One of the complex phenomena of medical treatment in February 2022: diseases that are bound to heal themselves can also lead to increased mortality. Some people will question: Dr. Zhang, are you kidding me? Or cheating

February 2022 One of the complex phenomena of medical care: diseases that are bound to heal themselves may also lead to increased mortality rates.

Some people will question: Dr. Zhang, are you kidding me? Or bully patients who don't understand medical common sense? A disease must heal itself, how can it lead to an increase in mortality?

In fact, of course, this is possible, I will give you a simple example:

I have written before about many postoperative patients with malignant gastrointestinal tumors, due to tumor and surgical trauma, may have different severities of anemia, usually iron deficiency anemia. Because for example, long-term chronic bleeding of gastrointestinal cancer and bowel cancer before surgery, intraoperative bleeding during surgery, will cause damage to the body and lead to iron deficiency anemia. In general, oral supplementation with inexpensive iron is usually significantly effective.

But note that there are indeed doctors who do not care much about postoperative iron deficiency anemia, because at this time the tumor has been removed and the human body is no longer bleeding. Then there is a certain amount of iron in the diet, even if it is not treated, in time, iron deficiency anemia will inevitably heal itself. Self-healing is true, but the idea is wrong.

Because some patients are slow to recover on their own, often to 1-3 months after surgery, hemoglobin is still 80g/L, or even lower. What if chemotherapy is needed at this time? Did it have to be postponed, resulting in the inability to perform standard postoperative chemotherapy on time, or was it an increase in the rate of postoperative recurrence and metastasis or even an increase in mortality?

So, obviously, even if iron deficiency anemia heals itself, we need to find ways to make the anemia get better faster, right? Even self-healing diseases can make the patient's whole process faster and the symptoms are lighter, which is also the goal of medical treatment, of course, very useful.

At any time, it is obviously a good thing to let the patient's physical state be good and let the blood indicators return to normal as soon as possible.

Finally, those who feel that self-healing diseases do not need treatment are really ignorant and self-righteous, they have not had any disease at a glance, they do not understand the discomfort and pain of the disease, and a toothache alone can make you want to die, even if it is a good thing to alleviate the pain a day earlier.

Take 10,000 steps back, those who accuse Chinese medicine of working is the placebo effect, please think about it, patients in pain and discomfort, can find drugs to alleviate symptoms, even if it is really a placebo effect, is not a good thing?