Keeping you informed

Hello, I’m a doctor. That may be the last thing I say in the next few minutes that you’ll understand, but I’ll press on. 

As a doctor, I have an onerous, and frankly pointless, legal requirement to get “informed consent” from you. That means doctors are supposed to sit down with you, run through all your treatment options, both conventional and alternative, their benefits and side-effects and the chances of them working. You then make the decision about the treatment you’d prefer—as if you’d know!

Fortunately, we don’t do anything like that. Instead, we dump a 48-page document on your lap five minutes before we begin the treatment I believe will work for you, and you just sign at the bottom of page 45 (the next three pages are all the legal fine print about how if you might die, I’m not responsible—you can just initial those).

This is all for the best, believe me. Medicine is very complicated and difficult for the average mind, like yours, to grasp, and most don’t have the critical ability to read and understand medical literature. Did you know, for instance, that there are people out there who actually think vaccines are dangerous? Or that herbal medicines are safe because they are called “natural”? 

It’s extraordinary to think these people exist, but they do. You may be one yourself (in which case, please don’t come to my office). They’re getting all this from friends, social media and so-called health websites instead of talking with me. 

So, if you’re going to believe all that baloney, what’s the point in me wasting my time and sitting down explaining everything, even quite slowly, when you don’t have the critical ability? Studies have demonstrated that people who make bad health choices will probably die.

Some of my fellow doctors have said this is just a function of natural selection and survival of the fittest, with the most stupid dying out. I think they’re joking, but I’m not laughing.

Rather than seeing you become a victim of natural selection, I want to help you, as do my friends at the Informed Health Choices project. They’ve put together a series of simple podcasts that each look at a different treatment. I know, I’m already slipping into jargon: “treatment” is a term doctors use that means any action intended to improve or maintain your health. See, that wasn’t so difficult, was it?1

They’ve kept the language in the podcasts simple, so you aren’t always tripped up by complicated terms such as “treatment.” There’s nothing worse than coming across a word you don’t understand and having to stop the podcast while you rush off to find a dictionary.

And I know just what you’ll be thinking: “Those smart doctors—always using terms we uneducated folk can’t understand. It’s not their fault; they’re just smart, and they probably use words like ‘treatment’ all day long.” Sorry, guilty as charged!

The project team has tested the podcasts on a group of parents in Uganda, and they’re loving them. They say they are starting to understand how we treat people (oops, that word again!) and even have enough confidence to ask healthcare workers some simple questions. Obviously, they’re keeping their questions for the healthcare workers, so they’re not troubling the doctors.

After the test subjects had listened to numerous podcasts, we then exposed them to ‘fake news’ broadcasts, stating things such as “vaccines don’t always work” and, as if they themselves had been inoculated with a truth serum, they dismissed the stories out of hand. They were immune.

After listening to the podcasts, the study participants said they knew right from wrong. Frankly, many of them weren’t very well educated, and we weren’t sure just how much they were able to retain, but some were clearly trying hard and were listening to each podcast around three times every day.

Some of the naysayers (yes, there was a tiny handful) were surprised that the podcasts didn’t talk about the ways we deal with specific diseases or if anything we did actually worked—which is, after all, what medicine is really all about—but then we’d be going down the rocky road of informed consent.

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