Standard of care is often the perfect approach to your health problem. It has saved my life more than once and I have lots of good things to say about it.
Most of the time, SOC is good enough if the medical protocols available in your country of residence can successfully address your needs and avoid exposing you to the risk of harmful side effects.
If you have a simple bone break and no other complex health issues that might effect your recovery, then one size fits all treatments will generally be a good enough fit and that’s where SOC shines. It’s streamlined and fast. No additional training or research is necessary because your provider has probably done it hundreds of times.
However, SOC is not necessarily the best treatment available; SOC reflects the treatment that hospitals, insurance, and other stakeholders in the health industry regard as the safest choice for them and you.
When your doctor says your treatment is SOC, he or she is referring to a complex balance of benefit to the patient, liability, malpractice risk, cost effectiveness and the ability to bill insurance for the selected treatment. If there’s a bette treatment that insurance doesn’t cover, you’ll generally get the treatment that’s covered.
Of course, your health needs, urgency, and likelihood of success are all taken into consideration but weighed against the concerns of everyone else involved with treatment: from the attorneys that advise your providers to the insurers that will pay them.
There are lots of reasons to look beyond the standard of care. Side effects, success rates, availability and/or cost of treatment, the desire to combine SOC with other protocols under your providers supervision, and many more reasons too numerous to list here.
It’s important to understand SOC isn’t about the latest and greatest and your provider often knows this. It’s about the accepted, the treatment that has the consensus of the most providers and their entire backup system of administrators, insurers and attorneys.
You might even have a silent (or vocal if you’re lucky) ally in your provider. They must walk a fine line though: by suggesting something other than SOC, that provider can risk serious problems. Even referring you to a well conducted study that is not yet reflected in SOC can be seen as unethical by more conservative licensing boards. Evidence Based Medicine seems like a no-brainer, but it’s not because our current legal system is based around SOC.
There are serious concerns among attorneys that the courts need to address this discrepancy or our providers will cling to SOC despite new research that informs us that some of our SOC protocols are not only ineffective, but are also harmful. Here’s a pdf to a break down of the argument of SOC versus EBM by Carter Williams:
Evidence-Based Medicine in the Law Beyond Clinical Practice Guidelines: What Effect Will EBM Have on the Standard of Care?
This website is all about what to do when you’re not happy with the options SOC offers you. I believe EBM is the way to determine the best course of action and that’s why i’ve created this site; to help you understand the benefits of EBM by reading up on all the things I’ve used that have been effective and not SOC. Feel free to contact me if you can’t find what you’re looking for with the search function.