By Evan Falchuk
In today’s Booster Shots, Shari Rowan says sometimes patients “shouldn’t hold on to hope.”
She describes research that suggests that patients that have a realistic view of their medical situation do better than those who don’t. One of the authors of the study said that hope “is an important part of happiness. But there’s a dark side to hope.”
I think she’s talking about just another form of denial. These are patients – and, often their families – who suffer not only from a disease, but also of the psychology of how they deal with it. As I wrote at the time:
I remember my father, who is an internist, telling me stories [of] . . .people with obvious, visible effects of a disease, but who weren’t getting any care. It wasn’t that they had no one paying attention to them – often they had family and friends almost begging them to go and get help. They just refused to go.
It is a reaction that I think is common to anyone who has suffered from a serious illness. You don’t want the bad thing to be happening, it’s much easier to deny its existence. The thinking is: I don’t want to be sick. If I need medical treatment, then that means I’m sick. So I will not seek medical treatment.
It’s much worse if the family of the patient is in on it, too, enabling the denial. And I’m sure it’s devastating to those family members who want to see their loved one get help, but can’t get them to listen.
Misplaced hope is really the same. Of course, realizing this is not the hard part. Figuring out when your hope is misplaced is the hard part. Is it really true that the condition is irreversible? Sometimes it’s easy to say “yes,” or “no,” but very often the answer is “we don’t know.”
What then?
The struggle – the journey – for a patient or the family of a sick patient is trying to figure this out. Are you doing more harm than good by fighting to get a better outcome, when you’d be better off just accepting reality? Or are you doing yourself or your loved one a disservice by giving up when there are things you could do to make their situation better? And as a family member of a patient, is it all really dependent on you?
— Whatcha got ain’t nothin new. This country’s hard on people, you can’t stop what’s coming, it ain’t all waiting on you. That’s vanity.
