Second Opinion: When Doctors Disagree
When you're diagnosed with breast cancer, many experts suggest you get a second opinion. Your insurance company may require you to do so. The conventional wisdom is that a second opinion will give you more information, more confidence and a greater sense of control. What no one tells you is how stressful it can be.
When your doctors disagree, which happens in about half of cases, it leaves you, the patient, to make the decision. And chances are you have no medical training. Your friends and family will tell you to "trust your gut." But my gut churned with fear, not intuition, when I got conflicting opinions on treatment after I was diagnosed with breast cancer five years ago.
You can go back to the first doctor with the second doctor's opinion in hopes that the two can somehow be made to agree. I tried that, but ended up in the role of messenger, going back and forth between two increasingly irritable doctors, telling each what the other had said -- to no avail. You can consult a third doctor in hopes of a tie breaker, but there's a chance that you will get yet another difference of opinion. In my case, the third-opinion doctor was basically neutral. I made lists of risks and benefits, called friends of friends who had had one regimen or the other, spoke with a volunteer at Share, read everything I could get my hands on about my particular kind of breast cancer, and lay awake at night obsessing over my options. I was terrified I would regret whatever decision I made.
Five years later, I'm not sure I made the right one. If two respected doctors with years of training and experience disagreed, how could I possibly be sure I chose the right course? But I do feel I made an informed decision. And that's probably all anyone can do: examine the medical reasoning, discuss the recommended treatments with people who have undergone similar regimens, make lists of pros and cons. And then rest assured you've done the best you can.
Posted July 21, 2010.
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