During a conversation about an injury last week, a friend said, “I don’t want to doctor myself.” That both surprised and stuck with me. I totally agree with that statement when you’re struggling to get a diagnosis. Patients don’t have the knowledge, training or equipment to diagnose a condition. But there are many times when doctoring ourselves is exactly what is required.
If the doctor diagnoses pre-diabetes, the best thing we can do is doctor ourselves by increasing activity and making dietary changes. In fact, we may even be able to avoid diabetes by turning these changes into lasting habits.
The same is true of strengthening muscles after a knee replacement. At first, you may participate in scheduled rehabilitation at a clinic. Once that ends, you may still need to continue to work on strength and flexibility on your own in order to have full range of motion, increase stability, and prevent pain.
And with allergies or food sensitivities, doctoring ourselves is sometimes all we have. If you have adult onset peanut allergies, avoiding peanuts and peanut products is currently the best way to doctor yourself. Celiac disease is no different. Eliminating gluten from your diet is the most immediate, effective, and least expensive way to heal and stay healthy. This is a form of doctoring yourself.
We give our children meds for fever. And if they have lung disease, we check their blood oxygen level and choose a setting on the oxygen concentrator. Even when my son was in a wreck, we had to clean his wound and change his bandages twice a day until he could have a skin graft.
This meant pulling back the skin at the edges of what looked like raw steak. When we pulled, it hurt and we had no way to deaden the pain. It wasn’t pleasant, but it was necessary.
You’re certainly no stranger to patient care if you have an ailing elderly relative. No matter the diagnosis, it’s not uncommon for much of the doctoring to be done by the patient and family at some point.
While much of what I’m describing may be nursing care, when you’re at home you also make the decisions. You come up with the plan for each day for following the actual doctor’s orders.
All of this seems so obvious, I was taken aback by my friend’s statement. But he has no children, has never cared for an elderly relative, and is bombarded by the same pharmaceutical ads we all see on TV and in magazines.
The overarching message we’re presented is that there’s always something that will fix things. All we need to do is take medication.
So what happens when a virus comes along and there’s no medication to prevent or treat it? Will we be willing to doctor ourselves by wearing masks and changing our social habits?
We’ve been learning the answer to that every day for the past year-and-a-half. We’re still learning it. And it seems that a large portion of the population agrees with my friend.
But no matter how advanced the technology, how powerful the drugs, and how skilled our doctors, a treatment plan has much less chance of being successful if we’re not prepared or willing to doctor ourselves once we’re prescribed a plan. The best outcomes come from all of us working as a team.
Go team!
The above is not meant as medical advice, nor is it meant to discourage you from visiting your doctor. The references to “doctoring yourself” refer to actions individuals must take in order to follow their doctors’ orders.
