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Reader question: What does this sentence – Doesn’t your retirement plan deserve a second opinion? – and “second opinion” in particular, mean? My comments: It means you should perhaps have a rethink over your retirement plan being made one insurance company. Better, go seek help from another professional group, and make sure you’re getting it right. Second opinion is originally a medical term, referring exclusively to a second medical opinion. You go to a hospital with a slight fever, for instance, after mucking in on a soccer pitch in the afternoon and going to the karaoke for the evening and all through the night. Your doctor, after running you through an assortment of examinations, gives his/her diagnosis: You’ve got cancerous tumors! Prepare for radiation and chemotherapy. Alarmed, you go to another hospital and see another doctor. After running you through another assortment of examinations, the second doctor says the tumors are benign, i.e. harmless. You go home happy, relieved, and perhaps to continue with your unhealthy ways of drinking, smoking and partying through the night, naming just a few of your (probably lesser) sins. But the point is, the second doctor’s diagnosis is called a “second opinion”, and obviously it’s important. In the case of cancer, it is believed that more Americans die from cancer treatment than from the cancer they carry. | 
