I Heard My Savior on NPR

I didn't really hear Jesus on NPR, but I heard something amazing and (for me at least!) unprecedented on NPR. It was the authors of a new book called Your Medical Mind, Jerome Groopman and Pamela Hartzband. The link to an excerpt is here. The interview can be listened to online and you can read the article here.

I enjoyed listening to the author-doctors talk because it was like finally hearing an M.D. (two M.D.s!) affirm some of the things that I have been thinking on lately. The docs said that everyone is different and that half a dose of one drug might work for one guy and not another. "Treating the patient as an individual — and not as a statistic or algorithm to be solved — is vitally important, says Groopman, because the best and safest care might not always be standardized."


At one point in the interview, the docs frankly admit that doctors these days can't treat patients on their own terms (that is, on a patient-by-patient basis) because the insurance companies won't let them. The insurance company latches onto certain numbers and doses and indicators of health--so called, 'best practices'."If you step back, you can have different groups of experts coming out with different best practices," he says. "And what that tells you is that there is no right answer when you move into this gray zone of medicine." 

What?! We're all individuals? I am in love with these doctors. Listen to this: " ... But what's happened, we believe, is that many of these expert committees have overreached. And they're trying to make [medicine] one size fits all and dictate that every diabetic is treated [the same] way or every woman with breast cancer should be treated [the same way]. Treating the patient as an individual — and not as a statistic or algorithm to be solved — is vitally important, says Groopman, because the best and safest care might not always be standardized."

And remember how I've been ranting that everything that doctors, the FDA, the ubiquitous 'they' tell us changes all the time?! These doctors speak to that too: "From an analysis of 100 best practices put together by committees in internal medicine, Groopman and Hartzband discovered that 14 percent were contradicted within a year. Within two years, a quarter of the best practices were contradicted, and by five years, almost half of the rules were overturned."

At the beginning of the interview one of the doctors even told a story about how side-effects of our drugs can be so bad, it really doesn't justify taking the drug. As someone with high-cholesterol, the Dr. Groopman was supposed to take a Statin drug. One of his doctor friends, however, had taken a Statin and had suffered irreversible muscle-nerve damage. It was refreshing to hear a doctor admit that drugs aren't perfect.

I haven't read the book, but I am so excited to hear that some doctors aren't by-the-numbers dipshits. Sorry, but that's how I feel. Some doctors are wonderful and some aren't. They're all just human.