Why does it have to be so Difficult finding the Right Colon Cancer Treatments?
Five years ago my friend Mona was just about the happiest person you ever met; she had a dream marriage, and her first baby was on its way. Right after her baby was born, and she was wheeled to the gynecologist's clinic for a routine postnatal checkup, they found that the difficulty she had had with labor and the stabs of pain she had felt, were not normal as they had thought they were. After a battery of tests, they came out with a pronouncement that shook all of our lives - she had colon cancer. She reacted to this much better than any of the rest of us did. She had an inspirational faith in God and felt that the very fact that she had just been given a child meant that she was marked to live, not death. With this truly uplifting faith, she took in doctor after doctor, asking about all the colon cancer treatments that were available. To begin with, they didn't think she would make it through the year - her cancer had spread to her liver; one doctor said that he could try chemotherapy to perhaps extend her life by another year. Another doctor said that surgery would probably give her a few years more months.
As she struggled with the system, trying to find the best way to learn of the colon cancer treatments that would work, she came upon a stubborn fact about surviving cancer - as many world leading experts as there are in this country, each one a true experimen in his specialty, there is no one place you can go to that will give you all the information you need. If you have a surgeon who specializes in cancer-related surgery, he'll know everything there is about surgery, but he won't really know much about oncology. There are some people who feel that cancer is a kind of overhyped disease. They feel that the magazines and movies are far too cancer-aware, and neglect other equally important diseases. But the facts speak for themselves - more than half a million people will die this year from cancer in America. That's the second worst killer disease there is out there, next only to heart disease. All the attention has really contributed in a meaningful way though - every year for the last 15 years, fewer and fewer people have died of cancer.
The Institute of Medicine, a government body, admits that the quality of care you will receive at various hospitals around the country is shockingly uneven. Some hospitals will give you the best care in the world with the greatest colon cancer treatments ever invented. Some will give you treatment that is on par with Third World hospital care. So now, the National Quality Forum is trying something new - for the breast and colon cancer treatments that you seek, there will be quality standards established that can help you tell which hospital is best.
The most basic colon cancer treatments and tests are skipped sometimes at hospitals. For instance, if it is suspected that you have colon cancer that has spread to the lymph nodes, doctors absolutely have to offer you the option of chemotherapy. The standards will fail a hospital that neglects to offer this course of treatment.
My friend's healthcare plan didn't allow for aggressive treatment - it only allowed palliative treatment, which meant that they paid for colon cancer treatments like chemotherapy that would help with her pain, but they wouldn't pay to try to cure her. She quit her healthcare provider and switched to another she got with a new job she got. She went to the Seattle Cancer Care Alliance. The doctor there was an expert who had about two dozen colon cancer treatment options for her, to go with one after the other. She didn't find the doctor easily; she went from one doctor to the other for about two months, and this final hospital was perhaps her eighth.
There are times when doctors don't offer colon cancer treatment options even when they know of them. There are all kinds of reasons why. Sometimes, it is because they feel that the patient doesn't have the right kind of insurance or the right kind of money. Sometimes, the race of the patient somehow comes into play. Black and Hispanic patients are not offered the kind of treatments white patients are. In the end, my friend got surgery done. She is still alive today, and it all goes to her tenacious search for the right doctor.
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