A New Approach To Healthcare

Having the honor of serving thousands of people over the years, I wanted to share my knowledge so the public can be better health care consumers and begin to understand how to overcome their chronic pain and to sort out the false from the true . Although my specialty has been in sports injury, especially with runners, I realized that the way people were built had been the missing link in why people were often frustrated with the care they received for joint and back pain.

The Healthcare Monopoly

The monopoly that is healthcare today sells a bill of goods to the public, resulting in massive revenues of the monopoly. The current system focuses on treating the symptoms of chronic pain (again, creating revenue), instead of focusing in on the cause of chronic pain. This is a backwards approach. The result is billions being spent by patients and consumers on treatments that just do not work.

Chronic Pain Relief

People want to have their pain problems resolved or prevented, not just labeled with classifications such as Fibromyalgia, which benefits the health care provider more than the person in pain. They do not wish to be taking drugs for the rest of their lives and they want the joints in their bodies, such as their knees and hips, to last as long as they do. They want to grow older in an uncomplicated and healthy way.

False Hope For Chronic Pain Relief

What many people find out after many visits to their health care provider for pain is that many promises of relief for  their chronic pain were never fulfilled, while they used their diminishing healthcare and financial resources to find real answers as to why they hurt.

Chronic Pain Demystified

My new book, 'Cheating Mother Nature' recognizes that the answers to people having constant pain have a common thread. These include, but are not limited to:

Joint pain
Back problems
Arthritis pain
Neck pain
Fibromyalgia
Nerve pain

and a host of other types of chronic pain. The concepts in 'Cheating Mother Nature' demystify the reasons people hurt. This book challenges the status quo in healthcare and puts the patient in control so they can be more informed, more in tune and find the right people to help them stay out of pain or by increasing their knowledge, they can help themselves more effectively.

It’s Time To Change Our Healthcare System – Here’s Why

The big problems with healthcare costs are the blind spots in most doctors’ ‘diagnostic’ way of thinking. Many of the problems people experience are really ‘parts of systems’ that are malfunctioning with the symptom disguising itself as the problem.

Treating The Symptom Instead Of The Problem

Most doctors who are studying specialties are not trained to think this way, and are instead trained to classify symptoms as separate diseases and practice based on disease theory within their specialty. Yet, in fact, the kidneys interact with other organs, the adrenals interact with other organs, the intestines interact with other organs. These organs are parts of systems. The musculoskeletal system overlaps many of these systems, yet training in the functional diagnosis of the musculoskeletal system is glaringly absent from the medical curricula.  It is a fact that problems in organ systems can show up as muscle pain and problems in the muscular and neurological systems can reflect organ malfunction. A lack of training, consideration and knowledge of the musculoskeletal system and its systemic integration leads to tests that are supposed to find the problem through process of elimination.

Too Many Medical Tests

The net effect of this approach is that we order too many tests because of holes in our understanding of how things work in the body. Most physicians are trained to see the micro (small issues and symptoms) and fail to see the big picture (why the symptoms actually exist). Physicians then are trained to classify the symptoms and attempt to ‘do something to it’.

Years later, other problems in other organs and systems may arise because the underlying causes of the person’s original problem were never discovered, but the offending part (gall bladder, for example) may have been removed.

Cutting Healthcare Costs

We need to rethink what we are doing. Cost cutting our way in the same paradigm, using the medical home or Accountable Care Organizations (ACO's) is lunacy, even if the model shifts to pay for results. We need a paradigm shift and a change in the model that ultimately needs to be a whole body model, versus our current specialist vs. generalist model. Doctors who spend the time to figure out a problem should be paid for it.

Understanding Medical Problems

Doctors of all disciplines must begin to understand how problems develop and work on the mechanism and prevention of the disease process (versus our current model of throwing away or treating the individual parts that seemed to go bad). We should lean less on medication to reduce chronic problems, such as blood pressure; problems people have been taught to believe just happen and instead address the functional or systemic issue causing it whenever possible.

Aging

Aging is not a disease, but a process we all go through. We need to honor this and treat it as it is - something everyone will go through. The healthcare system needs to gently assist people into their later years rather than treat the aging process as a disease.

Then, and only then, can we truly begin to fix the problem of healthcare. The public must be able to understand their problems rather than be fearful of them, since people make better healthcare consumers when they make choices from knowledge rather than from fear.