Take the Rock Out of Your Shoe
For anyone who is paying attention, it is becoming increasingly clear that there are some major problems with our health care system. In fact, what we have can be more accurately called a ‘disease management’ system instead of an actual ‘health care’ system.
In the broadest sense, this is exemplified by the overwhelming emphasis on reactive treatments that manage symptoms and the fact that there is almost no emphasis on preventative or functional medicine. The ultimate result of this is that we, as a country, spend more on health care than any other developed nation, but consistently rank among the lowest with respect to life expectancy and overall health.
In other words, despite the fact that we are paying more and more each year – more than any other developed nation – we are becoming more and more unhealthy. We are not getting what we think we are paying for, and we should be demanding more.
Whom to demand more from, however, is the real question. I don’t think it is our doctors; who have been given less and less time to spend with increasingly unhealthy patients. I don’t think it is the hospitals; who have been trying to make the most of tightening budgets and decreasing reimbursement. Nor do I think it is us, as a population, as we have been trying to do our part by gradually increasing our health literacy as information has become more and more readily available.
The real culprit is the overall structure and the system of incentives for the system behaving the way it does. Consider the ‘rock in your shoe’ analogy; you are walking around when you notice a rock in your shoe that begins to cause foot pain. You can take Advil and wait, which is often recommended for general musculoskeletal pain, which may alleviate some of the symptoms, but you could also simply take off your shoe and dump the rock out, and alleviate all of the symptoms, without spending any money on pharmaceuticals.
Unfortunately, our medical system typically advocates for the former scenario and not the latter. If you have high blood pressure, you are given a medication to lower it, the same goes if you have high cholesterol. Those medications can be effective, but there is rarely any investigation into what is causing those symptoms in the first place.
The real problem with this mentality is the road this puts us on. You start taking statins to lower your cholesterol, which it does, but it also decreases your libido; so you start taking Viagra, and so on and so on until, like most Americans in their 60s, you’re taking a handful of pills everyday just to get by. By not spending the time and resources to find out why a person’s cholesterol is high to begin with, we have created a paradigm in which billions of dollars are made every year by pharmaceutical companies, and very little money is spent trying to find the root of the patients’ problem.
So, whether you suffer from cardiac conditions or general back or knee pain, don’t immediately reach for that Advil or Ibuprofen to address your symptoms. Take the time to investigate and discover the root of the problem, then start to make decisions accordingly. For musculoskeletal pain, your physical therapist is the best place to start and should always strive to resolve the root of the problem.
