You arrived at this page by selecting:To take or not to take professional advice (YEP 08/07/08)
Indeed that is the question! We are hearing more and more about professionals who fall short of people's expectations by getting things wrong. We do seem to hear a lot about doctors who fail to diagnose things early enough which can result in severe consequences for their patients. There was one recently where a lady suffered with her knee for 7 months before she was referred to a specialist and diagnosed with bone cancer. Unfortunately this lady had to have her leg amputated due to the advancement of the disease. Now I'm certainly not saying in that case that there was no blame to be had but I wonder if we are over-relying on professional advice.
Advice is advice at the end of the day and some of it has to be guess work. The professionals should be better at guessing than the layman or woman but it's still a guess. I wonder whether we are opting out of thinking for ourselves and laying all responsibility on others.
I remember the story - Lorenzo's Oil about a little boy who suffered from an incurable genetic disease that progressively destroys the brain. The doctors had given him just two years.
His parents didn't accept that and researched the illness for themselves. They invited world experts to discuss the research and this resulted in them coming up with a treatment which seemed to prolong his life until he unfortunately died at the age of 30. Two ordinary people managed to succeed where other medical professionals had failed. It's an amazing story and a fine example of when not to take advice.
That seems to be the trick, when to take advice and when not to. It's a difficult one as advice is sometimes wrongly construed as fact when it's just plain old advice. I think we need to trust our gut instincts about things a little more. If our instincts go against professional advice in some cases then I think it might be just worth the risk.
As time goes on I think we are becoming bolder when it comes to probing professionals. Our expectations seem to be higher than they used to be and there seems to be less room in our hearts for errors.
Remember professionals are just people and I think it pays to question those professionals to make sure that their advice is the right advice for you instead of treating them as a superior being who knows all the answers.
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