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I read When Breath Becomes Air, [0] the story of a physician-scientist's own battle with cancer, and one of the things he writes about was his frustration at ge

I read When Breath Becomes Air, [0] the story of a physician-scientist's own battle with cancer, and one of the things he writes about was his frustration at getting treated like a patient when he was trying to get hard numbers for his survival probabilities. It seems the consensus in the medical community is that there's very little good that can come from giving odds to a patient. What are you going to do with that information? [0] https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/30241171-when-breath-becomes-air https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/30241171-when-breath-bec...

beefield 7y ago
> What are you going to do with that information? Yep. Why on earth should I be given the means to make informed decisions about my body and life? What an outrageous idea. (sarcasm included)
perl4ever 7y ago
It's a very memorable experience when a doctor thinks he is helping by telling a person they are recovering from a terminal illness and they and their loved ones take him at his word and then go nuts trying to figure out why symptoms are getting worse. That's the slippery slope you end up on when you say odds don't matter.