Humanism in Medicine - Decision Making

My husband recently had heart stents put in.

He’s had warning signs for years that he ignored: high cholesterol, high blood pressure, and in the past year – increasing fatigue. 

He finally ended up in the emergency room with chest pains. 

We are fortunate that he’s ok and no damage was done.

Lots of people aren’t so lucky. Some have no warning at all. 

The reason I want to share this is because we put my husband’s life at risk by not following the advice of his doctor.

This is partly because we couldn’t afford the medicine required, but also because we were in denial about his condition. 

We didn’t want to believe that his health was really deteriorating or that there was anything we could do to improve it. 

We should have paid attention to the science.

We should have allowed the experts to inform our decision making and instead, we ignored them out of fear and irrational hope.

Humanism in medicine isn’t just about making sure that care providers treat patients as fully human.

It’s also about using the best knowledge we have to treat people.

We are Humanists and we ignored the best information there was.

When it comes to your health, trust the experts and the science and don’t ignore the reality of your health out of fear.

We got lucky. We aren’t going to make that mistake again.