When you or a loved one is diagnosed with cancer, the decisions start immediately.
Listening to medical professionals is essential, but so is listening to people who have stood in your shoes from outside of the system. Most cancer advocates and caregivers who are thrown into the cancer ecosystem with no warning don’t have medical training, and so they see things differently. Acquiring the literacy you need for your journey depends on your needs and your ability to find the right resources.
That doesn’t mean you’re going to get a medical degree overnight. As a businessperson, I’m well-equipped in effective decision-making, except when I don’t know what I don’t know. Not knowing what you don’t know sometimes means you don’t even realize you aren’t making a decision when you are. Take the following example:
A routine visit to your general practitioner indicates areas on your body that look “suspicious” and should be monitored, or may be cut out and biopsied. This treating physician is able to verifiably remove the cancerous area, and suggests you come back every 3-4 months to have it checked.
Is there a decision to be made here?
The answer is based on many things you do and don’t know about your own health, family history, and medical best practice.
Ask yourself:
- Will I, for example, stick with this monitoring plan with my general practitioner or will I seek out a cancer specialist?
- How do cost, coverage and convenience play into my decision-making?
- Do I decide based upon a single doctor or the hospital they work for?
- Do I accept a “standard of care” treatment or not? Will I seek second opinions or not?
Many people early in their cancer journey over-value convenience. They believe that if they don’t disrupt their lives too much, the problem will be minimized. But convenience is often the enemy of quality decision making in cancer care. When you start saying things like “But it’s local,” or “But this doctor has a good personality,” you can degrade effective decision making before it even begins.
The Mayo Clinic outlines five general steps to take in order to organize and simplify the decision making process as you make your way through it. These are:
- Set your ground rules
- Decide on a goal
- Research your treatment options
- Analyze the benefits versus the risks
- Communicate with your doctor
While deceptively simple at first glance, each of these steps can be a mammoth task for someone thrown off the deep end after a cancer diagnosis. The amount of information you have, your location, your doctor, your background – all of these can be sources of support or resistance to different treatment options.
The mission of 1104Health and the cheryl app is to help you weigh every decision accurately to ensure that no stone is left unturned and no opportunity missed out on. For more information on getting matched with clinical trials happening right now, sign up today.