Don’t Give Your Power Away To Experts
The person who best knows what you need is you
I have learned the hard way to not give my power away to “experts.” They may have a lot more training and education in their particular field than you or I do, but that doesn’t always mean that they are better qualified than you or I are to make decisions about what is best for our health and our lives. I’m not talking about thinking you too are an expert because you Googled your symptoms or watched a design show that one time. I’m talking about running the recommendations of others through the filter of your own inner knowing to determine if what they are saying resonates for you or not and whether it meets your needs. This applies to medical professionals, but also to other types of experts.
Everyone tends to look at the world through the lens of their own experiences and bias. Opening up to a variety of perspectives can be a good way to figure out what is truly the best move for you. For example, many traditionally trained doctors are biased towards pharmaceuticals and surgeries. In some cases, those may indeed be the most appropriate treatments but many times other options are available that would have fewer side effects, scars, or would just work better for your life in some way. Realizing that means that you have a greater range of choices.
My blood pressure has been a little bit high for some time, and I finally acquiesced when my GP wanted to put me on medication. I was already starting to work on lifestyle changes so that I could get myself back off of the drugs but then a few weeks later I was at the dermatologist having her look at a rash that just wouldn’t go away. She told me it was one of two things — either an early sign of a particular, rare kind of cancer or a reaction to blood pressure medication. The biopsy can back negative, so at my dermatologist’s suggestion, I decided to quit the blood pressure meds in favor of continuing with the diet and lifestyle changes. I also started seeing an acupuncturist.
The rash is now gone, the BP is down, and I’m happy about the decisions that I made by using the information at hand to determine what worked best for me. From what I’ve since read, blood pressure medicines often make the situation worse anyhow. The rash really did me a favor. My acupuncturist has also been able to help me get off of my thyroid medication and I’m doing a lot better than when I was taking it.
“Prescription drugs now kill more people than illegal drugs or motor vehicle accidents, making them one of the leading causes of death in America, even when taken as prescribed.”
Like most octogenarians, my mother is on a slew of prescription drugs, one of them a statin. She is not at risk for heart attack or stroke, but none-the-less, her doctor wanted her on them “for good measure” despite the fact it’s now widely accepted that for someone of her age and health, statins are of little benefit. My mom is of the generation where you do what your doctor tells you without question so I was very proud of her when she petitioned him to discontinue the statins. At first, he said no, but when, with my encouragement, she cited him several studies that show it’s unnecessary for people like her and listed for him the litany of side effects that she was suffering, he finally relented. If it had been me, I wouldn’t have waited for permission.
A couple of years ago we moved to a new state and bought a house. The yard was in pretty good shape, but after we put in a pool, it needed some refurbishing. I don’t know a lot about the native plants of this zone. Plus, I was still dealing with other resettling issues, like finding new doctors and dentists for everybody, including my mother-in-law who had recently had a health crisis. I hired a reputable and not inexpensive landscape company to put the yard back together and install some better screening to the pool area. Although they did confer with me, and the yard came out fine, there were some places where they made some stupid decisions that I was too distracted to catch until it was too late. For example, the vine that is meant to provide screening on the one section of fence dies back in a hard freeze — something that we get almost every year. If I had waited until I could have given the project more attention and not deferred to the landscapers, we would be a lot happier with our back yard.
When we redid the kitchen at our old house, we hired a contractor who was ostensibly supposed to design it, but we pretty much planned the entire thing ourselves and just relied on them to execute it. We had a good sense of what we wanted going in, but they had a showroom of materials and the know-how around measuring and installation. I supervised the entire project and it came out beautifully! This is what I wish I’d done with the yard and what I intend to do with any other kind of home project from here on in. I want to do the research needed to formulate our own plan and then oversee the installation. If I don’t have the bandwidth to do that, I should probably wait until I do, or turn it over to my husband, James.
But what if you don’t know enough about kitchen design or whether statins are an appropriate medication for you, or what have you? How can you be comfortable making your own call? Doing some research ahead of time is always a good idea, not so much so that you can second guess the expert, but so that you can know enough to ask good questions. If they are dogmatic about their way being the only right way, it’s useful to know whether or not there are even other options before deciding how to proceed.
If possible, I try not to work with people who are dogmatic in the first place. At this juncture, I pretty much don’t give my business to anyone who isn’t willing to collaborate with me. In the case of medical professionals, they may have years of schooling, but I am still the world expert on my own body. If they aren’t willing to take that into account, I’ll probably go somewhere else.
I still remember how taken aback my mom was when one of her doctors asked one time what she thought was the appropriate time-frame for ending one of her treatments. Mom had no muscle at all for assessing her own health or her own needs and was planning to just do whatever the doctor thought was best for her. Having him include her in the decision kind of blindsided her. This is what it means to abdicate your power. Strengthening that muscle of understanding your own state and your own needs is vital to being able to make confident healthcare decisions or really any kind of decision.
What are my goals? What do I really want or need for myself? What do I know about how I might be able to achieve that? What additional information do I need to understand the situation? What are the upsides/downsides of the various possibilities? Which one do I have a gut reaction to, either positively or negatively? You can talk yourself into or out of just about anything, but what is your inner wisdom saying when you turn your cognitive processes down for a few minutes?
If you don’t have any idea, that might be something to practice, because if you don’t really understand yourself; if you have no sense of your own health and your own body; if you don’t know much about what you want, you are destined to have other people make decisions for you, and despite best efforts, they may not turn out to be the ones that are actually the best fit for your needs and your life. By all means, get information and advice from experts, but then don’t leave the final decision-making up to them. You are the expert on yourself and don’t let anyone tell you differently.