“The more things change, the more they stay the same.” This couldn’t be truer of our health care delivery system. As a practicing physician for more than 30 years, I have experienced firsthand the explosion of medical technology, much of which has dramatically changed the way we diagnose pathology and the way we surgically and medically treat pathology. I will admit that this has served patients and doctors well, yet recent history has seen an explosion of illness and morbidity in our society.
What I feel compelled to take issue with, and the reason I am writing this treatise, is that the actual paradigm of medical care has not changed much in spite of all of our technological advances. Physicians have been extensively trained and have held steadfast in the belief that presenting symptoms are entities unto themselves. These symptom complexes have been treated as if they have a life of their own, separate and apart from the innocent bystander host, the person with the medical problem. We have divided the human body into a jigsaw puzzle of component parts. We’ve taken the jigsaw puzzle apart and assigned a specialist to address each one of these pieces of the whole, losing sight of the fact that everything is part of the whole, and everything we do as physicians to each little part affects the whole person. This has fostered the current allopathic paradigm of “symptom care” in lieu of the more important issue of “health care.”
In order to establish a system that is truly focused on health care, we need to expose some “myths” that will allow us to unlock the door to creating a more efficient and successful healthcare delivery system.
Myth #1- Technology has improved healthcare
Myth #2 – Inflammation is bad
Myth #3 – Genetically coded diseases are unavoidable
Myth #4 – Medications improve health
Myth #5 – Childhood immunizations protect us from serious disease
Myth # 6 – The double blind – placebo controlled study guarantees safety and efficacy in drug therapy
Post Continues on www.huffingtonpost.com