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Hi Filomena,
With all due respects to you, what you say, that I said .... is not what I said
that you say. In fact it is just the opposite.
You appear to support Santosh. Yet wisely he has not thanked you for the
support. Your statements (below) totally contradict the hard facts of the
"gospel truth" that Santosh has claimed that medical and other sciences present
through research and publications in "peer reviewed" journals. The contrarian
view is the point Fred, others and I have been making under the thread / title
of "Another Kaneo .. or is it .. Hot Air?" which was an offshoot of "Science
as a religion". All of us have had little success getting our point across.
Perhaps with your personal story and specially the "moral of the story" some of
our readers will be more aware of what we have been writing.
Your comment, "Santosh, in warning us not to rush to judgement and give up
operations for cancer" (second line last paragraph), as a neutral reader of
this discussion / thread, shows what a "fine job" Santosh has been doing with
distorting my writings. In none of my posts did I state that there was no role
for the surgeon or surgery in cancer management. In fact in my very first
post, I clearly state that surgery has moved from radical / aggressive surgery
to organ-sparing / conservative surgery. And more recently I stated we have
gone from Open Biopsy to Needle Biopsy.
Thank you for sharing your personal medical story with us. It brings home many
mistakes that physicians and researchers make. Oops! Did I say mistakes by
physicians and researchers? Mistakes are supposedly only confined to religion;
And physicians are supposed to correct those religion mistakes. Should we give
the padres equal time and space to opine on the "dangerous (medical) myth and
is not to be relied on as absolute gospel truth" (quoting you)?
>From your post below, you have a very smart daughter. As a budding
>knowledgeable doctor at UCSF, she has conceptually bridged the "voodoo and
>prayers" of (your) religion with "voodoo and prayers" of medical science and
>your doctors. :=)) As a doctor after my heart, another adage your daughter
>may find useful is: "A lot more often than we realize, patients live in spite
>of their doctors". And we, the doctors, should Thank God for that.
Treatment choices lie somewhere in the midst of skepticism of multiple sources
(corroboration) of scientific data. The treatment should be tailored to the
patient; and not the patient to the scientific study. No doctor should
"insists" on what their patient should do. The physicians' role is to present
the facts and information of the various options to the patient. And let the
patient make the choice. After-all it is their life. The doctors may make a
good faith recommendation, - the same that they would make to a very close
relative. The patient also should be encouraged to do their own reading and to
ask questions. As your case demonstrates, the patient, (not the doctor), that
pays the ultimate price and lives with the choice / decisions and consequences.
I hope you politely informed your original gynecologist what happened to you.
That may be the best education he / she may receive and that would benefit
their next patients. Good scientists and doctors are always
humble a
nd open to learn from experience, especially the untoward ones.
Kind Regards, GL
------------ Filomena Giese wrote:
My own experience with "the latest research" is just the opposite. I learned
the hard way that the "latest research" could turn out to be a dangerous myth
and is not to be relied on as absolute gospel truth.
He (gynecologist) insisted that "the latest research" showed that it would help
me in other ways like preventing heart attacks and osteoporosis.... I did
report feeling somewhat dizzy as the months went by but he said that I would
get used to it and that the hormone replacement therapy had been proved in many
studies in the U.S. and U.K. and elsewhere as beneficial to older women. In
December 1991, I got a most terrible headache while taking a class. I knew it
wasn't just a migraine and asked to be taken to the hospital. I was taken to
UCSF (University of San Francisco Medical School and Hospital). The MRI showed
that I had suffered a brain haemorrage.
My daughter, who was herself doing her residency at UCSF said to me, somewhat
skeptical of medical "science" as the total answer, "Mom, it's your voodoo
(prayers and hope) against theirs."
Moral of the story: the "latest research" might turn out to be a myth.
Santosh, in warning us not to rush to judgement and give up operations for
cancer just because the latest research says this or that, is not half wrong.
My life-threatening situation arose because the gynecologist didn't pay
attention to the neurologist.
-------- Santosh Helekar wrote:
I commend you on your excellent take on the tentative and provisional nature of
some of the findings of medical research, and on the fallibility medical
professionals. Thanks for relating your personal story about the adverse
effects of hormone replacement therapy.
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