yourself, which takes weeks of experience, talking and study, then you try and pick someone who has had a positive experience with a good doctor.

I asked around with my tennis friends to get to a good local doctor and from there he recommended a good specialist for me. I already had the example of the bad specialist who was not self-revealing so I had experience of the contrast between a good and a bad lung cancer specialist.

The government does not provide cancer patients with cancer teachers who are independent of the doctors and the patients. Thus I now call myself for the duration a cancer teacher because I am already a developed teacher by profession  in psychology and am taking the time and learning quickly about doctors and cancer treatments which I post to my blog and which will shortly be an ebook for sale as well.

Were I younger I could also consult with people who are recently diagnosed with cancer and point out to them the issues that I know about and charge them a consulting fee well worth the value given in return.

Yet, as a retired 75 year old dealing with lung cancer myself, I can only be a cancer teacher by giving out my direct experience on my strephonsays.com/blog/ for people to draw their own conclusions. Maybe younger unemployed teachers will take my stuff and other people’s stuff and develop an independent profession of cancer teachers to truly help out cancer patients who must not simply consider doctors their friends when in fact doctors have enough incompetence among themselves to be a serious issue in treating cancer patients.

Action To Take

If you know of anyone who has cancer or works with cancer, please try and get them the buy info for this book when it comes out soon at my StrephonSays.com/blog/ site.

Let us contrast the first cancer specialist with the new clinic doctor.

The new doctor showed me my CAT scans which slice you up and present you in sections on the computer. Thus he showed clear areas of my lungs and then sections of my lungs where the tumor was taking over most to the breathing space, lower lung, and also pressing in on where the trachea was forming to bring air to my lungs and to take waste gases away.

Dr S had shown me only a single shot of my lungs and measured it at 11 cm, which is large. She said she did not want to scare me, but measuring a tumor on screen with your cursor is scary when you don’t place the images in context.

A two-dimensional mind can hardly explain a three-demensional universe.

The new specialist took me through the same steps and thinking he uses to show not only the tumor, but also how it’s growth was taking over the lung function of oxygenating my blood with air and causing shallowness of breathing.

Now why did the other specialist not do this? Is she incompetent? She is beautiful. She took time for me to answer my questions, and so I asked many questions. But did she explain the results of the x-rays and scans to me? No she did not, and tried telling my home doctor that I was somehow misunderstanding my case.

I ask my third home doctor, who seemed decisive and able to explain things going on in a diagnostic and rational way, to get me a specialist who is decisive and knows what he is doing.

This new specialist knew what he was doing, why to say on present medication until he gets the new x-rays and blood results from today, and what he recommends for further testing and treatment.

It’s all to the good. They will phone me this coming week, so they do act differently from the specialists right in the hospital, instead of these new, competent specialists in an affiliated lung clinic.

I told the new specialist that they don’t give the statistics right. It may be 5-15 people with lung cancer who survive five years, but making that kind of almost nil number the basis of having heavy duty treatments is not right, I said. You don’t misinterpret statistics unless you are manipulating someone on purpose, and that in my book is unethical!

Doctors should be talking more that 85-95 people with lung cancer who die within five years of diagnosis.

I said that with cancer such a big item in the world today why is it not right out there that doctors are not coming up with a cure for cancer, despite billions being spent in the area?

My new specialist said, well in some … I interrupted and replied, yes, for prostate cancer doctors can point to a much better survival rate after treatment, but that certainly is different from lung cancer. Why should I go through invasive treatments that show so little results, far from even fifty-fifty chance?

He got the message. He also asked what I did as a profession and I told him about teaching psychology and writing books on it.

So the new specialist took my case down in good logic order, and gave me a thorough physical exam, the first of six doctors to do so. Believe me, I appreciated a doctor who actually listened to my lungs as well as took me through my CAT scan to show me step by step what it was revealing.

All this detail? Yes, for it reveals the step by step process that is life as we seek to keep our existence going and even enhance it.

But what consciousness offers in addtion, as I practice it, is fundamental principles and laws for living life.

Principles For Living Life Out Of This Cancer Scare

• Find competent doctors and only deal with these doctors. Don’t go back to the ones who seem incompetent.

Learn what medical competence is in your area of need. Even if you know little, at least ask questions and record answers from doctors. Then check one out against another. If Dr F says this and you are saying Y which is true, what am I to believe and do?

Separate yourself out from your doctor. What are they to do that you are not to do? What are you to do that they must have your cooperation in?

Regarding the doctor-specialist today, he had his procedures established and wanted to take me through them without being distracted by my questions. When I did interrupt he said he would get to that shortly but first he wanted me to understand my case so far and why he was adding new x-rays and keeping medications the same for the moment.

This is good. It means he has refined his method so that it works in making the best possible diagnosis he can make in my case, but in anyone’s case probably.

I knew what I was to do next, like get the new x-rays, and get my blood tested as well as typed in case and when I had to go into the hospital, if I was in the dying phase.

I gained confidence in this doctor because he could use the data well to explain to me what he knew and what he did not know yet that he wanted to find out about. He could explain his next steps without speculating. He would take further tests and get back to me soon when he had an accurate diagnosis. He would not hide the truth from me at all. He was not that kind of doctor. The first specialist was hiding the truth from me, and I even asked her about it. “We don’t want to scare you,” she said.

Why should reality scare anyone?

Not knowing is what really scares people.

If you know of something that another person should know, why not just tell them the truth?

This issue comes up in couples having affairs. In their social group others begin to know if sex is happening between two members of the group who are not primary partners. Should one tell the person who does not know that their partner is also sleeping with someone else?

Yes, of course they should, the point being that reality is healing. If someone you know is dishonest, even lying, and that this impacts on someone you feel a close friendship with, then of course making known what you know, even if you have to qualify your information with ‘I can’t be sure,’ type explanation.

You can also go to the person engaging in hidden, sexual behavior and ask directly, ‘are you two sleeping together? Does your regular partner know? What do you two or three plan to do about it?’

While this seems meddling in other people’s business you can accept that this is interfering, or changing a situation by adding a bit more truth to it than there seems to be before.

Remember: Reality is healing. Trust the process.

Someone may be hating you for the results the rest of your life, but what if you consider that your commitment to living from the truth also includes others you are close to because if they don’t find out from you they will feel betrayed by you.

Usually I say, then give warning. Tell the secret affair offender, that you must tell you other friend what is happening so they can deal with it as part of the reality of their lives. How about then that I give you a ‘grace week’ in which to tell the truth to your present partner and deal with that?

Yet if you are a professional therapist, psychologist or counselor, never tell someone else what your client tells you. I say this but in fact so-called professionals that I have sometimes known have betrayed their own clients by telling their client’s partners what should be privileged truths best kept secret by the neutral professional, if such a professional is so committed.

As part of your private warning to a friend you know you can say, After this ‘grace week’ if you do not tell me that you have come clean with your partner, and she or he confirms this, then I will of course tell my facts and suspicions to my friend who seems to know nothing of what is happening in the present moment. It is better that you both be in reality on this so that you both know what you are dealing with and can resolve this moment of crises in your lives.

1. Reality is healing!
2. The truth will make you free!
3. Love means reality, not deception!
4. Deceive others and you are ultimately deceiving yourself.
5. If you cannot have integrity in love then you are not a person to be trusted, not even by yourself.
6. Take one hundred percent responsibility for how you are living your life and you will be causing the least injury to others as well.
7. Be guided by truth, not ego desire!

related post

• Strephon I Am Affirmations
• Strephon's Cancer Health Report August 1, 2009
• $ 10 per year membership
• Strephon's Photos
• Strephon is ready to go