Are 'refuseniks' crazy?

[Guest guest]

I don’t know how many of you have seen the TIME

special on Cancer – try this link http://www.time.com/time/specials/packages/0,28757,2075133,00.html

or this one http://tinyurl.com/5uq3a7t - which I thought covered

a number of aspects of the disease, including prostate cancer fairly well.

I found it interesting to read the piece labelled The

Refuseniks because I hadn’t realized that when people said

“You’re crazy not to have treatment.”, they were reflecting

an old medical opinion!!

<SNIP> Still, people who eschewed what medicine

had to offer were seen as problem patients or, worse, mentally unstable —

in the grip of " false beliefs " that it was the doctor's unfortunate

duty to try to change. In 1982 in the journal Psychotherapy and Psychosomatics,

a psychiatrist at Brown

University declared that

" most situations involving refusal of treatment involve issues of

psychological distortions, interpersonal dysfunction, medical systems

dysfunction, or psychiatric disorder, such as depression or organic mental

disorder. " Nowhere was it considered that a rational patient might be

making an informed choice. What they have found has contradicted the

stereotypes of uninformed, irrational and suicidal patients.

<SNIP> " They made quite deliberate and

usually clearly reasoned decisions, " says Irena Madjar of the University of Auckland, who conducted a survey of such

patients that was published in 2005 in the European Journal of Palliative Care.

" We found them to be intelligent, quite articulate and fully aware of the

possible consequences of their decisions. They are not a minuscule fringe

group, but they need to be better understood and given more appropriate

care. "

<SNIP> ……. refuseniks don't use

medical evidence as the only or even the main factor in their decision making,

although they report collecting lots of research about proposed treatments. But

they then go further, making choices that are more reflective of their values,

like the belief that the meaning of life is greatly diminished when the ability

to live it normally is compromised. <SNIP>

Amen to that last statement!

All the best

Terry Herbert

in Melbourne Australia

Diagnosed ‘96: Age

54: Stage T2b: PSA 7.2: Gleason 7: No treatment. Jun '07 PSA 42.0 - Bony Metastasis:

Aug '07: Intermittent ADT: PSA 3.4 May '11

My

site is at www.prostatecancerwatchfulwaiting.co.za

It is a tragedy of

the world that no one knows what he doesn’t know, and the less a man

knows, the more sure he is that he knows everything. Joyce Carey