Once upon a time, when I was very young (I would have been 14 or 15), a doctor lost his patience with me. I frankly don’t remember what the consult was about—it’s been quite a few years, and my memory is poor of details. What I do remember, is the sentence the fazed doctor told me: “Please stop playing doctor, let me do my job, “the doctor”, and you do yours, “the patient”. OK?

I agreed. I shut right up, and did what the doctor said. Now, I wish I remembered what the conversation was about, and more importantly if the treatment worked…

Fast-forward some 16 years: this time, I faced I cancer diagnosis. The first thing the doctor said, was that I had very high survival chances and I shouldn’t worry. Facing a cancer diagnosis, I did rely completely on the doctors around me (and the registrar who performed the operation, successfully); there was no question. And it worked. However, I was lucky. The first doctor who diagnosed me was right: my survival chances were very high. However, I soon discovered (at the Cancer Support Association in Perth) that many other people weren’t as lucky as I had been. Their prognosis was somehow beyond the doctor’s ability to “cure”. Doctors simply didn’t know if that kind of chemotherapy would shrink the cancer, or would simply deplete the patient’s immune system even further. Most oncologists will do what they are well trained to do: they will play a number game which need serious amount of skill and research to perform. And, sometimes, luck and intuition.

Some of the patients I met won’t even talk to their oncologists. Some of them are given no survival chances, and some life-extending therapies to improve their “quality of life”. Some other are told that their cancer might stay at bay forever, but that radiation therapy would increases the chances of everything going smoothly. These anti-doctor patients, which generate much frustration in the medical profession, read about lumpectomies triggering cancer cells, radiation therapy depleting people tremendously and unnecessarily, and sometimes decide to take their well-being in their own hands—they “play doctor”, as my GP would have said. A doctor would say that it’s an insane decision. A self-cured survivor would say that it’s the only right one. Some would say that it is a brave, and yet dangerous, decision.

I focussed on cancer in this article. However, this is true for any kind of illness that doesn’t have a guaranteed cure yet: HIV, MS, and so on.

My stance is that patients and doctors should simply play together—and do their best to win. I imagine it’s hard to be a doctor, and see a patient refuse treatment after reading an article that wasn’t even peer-reviewed. For a patient, it’s hard—immensely hard—to trust a person, or a profession, enough to allow them to pump poison into their veins with no definite answer on the results. But it’s rare, and maybe magical, to see a patient and a doctor to become a team, to decide together what the next move will be, to understand each other and do what is right for the patient, which is the most important thing. Maybe, both patients and doctors should learn how to be patient(s), and remember that the ultimate goal is always the same: health.

Whatever that might possibly mean.