Health Care VS Disease Management

We typically ask each other, as a form of greeting: “How are you?” and of course we fully expect a courtesy reply of: “I am fine thank you and you?” It would be uncomfortable if the reply was: “Oh thank you for asking… I am having a terrible day, I was just diagnosed with cancer.” What I am saying is that we too often trivialize health.

We minimize the value of our health in such ways and often continue to ignore our health until something does go wrong. We go to doctors who market their services as health care but in reality there is nothing healthy about invasive tests or the process of drawing blood, arriving at a diagnosis and treating with drugs. Think about it a minute. Imagine going to an insurance broker to buy Death Insurance; nobody wants to do that, but it’s really what you’re doing when you buy Life Insurance. Similarity, when we buy Health Insurance isn’t it really Sickness Insurance, as benefits are only paid when you are sick?

Health Insurance isn’t responsible to cover your wellness activities, you know – the things you do to promote health. It only covers you for hospitalization or to see a doctor when you are sick. The medical business has health care flipped upside down! It delivers disease management and sickness care only. Lets compare the alternative with other non-medical practitioners who do in fact focus on the restoration and preservation of health.

Health Care                                                Medical Care                               
Holistic                                                            Reductionist
Naturalistic                                                    Synthetic medicines
Lifestyle plays a major role                         Lifestyle is rarely considered
Never use any drugs                                    Almost exclusively use drug solutions
Surgery prevention focus                            Surgical solution focused
Private clinic based                                      Hospital based

Alternative doctors rely heavily on the body’s natural healing abilities while medicine has little faith in the body’s natural healing abilities. In fact it is expected that your body will fail you and of course we have hospitals and drugs to heroically save your life. There is nothing wrong with that and we do need that in certain cases, in a true life or death situation; but for everyday chronic disease the acute care management model utterly fails the patient as it mostly focuses on symptom reduction.

If we have the healthcare business flipped upside down, then what we considered the alternatives are really the mainstream health care service providers and its medicine that is the alternative to health care, you know…. sickness care. Who are the mainstream health care practitioners? It’s the chiropractor and the naturopath; it’s the osteopathic doctor or the traditional chinese medical (TCM) doctor when they focus on traditional or historical approaches; and there are even holistic MD, if you can find them.

Yes, we do need emergency medical services but so do we need doctors who approach the patient from a holistic perspective; who are concerned about the side effects of dangerous drugs; who advise and insist on patient compliance to lifestyle correction if true health can ever be returned.

Food for thought,
docMIKE