Too Much Information
Years ago when I taught medical ethics to college and pre-med students one of the hot button issues was informed consent. The main idea is that patients have the right to consent to, or refuse, treatment. But in order to do so they had the right to be fully informed as to what the treatment might be along with possible positive and negative consequences.
Sounds obvious to us today, but this notion came out of a centuries-old, paternalistic notion that the doctor knows best and the patient should just shut-up and let the wise man work. Patients would then leave the facility filled with – take your pick – optimism or despair. There are no easy answers to this conundrum. Medicine is filled with terminology not all of us can understand and even the most thoughtful of doctors can easily go too far or not far enough in trying to make the patient a true participant in their own treatment.
On The One Hand …
I ran into this myself recently. During a routine visit with my doctor he mentioned that a recent blood test showed an elevation in my white blood cell count. Not to worry, he said, but he did want me to schedule a visit with a hematologist (blood specialist). No big deal. For those of us of a certain age, medical visits are what, in an earlier age, soccer games were.
So I called and the recording said, "Welcome to Northwestern Oncology and Hematology." Oncology? What? Gulp! Was there something I needed to know that I hadn't been told? Suddenly, I was filled with empathy toward those women whose doctors might blurt out a cheery, "It's just a small lump and probably nothing."
Not enough information? Perhaps. It would have been nice if my doctor had said something like, By the way, when you call you'll get the cancer center. Keep in mind that cancer patients get blood tests about as often as nurses Purell their hands. That's why the hematology lab is there. You, however, are just going to hematology.
As it turned out, the hematologist was not very concerned about my white blood count and, in fact, the blood draw I had there later revealed that things were normal.
Truthfully, I tend to think that more information is better than not enough, even if our practitioners don't always know what we can handle or understand.
On The Other Hand …
For example, I love going to MyChart to see my test results. I have no idea what most of it means but I look for the little pointers and whether or not they're in the yellow zone or the green zone so I can cheer on my red blood cells or give a little encouragement to my eosinophils or tell my absolute neutrophils to buck up – things are all right. Then there's the metabolic panel telling me to jazz up my potassium or watch that sodium, glucose is a little high and my alkaline phosphatase is right where it belongs. Mostly, though, it's rather meaningless, particularly since I don't know what I'm supposed to do with all that information.
I suppose the medical world isn't all that different from the rest of the world. We're blasted every day with political headwinds of the sort that, if we try to understand them our heads explode, while if we ignore them we do so at our peril.
Then there's the tech world. I have a Honda CR-V I'm perfectly happy with, even though I've mastered maybe fifty percent of the functions and gizmos it has. That's pretty much the same in our household where we have a PC, a laptop, a tablet, two smart phones and a smart TV.
I've been told I have more technical gear in my house than was used to land Neil Armstrong on the moon. That's impressive, and probably true, but I just wish I could get Alexa to stop turning on Gayle's lamp right after I've told her to turn mine off.
G.K. Wuori ©2025
Photoillustration by the author