Hello everyone

[Oriane Lima]

I'm sorry to enter this conversation. I for example, I was doctor for 48 years of my life, I had all the formal education that anyone can have. Including Gary a Doctorate D'Etat at Université de Bordeaux, a PhD degree in Medicine at Toronto University and a post-doctorat at Washington University, USA. I agree with you about the discrepancy of opinions often expressed by doctors in general. But the problem is not the doctors, but rather with diseases that are difficult to diagnose. The problem is that people relax with their own health conditions "day to day". In different people, obviously with different immune conditions, the continued aggression of the body will culminate, in most cases, in the development of serious health problems. Furthermore, deficiencies that our body acquires with age, such as tissue repair and fighting infections and cancer, can mask other health problems. Many diseases are diagnosed later, as many symptoms are mistaken as processes related to aging and, when the underlying disease is diagnosed, it is already more advanced. Therefore, the higher the age, the more points in the record.

Take care

 

[happyrat1]

Granted my experiences are anecdotal, Oriane, but my feeling is that if I am ever diagnosed with a serious cancer, I will simply forego the treatment and ask for morphine.

I am comfortable enough with my own mortality that I would not seek to prolong my life by two or three years at the cost of destroying any enjoyment of life I could possibly gain thru chemo or radiation or surgery.

Having seen with my own eyes the results of "treatments" of breast and prostate and lung and pancreatic cancers in the past ten years among my friends and relatives, in every case I would say they all would have been better off if they'd opted for morphine and not endured the ravages and indignities of surgeries and chemotherapies which they endured and which in the end served no purpose other than to mutilate their corpses.

Sorry to say Oriane, that your profession still has basically no real solution to cancer and that "success" is measured by ones and twos of years of survival.

To me, modern medicine is no more effective than bloodletting and leeches when it comes to cancer diagnoses.

Gary

 

[Oriane Lima]

Gary, cancer is indeed an extremely complicated topic to talk. When I wrote the observations above, I was not focusing primarily on this disease. But in others, so incapacitating and debilitating, such as: emphysema, coronary heart disease, Diabetis, prostate diseases, and so on. Since you mention it, there are different histological types of cancer, there is an international classification and gradation. Depending on the type and classification and the time of diagnosis, the individual survives for life; On the other hand if the type is unfavorable, he does not have much chance. Well I want to apologize again for this chat, it was not my intention to create any kind of controversy on the subject.

Be well Gary

 

[happyrat1]

Oriane, likewise I am sorry to pull this thread so far askew, but my experience has been that most doctors tend to "dumb it down" for their patients, and promote decisions based on their education and opinion to the patients without truly taking the time to explain all the possible side effects and consequences of treatment.

Partly this may be due to time constraints and the nature of single payer healthcare systems however I feel it also involves a certain degree of arrogant "doctor knows best" attitude imbued upon the members of the medical profession today.

The sad truth is that your GP typically sees you for 5 to 10 minutes during an office visit, and during that time he doesn't really care to listen to what the patient has to say and dismisses it as "uninformed opinion." Regardless of the fact that the patient is more in touch with his own current condition than the doctor possibly could be, he then goes on to recommend a specific treatment or course of action without consulting the patient or adequately offering alternative options.

The fact is, that doctors today tend to make snap decisions for patients based on virtually nothing other than the test results and their own opinion and spend virtually no time at all "clouding the issue" with alternatives so as "not to confuse the poor idiot patient."

Whether you like it or not. Doctors today are simply not trained to listen to or interact with their patients other than treating them as diseased slabs of meat.

And again, I apologise if this is a generalisation, as I realise that medical programs in different countries offer different approaches, but you yourself have been trained in the Canadian system at UofT and I ask if you treated patients like objects in your internship or not?

ie. Do you see 40 persons per day or do you see 40 pathologies?

Gary

 

[CowboyNQ]

Well guys I'm no expert on medicine but I see both points of view, compelling arguments.

I will say this. I believe a GP may have saved my life about 10 years ago. I was certainly not ready to shuffle off this mortal coil as a fit young bloke in his mid 30's!

 

[happyrat1]

Paul, I'm happy you're still here with us today and while I'm not saying outright that all doctors are quacks, you have to admit they are still human beings with all their warts and imperfections.

Remember, 50% of practicing doctors today graduated in the bottom half of their class

When I manage to find a decent practitioner I tend to hang onto him come hell or high water.

But when it comes to choosing a new MD for a family practitioner you may as well be flipping a coin with your life

Gary

 

[Rayblewit]

I am comfortable enough with my own mortality that I would not seek to prolong my life by two or three years at the cost of destroying any enjoyment of life I could possibly gain thru chemo or radiation or surgery.

But consider if the chemo or radiation cured you totally.
I have friends who have had cancer years ago who are now fighting fit again. If they did not have the treatment, they would most likely be dead now.

 

[happyrat1]

I've known eight people who had cancer, underwent treatment, died horribly within a year.

I don't like those odds.

The pancreatic cancer was the worst. He had a Wiffle Procedure. Look it up. They gutted him like a trout. He lived a horrible 9 months afterward

I'll take my bloody chances

Gary

 

[Alchemy]

Oh boy, I certainly can't weigh in here. I would take much of what Gary said and take it to conspiracy and what I call true alchemy. Before I found that cure I mentioned I was going to go all out and drag out my best alchemy. I honestly pictured vigorously searching historical journals of medicine and building experimental equipment and even some that had never been built for such purposes. I had done this in my field and it's why I am successful. Of course I knew that the creator would guide me as in the past. That's the real secret to "true" alchemy. Most often the discovery is immediately revealed as soon as I let the boss be the boss as was the case here. If I ever said "I" found a cure it was only to avoid talk of spiritual things perhaps in the wrong place.

 

[happyrat1]

Like I said, I've known 8 fatal cases of cancers among my friends and family in the past two decades.

There was also one survivor barely worth mentioning. A cousin of mine who spent her youth as a sun worshipper with squamous cell skin cancer, not melanoma. Dermatology 101. They dug a divot out of her nose and she lives to this day. However, she also has to have it removed again every few years as it keeps on coming back.

Actually it still somewhat comforts me to know that even someone with Steve Jobs' billions couldn't buy his way out of a fatal cancer diagnosis.

It's the last great equalizer between rich and poor.

Gary

PS. That Wiffle Procedure I mentioned earlier? The doctors considered it to be a "success." Normally survival rate for the procedure is ridiculously low.

My cousin who underwent the procedure? He was a gourmet chef. He was deprived of his great passion for cuisine by that lousy procedure. All he lived on for the last 9 months was foul smelling and foul tasting nutritional concoctions which prolonged his miserable life.

My father? Aged 88, diagnosed with a slow prostate cancer that would've probably killed him at age 100. Nonetheless he followed his doctor's orders and submitted to chemo hormone suppression therapy. The result? He was unable to walk 6 months later and died a year and a half after that as his heart condition worsened and finally he passed away after a miserable year of living in hospital beds. I swear to this day it was the chemo that sapped him of his vitality and destroyed his physical health and ultimately weakened his heart til it stopped beating.

I have other, similar stories, like the friend's father who suffered stomach cancer. They removed 3/4ths of his stomach and put him on chemo. He again, died miserably in a hospice a year later.

These stories are burned into my past and I don't give a damn what others say about my choices. They're MY choices to make and I'll be damned if I let anyone talk me into any sort of cancer therapy in the future.

 

[Alchemy]

It's the last great equalizer between rich and poor.

Truth and reality don't know such bounds, it's just how we play. Great statement.

 

[Alchemy]

Well Gary, I admittedly have not looked at what they are doing today but I've had hints that it hasn't changed. Chemo, imo, used to have an object to kill the cancer more than chemo kills you. Oh boy, now you got me going. The idea of higher education in the US is to narrow ones mind to a field. That is very, very wrong imo, or at least how it's done. It is totally unnatural and we see the result of it in nearly everything. Incompetence in everything. EVEN IN THE FIELD OF ONES SPECIALTY. For example, doctors do not have a good practical sense of chemistry, the practical basics. Because of this they get conned by pharmaceutical companies to the point they are like old ladies buying and using vacuum cleaners from every salesman that knocks on their door. I avoid doctors with passion. If I could find a doctor that worked independently like 50-100 years ago then maybe. Today in the US they have to play ball with government and large corporations. Corporate hospitals are definitely about money just as any corporation. Individual employees may try to stick with their dream of really diligently helping people but they are constrained to the protocol. For one it's fast food style big money medicine, as you also implied. All clinics I searched out were now under a federal umbrella not because I was low income, which I'm not, it's just all there were or all there is.
I would definitely have tried someone like Oriane since he's old school and outside of the umbrella of which I speak.

 

[Rayblewit]

My trucker friend Kevin went to the medical centre last week. The receptionist said "can I help you?"
"I have got The Shingles" says Kevin
"Take a seat someone will be with shortly"
Kevin sits and waits . . a nurse approaches "Kevin?"
"Yes"
"What have you got?"
"Shingles."
"I will take your details if that's okay name, address etc. . "
"No Worries!"
The nurse writes down the details and tells Kevin to wait a few minutes and someone else will be over shortly.
Another nurse arrives and says "What have you got?"
"Shingles!"
"Follow me . . . the Doctor will see you soon."
They go into a small cubicle and the nurse gives Kevin a BP test and Angiograms test. She then tells him to remove his clothes and wait for the doctor.
The Doctor arrives and says "Hi Kevin, What have you got?"
"Shingles!"
"Where?"
"Out in the truck, where will I unload them?"

 

[Oriane Lima]

Gary, I studied in Canada for 5 years from 1989 to 1993. I studied with Professor Griffith Pearson (who recently passed away August 10, 2016) and Professor Joel Cooper. Two prominent figures in the medical world (you probably have heard of its pioneering on lung transplantation). Recently, in 2013, I returned to Toronto at the invitation of Dr. Shaf Keshavjee, current Head of the Thoracic Surgery Department, at the now called University Health Network. Gary, I told all this to contextualize a bit, because at that time the health system was not clotted as it is today. Medicine was a wonderfully good profession in all respects. But that was 27 years ago, two generations ago. I am well aware that the current situation is different, a little chaotic, selfish and disposable, a monetized health care system (in Brazil is even worse) more demanding with the doctor, I would say even cruel, because of the excesse of work, almost without interruption. In these conditions, many leading brains are burned out by the system, diluted in midst of the mediocres...

About Semiology and Propedeutics, the study of signs and symptoms of diseases, a basilar and fundamental aspect of medicine, a question was made elsewhere and a student answered:

Which textbooks are currently used for Semiology at the top Med Schools like Harvard, Hopkins and UCSD? The answer: As a med student: yea, no, we don't do that. Med school is about risk factors for disease, what beta blocker you can give a tachycardic person with COPD that won't kill them, working the differential for a high anion-gap metabolic acidosis, things like that. Not much room for philosophy, aside from clinically oriented ethics.

But Carl Jung in the past stated: "Know all the theories, master all the techniques, but as you touch a human soul be just another human soul."

Regarding the treatment of cancer. As I said before, it is difficult to make a decision in an extremely complex matter. Google the National Cancer Institute of the USA, regarding the International Classification of this disease. All likelihood, of living depends on at what point in the disease stage the individual is. Supporting treatments like chemo and radio are related procedures used in cases of very poor prognosis, as previously known, when staged by successive lab tests. Generalizing a bit, doctors are the worst patients, because they know what they have, although in many cases occurs a massive escape from reality.

 

[Fred Coulter]

My father died of bladder cancer. His first outbreak resulted in removal of his bladder. He then lived another three years, almost all of which were good years. He composed more, visited family, etc. Unfortunately, when they removed his cancer there was some cancerous cells that were left behind, so a few years later he had a relapse. He was cognizant until a week or so before the end, and spent the last few months in and out of hospitals and hospice. I spent a lot of weekends driving to Miami.

So, yes, he died of cancer. But he would have died three years earlier if the doctors hadn't done anything.

We're all going to die, eventually. I see no problems with attempting to put it off as long as possible. But each person's case is different, so the decisions one person makes is different than someone else. Circumstances differ. People differ. I doubt there are any invalid choices.