When Doctors Become Patients

By ERIC D. MANHEIMER
NYT

FRANK SINATRA’S greatest hits album, filtered through the jet engine noise of the Varian linear accelerator, was not what I felt like hearing at 9 a.m. I made a mental note to bring a Steely Dan CD for my next appointment.

I was strapped to a hard metal sheet, and the technician had just bolted my head down using a black mask that had been heat-molded to the contours of my face. The sheet and I would slide first up and then back in an overhead arc that would send high-energy electrons into my head and neck from computerized data sets outlining my throat cancer and its spread into adjacent lymph nodes.

I wasn’t a doctor anymore. I was a patient.

That was almost three years ago. This spring, the Archives of Internal Medicine published a much-discussed study that showed that doctors might recommend different treatments for their patients than they would for themselves. They were far more likely to prescribe for patients a potentially life-saving treatment with severe side effects than they were to pick that treatment for themselves.

(More here.)