(Beginning of a series.)
"My body isn't like everyone else's."
You'd be surprised how often I've come across this one. What the patient is trying to express is that a standard medical treatment was used on him or her in the past and was ineffective. It is also an assertion that all patients are not the same, and doctors should not use a cookie-cutter approach.
While I have sympathy for this statement, and believe all medical care needs to be tailored to the needs of the patient, it can be misleading. If you are a human being, your genetic code is probably about 99.5% identical to the DNA of the person sitting next to you, even if you aren't related. Thus, the truth of the matter is that the majority of your medical care should be identical to the care everyone else gets.
This is an important issue, because most medical complications occur not because patients get a standard treatment that is not right for them, but because they fail to get a treatment that is standard of care for their medical problem. For example, most people who die in the hospital from a pulmonary embolism (a blood clot in the lung) do so because they did not receive the preventative treatment they are supposed to get (blood thinners). Sometimes this omission is intentional (the patient is actively bleeding from an ulcer, for example), but often it is simply because it was forgotten, or because of fear on the doctor's part that the patient might bleed. Thus, all too often the reason people have medical complications is because a standard treatment was forgotten, and not because the treatment that was given was inappropriate for that particular patient.
Put another way, there is usually more danger in not treating a patient like everyone else than there is in treating the patient as if he is the exception. Remember, exceptional cases are exceptions for a reason--because they are uncommon events. Uncommon events are usually not worth planning for. You plan for the common and stay on alert for the uncommon, not the other way around.
Consider car accidents. Every one of us has heard the statement "he survived the crash because he was thrown clear of the accident." This observation is sometimes cited as a reason not to wear seat belts. And there probably are cases of people who have survived accidents because they didn't have a seat belt and were thrown clear. Those are the exceptions, however. When you look at the data, the rate of auto accident deaths has decreased in the U.S. whenever seat belt use went up, such as the years in the 1990s when most states began ticketing drivers who didn't buckle up. While not wearing a seat belt may help the occasional person, for the majority, use is better than non-use.
Now, some may ask, what about allergies? Don't allergies dictate that patients be treated differently than the standard? Yes and no. Most allergies doctors have to contend with in patient care are to antibiotics (although there are other medically relevant allergies), and most recommendations for antibiotic treatment include an alternative treatment for the allergic. So, if you have pneumonia, you will be given ceftriaxone, but if you are allergic to that, the alternative is levofloxicin. Still a standardized treatment, just a treatment that takes allergies into account.
The point is that appropriate medical treatment usually means less personalization than most of us would like to believe. As patients, and as doctors, we need to be wary of plotting a course that is outside of the usual approach to a medical problem. As a patient, you should probably be saying to your doctor, "I'll have what she's having."
We are all more alike than we are different, and that should show in our medical care.