You can’t possibly account for every possible patient treatment outcome.

During the years I worked with a local physician, I learned from him that physicians struggle with the same “insecurity” I did – that is, he often prescribed a course of treatment that did not appear to work. I spoke with him occasionally during those years about this apparent discrepancy between treatment expectation and actual outcome.

His basic philosophy, which he learned while at med school and during his internship and which I agree with, was that you can’t possibly account for every possible patient treatment outcome. Physicians deal in probabilities. It is probable that a specific treatment will work for a patient based on past experience with that treatment for those particular patient symptoms – but it is just plain unreasonable to think it will work for every patient exhibiting the same symptoms every time – or predict exactly how an outcome of treatment will appear in a specific patient.

If, for example, you were to win the lottery today, you can’t predict precisely what your life would look like next week or next month or next year. You might be living on the Riviera in a luxurious home overlooking the beach – or you might be busy fighting to keep your newly acquired fortune away from greedy relatives, scam artists, or thieves – or you could lose it all in a stock market crash. At best, you can only guess at a probable outcome!

The same goes for treatment – the best predictor for treatment is past performance [of that treatment for that set of symptoms on patients similar to the one being treated]. However – due to the uncertainty principle, you can’t know right now with total surety what your life will look like even in the next second.

That could leave us with quite a sense of insecurity about our future. Remember, though, that the future is not totally unpredictable – only unCERTAIN. That means the PROBABILITIES are predictable. Based on our actions/behaviors we can predict with fairly high certainty – but not absolute certainty – a PROBABLE OUTCOME.

In the course of therapy or treatment, we hope that by the time we achieve our intended outcome, we are a different person than we were when we set the goal. Our frame of reference changes – making it much more difficult to notice changes when they occur. We might not recognize change when we see it.

So – when a change therapy seems to make no difference in your life, take a moment to consider what a change could look like rather than what you think it should look like. You may be pleasantly surprised.