I don’t know how many times I have read this statement. It never fails to bug me.
Yes doctors do tell patients that their injuries/illnesses may result in an inability to walk. And yes, patients who have been told that there is a chance they may not walk again do, in fact, walk again. Often.
The problem is that whenever a doctor gives you a potential outcome, they are guessing. Based on their experience and knowledge, they may feel that a particular outcome is more likely than others, so its more like a SWAG (scientific wild ass guess). It is also incumbent upon doctors to give a patient the complete picture of what might occur so that the patient can give informed consent. It is in meeting this duty where I feel that most patients are told that they “won’t walk again.”
Sometimes miracles do happen and the cancer patient is cured on their death bed and the paralyzed walk again. Mostly, overwrought hypochondriacs hear that there is a statistical chance of approximately zero that their emergency hangnailectomy might result in a loss of the use of their arm/leg/right nostril or death and suddently the trip to the ER then becomes an epic, made-for- tv fight for life, liberty, and the pursuit of fast acting pain medications that makes Shackelton’s voyage look like a trip to the Holiday Station.
Now if you should happen to have an intimate knowledge of what your vertebrae look like in the flesh, so to speak, please accept my apologies. The rest of you need to quit with the drama queen bullshit. Really.
After having doctors give me the run down on possible outcomes from a number of sugeries, including an achilles tendon repair, I have heard some of these dire outcomes during the informed consent conversations. Usually its posed in a “there is a 1 in some large number chance” that you might die/be crippled/have some debilitation.
I am also married to a doctor and so hear this stuff from that perspective fairly frequently.
I was on the golf course the other day and met a guy that had had spinal fusion surgery. He was having problems with raising his arms above his head (though no problems hitting the ball). He proudly told me that the doctors told him he would never use his arms again. Not probably what the doctors were trying to convey, but they probably did say it to him during the informed consent discussion. This is just the latest incident of this. I hear it a lot. I read it even more.
Some of these folks may well be the miracle they claim to be. That why I don’t call bullshit to their faces. I have no way of knowing which ones are which, but I am fairly certain the number of miracles is much smaller than the population that claims to have overcome. This type of thing is often cited by folks who “don’t believe in doctors”. Bugs me to no end.
Are you pitting people that hope for the best even against the odds? For starters ou only hear about the excptions. No one goes around telling their inspring story of how the doctors said they’d never walk again and… they were right. Also I’d bet golf course man’s version is likely a gross oversimplification of what his doctor really told him. Sometimes the outcome is on the short end of the odds. My dad’s spinal fusion was one of the few that has complications… Life sucks then you get wheels.
I assumed the OP was pitting how, in those feel-good Reader’s Digest kinds of stories, you’ll read something like “after both her legs were destroyed in a tragic paper-shredder accident, doctors told Charlotte that she would never walk again. But after making her own prosthetic legs out of used car parts she not only walked, but won the New York Marathon!”
I’d kind of like to go to a hospital recover ward and walk into random patient rooms, say “you’ll never walk again!” and make a quick exit. I wouldn’t even restrict it to folks who had spine injuries.
I hear stuff like that on some other boards I visit. Just yesterday, a person claimed that “all” the Doctors advise to “just instiutionalize them” (the group under discussion, which was autistic kids).
I am nurse working with a high risk population. I often sit with Doctors and families during some pretty intense discussions. I am sometimes called on to sign paperwork as a witness to some of these discussions. I have never, not once, heard any of those blanket-type statements made by Doctors.
During my own medical crisis, my discussion with the Docs included stuff like “85% chance of this”, “50-50% chance of that”.
When people make those kinds of statements, I am often doubtful that that was what was really said, and wonder if that was what they heard, or if, in hindsight the teller has modified the story for dramatic effect.
Perhaps it is just the time- people in the throes of a medical crisis can be overwhelmed by the amount of information the have to assimilate in a short time. We try to follow up discussions with written information and frequently have to repeat conversations a couple of times to make sure all points are heard.
Oh, give me a fucking break. Dance with me. Cause, like, I want to be your partner. Can’t you fucking see? The music is just, like totally, starting and shit.
I had a great doc and he never would tell me how much I could come back after he worked on and replaced parts of my right shoulder and arm.
“I don’t know” and “We’ll work on it” and when I would be in a defeatist mood, he would ask, “Do you think that is all you can do?”
I have in the family and have been around many medical types and I have never heard on actually tell a person that they could not ever do anything.
The only thing I ever heard was, “Don’t do that, it is the wrong way, do it this way instead.”
It is usually the hand wringing relative that makes the pronouncement in a fit of anxiety that causes the patient to think that there is no hope.
Also, I read the RD and if you actually read the articles, the docs in them do not say that the person ‘will never’, yeah their about overcoming big odds but the RD comments are just general bashing and not founded in fact. How do you know what the RD does if your so above ever reading the thing. Same kind of uninformed people are the ones who bash the RCC too. That is just opinion and there are docs who specialize in the problems that come from that part of your anatomy too.
I was only going after the folks that are overly dramatic in describing their prognoses. Docs, like attorneys, rarely give a patient a definitive outcome. Its more usually a percentage type of breakdown, e.g. you have a 90% chance that your bunion surgery will have a good result with no residual impairment, a 6%chance that there will be some stiffness, a 3.8% chance that the joint will become frozen, a .19999% chance that you might die during surgery, and a .00001% chance that you will never walk again. Obviously this is a made up scenario, but you get the picture. You’ll note that while “you’ll never walk again” was in the mix, it was pretty improbable. However, I get the impression that virtually every time I hear the old “the docs told me” line, the drama queen is referring to the .00001% chance.
The guy with the spinal fusion and the story of the docs telling him that he’d never raise his arms again, has more credibility in my eyes than most, but he is also likely guilty of blowing the doctor’s dire warnings out of proportion. I’m envisioning a scenario in which the doctors said that IF certain things came to pass during surgery, then he MIGHT not raise his arms again. This, of course, becomes “never raise the arms again” out on the course. Perhaps I’d have cut the guy some more slack if he was playing poorly, but as it was, he was kicking my arse out there.
Oh, my God. When I was a kid, they showed us a safety video about a guy who got paralyzed in a trampoline accident, and they USED THAT SONG AS THE END CREDIT THEME.
