Your Health, Your Decisions
“This excellent book explains medical decisions—often life and death—in powerful but personal ways. Your Health, Your Decisions is both very engaging and necessary.”
Ross Koppel, coeditor of First, Do Less Harm: Confronting the Inconvenient Problems of Patient Safety
In nearly every medical-decision-making encounter, the physician is at the center of the discussion, with the patient the recipient of the physician's decisions. Dr. Robert Alan McNutt starts from a very different premise: the patient should be at the center. McNutt challenges the physician-directed, medical-expertise model of making decisions, presenting a practical approach augmented by formal exercises designed to give patients the tools and confidence to compare and contrast their healthcare options so they can make their own choices. He addresses a number of scenarios, including heart disease, breast cancer, and prostate cancer-conditions that pose a range of choices that patients may face about diagnoses and treatments.
After providing a clear explanation of what is the highest quality medical-decision-making information, McNutt teaches patients to use that information to weigh the harms and benefits of their treatment options, empowering them to ask critical questions as they take a stronger hand in their own care. Your Health, Your Decisions moves from specific scenarios that commonly baffle patients to a systematic exploration of how to make medical decisions. By offering patients the tools they need to be full partners in their own health care, McNutt demystifies what can be a bewildering and even terrifying process.
Praise