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Article Series: Cancer
Help Me Understand Cancer
Want
A Second Opinion On Chemotherapy?
If you seek a second opinion, you present
two trained professionals with all the facts about your situation,
from the diagnosis to the recommended treatment plan, and compare
what they say. The doctors may agree, which should boost your
confidence about the plan. The doctors may not agree, in which
case you need to understand exactly what the points of disagreement
are in order to make the best decision.
Whether you get a second opinion may be up to you, or it may
be a decision that your insurance company makes for you. Some
insurance companies require a second opinion. Even those that
don't require it may pay for a visit with another physician
if you choose to get another opinion. Before you seek a second
opinion, check with your insurance company.
If you are unsure where to go for a second opinion, consider
these options:
- Ask
your doctor to recommend another oncologist.
- Call
another doctor on your insurance plan.
- Call
a nearby hospital or medical school.
- Check
with the Cancer Information Service, a service of the National
Cancer Institute.
- Ask
a friend or co-worker who has been treated for cancer.
Sometimes, in the course of seeking a second opinion, you
may meet a doctor who, for any number of reasons, appeals to
you more than the oncologist you originally had chosen. If
that happens and you are confused whether to switch doctors,
remember to think of yourself as a consumer of healthcare.
You have the right to spend your money with a doctor who makes
you feel confident and comfortable, so if you want to make
a change, do so.
Changing doctors is a business decision, not a personal one,
even if your reasons for wanting to change strike you as personal.
When you have returned to your original oncologist or made
the decision to switch, you can start attending to the details
of your treatment.
You Must Decide What Is Best For Yourself In some instances, your treatment plan may include specific
choices. For instance, there may be two types of treatment
that work especially well for the kind of cancer that you have.
One anticancer drug may be administered over a shorter period
of time and cause more troubling side effects than the second
option, which may require a longer treatment period. Your doctor
should present all the pros and cons and give you a few days
to make the decision.
If you are comfortable deciding after you have read all the
material you have been given and had all your questions answered,
so be it. If you don't want the responsibility of deciding,
you can always ask the doctor which treatment he would choose
for a family member. That sounds like a trick question, but
it isn't, so ask away.
Knowing The Right Questions To Ask At this point, you will have lots of questions. One particularly
difficult question is whether you choose to proceed with chemotherapy
at all. For most people, the answer to that question is a no-brainer.
No one wants to have chemotherapy, of course, but people who
hope that it will kill their cancer choose it. For others,
the answer may be influenced by religious or philosophical
beliefs, and they may choose not to move forward. That decision
creates a difficult situation for the doctor, who is left holding
a discarded solution to a very serious problem.
If you do decide to proceed with chemotherapy, some of your
questions at this point will be specific and have to do with
the near future. Some of the questions will be more general
and deal with the months, even years, to come. Your doctor
should be able to answer some of the specific questions, but
only time will answer some of the others.
For instance, you may want to know right now whether chemotherapy
will make you ill and, if so, how ill, and what can be done
if that happens. The doctor likely will be able to answer only
the last part of that question. Going through cancer treatments
is different for everyone. Not only that, but the second round
of chemotherapy may affect you differently than the first and
third. No one can predict exactly what will happen.
Still, you can ask - and ask often - what may happen and what
you can expect as you go through chemotherapy. And at every
step along the way, you can ask why you are experiencing certain
side effects and what to do about them. # # # # #
SolveYourProblem.com
: 2006
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