It doesn't take a historian to figure out that there is something wrong with the medical profession in general. From the pressure cooker style of training medical students churn out doctors who are less humane and caring after their internship instead of the reverse to the problem of overtreatment in the industry. The public at large have the impression that doctors are totally guided by cold logic and rigorous science in all their patient consultations and would be surprised at all this talk of evidenced based methodology.
It wasn't too long ago that the whole paradigm of dousing post-menopausal women with estrogen (which seemed to have almost bulletproof backing from professional boards) finally got shot down due to shoddy science of all things. From Mississippi appendectomies, useless mammograms, unauthorized pelvic examinations and the estrogen scandal, I'm not surprised by your offhand language that the uterus is only good for cancer after a certain age. I think such attitudes will be considered irrational and unscientific (as much as calling for routine orchidectomy for men) in the future when the body of knowledge is better mapped out - like the recent mind-body-bowel connection and the duties of intestinal bacteria to their effects on moods.
Apologies in advance for the total thread de-rail. Good luck to your wife, OP.
TL;DR: No guarantees in medicine or science. Live with it.
Medicine isnt perfect, but it has come pretty damn far in comparison to the old days. You cant go thru a single medical field without some clinical trial looking for better real-world evidence for doing whatever was postulated/theorized in someone's lab. If you were to demonize medicine for being misguided then why stop at
estrogen? Why not
humoral imbalances,
blood letting,
prophylactic radiation,
thalidomide, or
lobotomies? My point is that people need to realize that doctors are imperfect people trying to do their best with an incomplete picture of a
very elegant system(NSFW) whose multiple criss-crossing interactions are currently still beyond the understanding of even our most advanced sciences. The "only thing" that separates a doc from every day people is they were selected on various factors to sit for at least 4 years learning (to the best of our knowledge) the anatomical/biochemical/physiologic basis for everything that goes wrong in humans and its detection/treatment. Theyre seasoned experts who are much like your guides on unfamiliar territory. You could even pick up a tour book/magazine and read the same medical literature, but at the end of day we all just have to sit down and come to a mutually satisfactory agreement on what to do or where to go with the explicit understanding that it's based on our current best evidence. Ill bet things will be much clearer again in hindsight.
While clinicians are taught to read the literature and know the evidence, they're also taught to not behave like robots and go strictly by the evidence. People are not numbers. There's a bell curve distribution across the population and no easy black/white or yes/no answers to some patients' problem(s) so what do those clinical trials tell docs to do with those difficult cases? Im sure there are docs who adhere to the evidence to varying degrees, but I wouldnt blame the profession for not treating medicine more like a science. If
schizophrenia or
Lupus were as predictable as the
grignard reaction, dont you think the field of medicine would respond differently if it could?
The pressure cooker style of training medical students is far from ideal, but maintaining a competitive environment that challenges students to learn/process/analyze as much as possible in the short time alotted is important in a field whose
enemy respects no notions of fairness or patience. If there was any one to blame for the lack of empathy in today's practicing docs, it would probably be the nimrod bean counters who continue trying to apply business models to medicine while continuing to profit over the cutbacks they make to both patients and physicians. 15 minutes is not enough time to deliver thorough and effective care, but in managed care theyre just looking for "good enough" IMO. This is what Americans are voting for by continuing to allow/pay for insurances to dictate care/practice in a field where insurance bureaucrats have little to no formal contact or training.