Higher educated cancer patients get better treatment?

Today the quite shocking results of a Dutch research (led by epidemiologist Mieke Aarts) were published: it appears that higher educated cancer patients get better treatments (and because of that: higher survival rates) than lower educated cancer patients.
Reason for this is probably that the higher educated patients are more often actively looking for more information and probable treatments, raising the chance that they will find those treatments also. Besides, they probably have better (more 'equal') conversations with their doctors: doctors will explain them more, and the patients dare to discuss more with their doctors.
Advices that the researchers provide are: doctors should treat every patient the same way, and they should empathize more with the patient so that they can adapt their way of communication.

LIVING OTHER LIVES

Which one of us have never thought of being someone else? Living another life, in another country, in another epoch?
To most of us, this is just fantasy. Psychologists, psychotherapists and psychonalysts are somehow made to live other people's lives, if not only out of empathy, that capacity to iamgine what the other person is feeling or thinking.
There is another way of living other lives: reading.
Through books and descriptions we can live what our short lives would never allow.
Do read to your children, a few pages every evening. In time, they´ll want to know more and they'll acquire the habit of reading.
And read with them lots of fairy tales. Don't give in to the nasty modern way of thinking we must protect our chidren from frightful situations the books provide.  They have to live those emotions mediated by reading.
There is a great book that explains wonderfully the importance of fairy tales in children's education: The Psychoanalysis of Fairy Tales, by Bruno Bettelheim.