Do you remember the kids from school so full of themselves
that nobody wanted to do group work with them?
Perhaps you work with someone like that today, the know-it-all who has
left no room in his/her mind for anyone else’s ideas. Sometimes, these people attain great
individual success, but it is often at the expense of group success. American healthcare exemplifies that trend on
a larger scale, with plenty of individual successes, but having spent far more
money than any other nation on healthcare only to achieve dismal outcomes by
comparison to our global peers, it would be fair to state that individual
success has come at a steep cost: our health.
Egocentrism, a self-centered tendency bordering on
narcissism, has permeated American healthcare for a long time. If American healthcare is to make the
necessary changes that it needs, however, egocentrism must give way to a more
cooperative environment.
Cooperation is our path to the healthcare system we need,
and that begins with a gargantuan challenge to everyone from the various
practitioners of all different specialties to the third party payers to the
sick to the well: we have to collectively recognize that what we have been
doing for the past fifty years does not work, that attempting to strengthen the
system dominant across these past five decades is a fundamentally flawed
concept, and that a basic educational shift toward a broader understanding of
what it takes to be healthy is paramount to any change we seek to make.
The root of the healthcare crisis in the United States is
systemic. If we define health as a
complete state of physical, mental, and social well-being and not merely the
absence of disease and infirmity, then the basic tenet around which a
cooperative healthcare system must be built is how to accomplish the various
aspects of that health definition and the subsequent creation of a hierarchy
among practitioners predicated on which aspects they optimally serve. As it stands, the American healthcare system
is primarily aimed at treating symptoms, disease, and trauma, making it
unsurprising that our global peers so easily outpace us – our system is not
built on being healthy, but rather addressing the various problems that stem
from being unhealthy.
As an industry, healthcare in the USA is thriving, but
statistically healthcare is like a sports franchise that makes a ton of money
and outspends everyone else while annually producing losing seasons. Consumers demand overt expressions of
success, in sports meaning wins and in healthcare meaning well-being, and it is
time that consumers in the healthcare industry were made more aware of how bad
our system has gotten so that they may take a more active role in demanding
change.
It is a unique challenge that we face, overhauling a
system that triumphs financially in spite of its poor results. Even the vast majority of the financial resources
in the research community, which spearheads the effort to make advances that
would improve outcomes, are spent on how to better treat symptoms, disease, and
trauma; and yet disease is more prominent than ever, rates of cancer and heart
disease are climbing instead of falling, and people are dying in alarming
numbers from adverse reactions to the primary medical methods of choice to
combat such conditions.
Respectfully then, step one in this healthcare revolution
has to be a substantial increase in
both recognition on the part of the public and self-awareness from within the
allopathic ranks that the goals and practices of conventional medicine can no
longer be positioned as the gatekeepers of our health system. $3.5 trillion and rising and consumption of
80% of the worldwide production in medications just to be ranked the worst
health system? We live in a sick nation, and we have a moral
responsibility to figure out how to change that; the conventional methods are
not producing results and, though it wields a great deal of influence that,
given its profitability, it naturally would not want to concede, the truth is
the truth and shall remain unchanged, regardless of economics, until drastic
changes are made.
Reducing American reliance on conventional methods would,
in turn, reduce the role of insurance companies. Conventional methods are very expensive, thus
the insurance to cover consumer use of them is quite costly. The Law of Insurance states that premiums
drop only as the number of claims decreases; such is why life insurance is so
affordable for young, generally healthy people.
Whereas we currently use so-termed “health” insurance to readily overuse
conventional medicine with consequently skyrocketing premiums, a movement
toward conventional medicine’s role being reduced would allow premiums to
diminish in potentially dramatic fashion.
Sacrificing is rarely easy, but like parents must
inevitably sacrifice for the betterment of their children, it is just something
that we figure out how to do when it is necessary; and the realities are that
these sacrifices are long overdue and that the conventional philosophy and its
constituents, which receive 99% of the trillions spent on healthcare each year,
have the most sacrifices to make.
Daunting as that may be conceptually, our other option is
to allow a grassroots healthcare movement admittedly building strength to gain
inches while we really need to be gaining yards; we must ask ourselves why we
should settle for inch-by-inch progress when kids are statistically sicker in
this country than ever before and while tens of millions suffer needlessly with
preventable conditions.
It is much easier to keep a well person healthy than to
get a sick person well, thus step two in the healthcare revolution should be
the cultivation of uniformity regarding the basic principles of healthy living
and the appropriate expansion of the roles for practitioners currently
considered non-conventional who are better suited and trained for a proactive,
wellness-based philosophical paradigm shift.
A healthy percentage of non-conventional practitioners share the
understanding that the human body is readily equipped to heal and sustain
itself if it only receives what it needs to thrive. The problem is that we lack a strong, unified
message about the various things that the body requires to regain and maintain
optimal health.
Unity would go a long way toward taking step two. All or nothing mindsets are part of
egocentrism, and accordingly there has emerged a tendency for holistic
practitioners to get stuck in the bubble of their own respective niches. If we were to agree that the nerve system’s
functional capacity to regulate the body is both of paramount importance and
that it is something that can be influenced logically and scientifically; if we
were to agree that nutritional counseling and supplementation are imperative,
especially given the challenge of finding high quality, untainted food; if we
recognized that the integrity of the human structural frame was dependent upon
foundational balance and decreasing tension on the tissues; if were to agree
that stress management coaching and attitude improvement were indispensable
tools without which the goal of thriving is made far more perplexing; and if we
were to further agree that these various aspects of healthy living, activity/exercise
included, were not mutually exclusive but part of a vitalistic formula that
every single person needs in order to be well, then we would have the core of
an infrastructure for a revamped healthcare system.
In addition to unity among the so-termed
“non-conventional,” destigmatizing the likes of chiropractic, integrative
medicine, naturopathy, etc. would also be very useful in stimulating the kind
of dialogue necessary for health practitioners, allopathic and holistic alike,
to work with instead of against each other in order to streamline the
aforementioned big picture process.
Language is a powerful, perception-shaping tool, and
right now the language being utilized in healthcare downgrades everything non-medical
into categories that describe them as subordinates of conventional medicine, as
“alternative” to or “complimentary” of the conventional methods. Conventional medicine is like calculus is to
mathematics, its applications numerous and important but nowhere near
all-encompassing. Holistic practices deserve
to be distinguished with language that acknowledges what they intend to be and
not what conventionalists would rather label them; those labels misrepresent
the comparison to the conventional as apples to apples, but it is in fact apples
to oranges. Our use of language
regarding healthcare has to change if we want to better facilitate a more
cooperative system, and that begins with a clear understanding of what everyone
does and does not bring to the table.
Once a more cooperative system has been established, then
we can take our unified message to the masses, eventually implementing human
physiology, nutrition, exercise, structural anatomy, and stress
management/attitude as the basis for an elementary education curriculum taught
in stages under the “Health” label right alongside the various pillars of
learning mathematics; we can reestablish the better-suited role of conventional
methods as guardians at the gates of death, the fire department of healthcare
if you will, rescuing patients in need of its disaster intervention tools, a
role at which it would
have the opportunity to earn worldwide recognition as the
best at what it does exceptionally without extended sidebars about it being the
leaders of the worst health system; we can revise the focus of research, which
has practically been monopolized by the reactive mindset associated with
disease/symptom treatment, to study causative factors and preventative measures
that embrace rather than shun the human body’s innate capacity to heal, and
also further refine the research process that has come under increased
scrutiny.
The bottom line is that, without a collective conscious
awareness of the realities we face and without greater unity among all of us to
push harder (and in the same direction) for fundamental change, then the
necessary healthcare revolution will continue to be rendered a surfer headed
straight into a tidal wave. With
cooperation, though, we can realistically aim to strengthen the health of the
population by focusing on the core aspects of healthy living, allowing those
suffering to genuinely get well and educating those who are generally well on
how to stay that way.
Thinking good things for you,
Dr. Chad
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