Shocking! – A recent article reveals that surgeons recommend surgery and radiologists recommend radiation. This doesn’t change your responsibility as a patient.

This story illustrates the value of investigating your illness on your own and being armed with information before making a decision. This happens naturally in a free market. It helps illustrate why centrally-planned health care will always be bad for patients over the long run. Each patient is unique – each patient has his or her own motivations and reasons for making the choices he makes. Patients are not widgets that can be plugged into a regimented process and spit out the other side in consistent ways to maximize “happiness” or “societal good”.

No one except the patient ultimately knows what treatment is best. The doctor is a tool and a resource for making your own health care decisions. Any policy or proposal that takes one scintilla of this power away from you should be vehemently opposed.

One of the study’s authors comments:

“The different treatments for prostate cancer…entail different side effects, different recovery profiles, and they require different time commitments,” Dr. Thomas L. Jang of The Cancer Institute of New Jersey in New Brunswick, one of the study’s authors, told Reuters Health. For this reason, he and his colleagues say, it should be the patient’s preferences — rather than the physician’s specialty — that guides treatment decisions.

The study’s conclusion is one that most reasonable, thinking, sentient humans would agree with and choose as the “correct answer” on a test. The problem is that doctors may not be “walking the walk” and don’t usually give patients all the options.

Men newly diagnosed with prostate cancer face “a lot of confusion,” Jang noted, because there are so many treatment options available. “The physician who is providing the counseling for these patients should go to great lengths to provide a balanced perspective, an unbiased perspective, on these treatment options.”

You and I agree with this, right? The question is, does your insurance give you the freedom to do this? What are the costs to you (out of pocket), if any, of seeing three specialists after you’ve been diagnosed with prostate cancer? If your insurance company (or Medicare) makes it easier to see one than the other, you may be witnessing a form of rationing that takes place every day in this country – it’s cheaper for the insurance company to send you back to your primary care doctor, who may recommend “watchful waiting”. This happened 60% of the time for men in this study who saw their primary care doctor after diagnosis and before treatment.

Watchful waiting, avoiding risks of radiation, surgery, or procedures is a valid choice – but it should be up to the patient. The author of the study had this advice at the end of the article:

And if patients don’t feel they are getting unbiased advice, Jang added, they should get a second opinion. “It’s really our responsibility to provide these men with every single available treatment option.”