Imagine going into a car dealer with your Check Engine Light on. Instead of probing to find the underlying cause of the problem, the mechanic checked your oil, rotated your tires and put some masking tape over the light and sent you on your way without getting to the root of the problem. Soon you’d have fleets of broken cars lining up for service at the dealer, coming back over and over and never getting fixed.

This, unfortunately, is the best analogy I can come up with for our modern medical system. I’ve bounced around our dysfunctional healthcare system for the past decade, spending tens of thousands of dollars of my insurance’s money to try to cure my mysterious sleep disorder. I finally gave up on my regular M.D.s and like so many, turned to my local healthfood store, alternative practitioner and the Internet. Thankfully, it didn’t take long, and didn’t cost much to finally pinpoint the underlying cause of my problems so I could regain my health. When later approached with my findings, my doctors just shook their heads and said, “Great, keep doing what you’re doing,” and went about their business not healing other patients.

(By the way, none of my dozen or so blood tests ever turned up anything even though I was in the worst shape of my life – not sure why M.D.’s value them so highly…)

As I see it, the solution to our very ill healthcare system is to radically reform our medical schools and start researching these alternative medical approaches. We need to generate the peer-reviewed research to give doctors new tools that they can incorporate into their practice. The National Center for Complementary Medicine is on the case, but it’s getting a very late start and is massively under-funded.

By the way, I work with a bunch of scientists who conduct peer-reviewed research and most of them share the same view of their own medical care and are searching out Naturopaths, so this view is more pervasive than doctors realize.

So, to recap – saving money on medicine is simple – get to the root cause of the most common chronic health problems (IBS, thyroid issues, sleep disorders, depression, obesity, etc.) and actually start curing people, and voila! — our insurance bills plummet.

Sincerely,
Sleepless-no-more in St. Petersburg

I am at best Libertarian, at worst a neo-objectivist. I like the Idea of consumer driven health care. Where is makes me nuts is how it plays out today with decisions folks are making with their high deductible plans. They will follow some of my recommendations for work up ….but not the standard of care MRI to rule out MS or lymphoma because of cost. Now I find myself empiracally treating something without a good diagnosis because the patient and her husband want to do it on the cheap and see how it goes.

Her symptoms may be improved by my treatment but the underlying cause (unknown) may be left to fester and kill this person.

I don’t like being treated as a sushi menu of what the patient will comply with and they won’t comply with. All I can do is document “against medical advise” and hope for the best.

And private insurance is more efficient?

n engl j med 349;8

“The existence of global budgets in Canada has
eliminated most billing and minimized internal cost
accounting, since charges do not need to be attributed
to individual patients and insurers. Yet fragmentation
itself cannot explain the upswing in administrative
costs in the United States since 1969, when
costs resembled those in Canada. This growth coincided
with the expansion of managed care and
market-based competition, which fostered the
adoption of complex accounting and auditing practices
long standard in the business world….

Despite these imprecisions, the difference in the
costs of health care administration between the
United States and Canada is clearly large and growing.
Is $294.3 billion annually for U.S. health care
administration money well spent?”