Lynette Bisconti: I sought a total of eight medical opinions and the reason I did that was not because I was in denial and I wanted to hear something different. The reason I did that was because I wanted doctors who were humble enough to admit that they don’t know how to cure cancer.
And I wanted doctors who would respect my decisions, make me a partner in my own healthcare decisions and allow me to make decisions for myself. The major cancer centers didn’t look at me as a woman who was pregnant, desperately trying to have a baby and save her own life. They looked at me as a breast with cancer.
Dr. Edgar Staren: There’s so much in medicine that there’s simply no way that even the smartest of the physicians could have all the knowledge of what’s going on in medicine. They know that. Instead, I think what happens is that there’s an attempt to cover those things up. There’s an attempt to pretend that they know all aspects of health care to try to calm the patient down, to make them more comfortable.
But as a result, they detach themselves away from the patients. They do so because of the increased amount of technical components of care. In fact, many diagnoses, it’s terrible to admit, but many diagnoses are made in this country today without a patient even being touched. We depend so much on the high technology, we can’t lose sight of the importance of that simple touch, the holding of the hand, the palpation of the abdomen – all the information that comes from looking at that patient, that brings us back to the humanity. It’s a key component.
Part of my belief in care, and certainly Cancer Treatment Centers of America’s obvious belief is that personal input, the fact that we must have that kind of rapport with our patients, that we need to think of that individual as a family member.
Lynette Bisconti: It’s all about individual care. Cancer Treatment Centers of America uses the term ‘patient empowerment medicine’. What that means is, you have the right to be a consumer of your own healthcare, to ask questions of your doctor, and to have those questions answered, to refuse a treatment or say ‘yes’ to a treatment, to develop what kinds of treatments you want and to say ‘yes’ to some of them and ‘no’ to others, and you have the right to be a participant and a partner in your care.
In fact today, with the way our healthcare system is, grab on to that right because it’s necessary for your own survival.
Dode Hammack: I wished I knew why all of the hospitals in the world don’t practice medicine this way. The only thing that keeps coming back to me is their philosophy that the human body is an amazing tool and it has the ability if it’s instructed properly, if it is fed properly, that the human body can help to heal, and this all encompassing approach, the mind and body, the spirit, the nutritional aspect have such an impact, not just only when you are killing the cancer off but your recovery period as well, and they have found a way to make this ideal combination for the individual person.
Lynette Bisconti: The staff at Cancer Treatment Centers of America is caring. They are compassionate and they treat you with dignity. It’s been nine years since I was diagnosed and treated here. I come back here and I still have people recognize me and give me hugs.
(hugs Michelle)
Michelle was my radiation nurse. Eight years ago she was my radiation oncology nurse.
The nurses are the most compassionate people I have ever met. When you ring your call button you don’t wait and when you need helpful hints, they are there with those, they are there when you need to cry, they are there when you need to laugh, they are there to tell you a joke, they are there to be proactive before something happens, they are really on top of their game here – really compassionate.
Heidi Larder (nurse): You definitely get emotionally involved with patients. There’s no way that you can’t, especially if you are a human being, on top of being a nurse you fall in love with patients.