I had never heard of DIC before, but I knew that patients had a right to refuse treatment even if it was detrimental to their health. After reading this article, it does make sense that people should have a right to self-medication. I’ve heard of instances before from family friends where a doctor denied them a certain prescription medication despite our friend knowing that something was wrong, which ended up harming them in the long run. This is very much applicable to my family; my mom has pulmonary arterial hypertension (the arteries that pump blood from her heart to her lungs are constricted and put too much pressure on her heart), which becomes life threatening very quickly if she doesn’t have a constant administration of medicine. There are several types of medicine, and a person’s response to the medicine is very individualistic. In this case, a doctor might prescribe one of the medications based on how her tests come back, but the only way to know if the medicine is working is if she feels her quality of life is the same as it was before (basically asymptomatic). Luckily our doctor is very nice and is willing to prescribe another medication if it means my mom will feel better, but it could be the case that he would refuse because he thinks he knows which medicine is best- even though the only person who can truly know is my mom. She should have the right to switch medications, because she’s the only one qualified to judge her well-being.
I also agree with Flanigan in that people should first be informed of all the benefits and risks before receiving the drug they request. Not everyone would research a certain drug before they request it, so for liability’s sake, they need to at least hear the risks even if they choose to ignore them.
I think this brings the interesting point that sometimes doctors can fail us. When the patient is the one vulnerable, the one who has their body attacking them, they entrust a huge amount of trust in their doctors. There are mostly certainly stories of doctors inaccurately treating patients or having ulterior motives. These realities are valid, and self-medication can certainly help with these unfortunate situations.
I agree with the fact that there should be complete transparency between the patient and doctor, and I agree with the point about quality of life after taking the drug. I think that there is a hard balance between someone picking the medicine that they should have versus the doctor because even though the person knows what feels best for his or her body, the doctor will prescribe the most effective drug first and then move from there. I think that it is very important for doctors to listen to their patients and come up with a plan together on what medicine they should take next.
I understand your point of the patient knows best how to the medication is affecting them. I know in the instance of a family friend that experiences chronic pain, she had some issues getting doctors to listen to her about the pain she was experiencing and how her current treatment was affecting her. However, I see this as more of an issue of poor practice from medical professionals because they should have been putting more value on the comments form the patient rather than medication being prescription based.
While it is true that doctors can sometimes fail us, I think it is still faulty to buy into the argument that we know what is best for our own bodies. As another posts mentions, why even have doctors then, if we all know what’s best for ourselves?