Everyone
is different. That phrase gets thrown around with increasing
frequency, does it not? If you study our society, though, it becomes
apparent that people truly believe that phrase about as often as they
commit to the classic health tenets of nutrition and exercise
(statistically, about one in ten people). Everyone is indeed unique,
but our society also seems uniquely set on labeling everybody, then
forming opinions based on those labels. Sociologically, labels
regarding race and sexual orientation are two examples of very prominent
topics piercing our consciousness and forcing us to further examine our
perspectives. With modern American healthcare, interestingly, we have
been slower to recognize comparable patterns of labeling.
A
diagnosis is a label too, and it has the same dangerous potential to
follow a person around, altering both the perception of that person by
others and that person's own perception of his/herself. Perception is
reality; it has been scientifically verified that people generally
struggle to break free from the bias of labels. People can watch a
video of a girl playing in front of a garbage-strewn street in the city
and draw the conclusion that she is not as intelligent as the exact same
girl shown, in a separate video, playing in front of a suburban home
with an abundance of well-manicured trees and a nice picket fence.
Similarly, as happens all the time in healthcare, a person can be given a
diagnosis based on a series of symptoms that strips their every
individual characteristic away in order to fit them into a
treatment-specific generalization bubble.
Fibromyalgia
is a prime example of the dangers of labeling. Though its symptoms are
quite real, Fibromyalgia is merely a title applied to the increasingly
common health problem of experiencing muscular pain throughout the body
more intensely. Most traditional physicians will tell you that the
condition has no cause and no cure, but that is as bold and
over-generalized a statement as suggesting that a girl from a
challenging socioeconomic background cannot become a game-changing
entrepreneur who debunks many of these diagnostic myths.
There
are numerous known causes for severe widespread muscle pain due to
chemical imbalances in the brain (aka Fibromyalgia), nutritional
deficiencies and the brainstem subluxation / misalignment of the anatomy
(cervical vertebrae 1 and 2) that protects the nerve system's hub, to
name two examples. The upper neck misalignment also makes the head
shift forward over the shoulders, consequently prompting the natural
curve in the neck to be lost and decreasing normal motion among the
vertebrae throughout the cervical spine; normal motion is the catalyst
for pain-relieving endorphin production in the central nervous system,
and deficient endorphin levels make it more likely to experience pain.
Unfortunately,
diagnosing (labeling) has become the clinical end game for traditional
medicine, a stimulus not for fundamental change but for symptom
treatment through drug therapy. Traditionalists trained predominantly
in pathology struggle to connect to information beyond their training,
which is in diagnosing and treating symptoms and disease, even if they
maintain a basic knowledge that most of the 10,000 possible diagnoses
are attributable to poor health habits. These labels, such as
Fibromyalgia, do not characterize cause, just effect, but people often
hold them up as gospel, living their lives around the diagnosis and its
associated medical treatments, fear struck so deeply into their hearts
and minds that they come to think of the label as being as specific to
them as their fingerprints.
The
modern medical system teaches its doctors to label and prescribe, and
to place an otherworldly amount of faith in randomized, clinically
controlled trials which are designed to eliminate the complexities of
the people they are diagnosing. Traditionalists then pass the modern
medical mindset down to the people that they treat.
When
a person gets diagnosed with Type 2 Diabetes, a label attached to the
gradual decrease in ability to produce blood sugar-regulating insulin,
rather than learn the physiology (and neurology and biochemistry) of how
it develops and be encouraged to address the underlying causes specific
to him/her individually, inaction and/or drugs are emphasized as if
fate had already been sealed. If another person is diagnosed with
Multiple Sclerosis, a fancy nickname for multiple areas of scarring on
the brain and spinal cord from lesions prompted by an autoimmune
response, multi-system destroying immune suppressants are given instead
of addressing the various causes of the immune system attacking the
body. Given the label of osteoarthritis, also known as degeneration,
people are unknowingly made to assume that it is an age-specific process
uninfluenced by anything else (like structural balance, which
determines structural integrity), and accordingly are shielded from the
options that can slow it down and dramatically ease its associated
symptoms.
If
you alter various physiological and psychological patterns accumulated
over time, then labels may no longer apply, but diagnoses are not used
as a starting point to awaken in a person's mind an understanding that
it is time to do things differently (to optimize the brain and body's
internal communication network, to perform regular constructive
exercise, to overhaul nutritional habits, to value stress management as a
life skill, to re-balance the body physically to remove constant
muscular strain, to fully address mental trauma, etc.). Lifestyle
change, the key to restoring health, is not a fundamental goal of the
modern medical system, neither in regular clinical practice nor in
laboratory research.
Labeling
has, to borrow a common medical term, a lot of side effects, bottom
line. It can make you feel defeated, and its common treatments can
further your health decline. None of the above even broaches the
subject of misdiagnosis (another way of stating the improper
application to a person of a particular label), which sadly is as
typical as it is both extremely dangerous and economically inefficient,
major concerns considering American healthcare's last place standing
among its industrialized peers in outcomes despite ranking first in
spending. If we want to change healthcare, it is time we start
re-assessing the same labeling issues found in other parts of our
society.
Thinking good things for you, as always,
-Dr. Chad
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