The following is an exerpt from book Why Am I Sick? And What To Do About It , by Dr. Robert Zee, available on Amazon today. See if any of this sounds all too familiar.
In medicine, we are constantly trying to eliminate the possibility of medical mistakes. More powerful technology, more specific tests, better imaging techniques, increased efficiency of communication, and better safety precautions are all put in place so that no one can make a mistake. This, of course, requires more extensive documentation and greater coordination of care. Recent legislation regarding patient privacy, licensing board requirements, insurance company guidelines, and more complex procedures for maintaining and distribution of medical records creates administrative nightmares. The sheer amount of paper work involved in keeping the patient chart in order has seemingly become more important than what the chart actually contains. Evolution of the health care system has recently turned it into a complicated network of documentation, communication, and medical billing. As if that is not bad enough, two or three administrative employees are required for every doctor just to keep the paperwork moving. The patient chart is inspected closely by the doctor to make sure the forms are in proper order and double checked by the staff. Before the chart is filed and billed, it is rechecked in case of a future audit by an insurance company, the State Board of Examiners, or worse yet, an attorney bringing malpractice charges. In the mean time, no one has any clue what is wrong with the patient, but at least no administrative mistake was made and the documentation is in order.
The health care system has not only evolved into a tremendous communication machine, but has also evolved into a sophisticated conveyor belt for moving the patient from practitioner to practitioner, and from facility to facility. Any belief that the patient may have a condition that might be later construed as a possible malpractice issue will result in a referral issued to a specialty practitioner to shift the responsibility of care, and therefore liability, to someone else. The specialty practitioner is then assigned the responsibility of diagnosing some ill-defined condition, utilizing lab tests, imaging, and any other tests required to identify a disease that may or may not exist. Referrals are often made to avoid liability, and medical tests are often prescribed to avoid malpractice claims rather than for medical necessity. Tests and referrals often require insurance company approval, adding convoluted twists to both the medical documentation machine and the patient conveyor belt. The patient, trapped on the medical conveyor belt, has little or no chance of ever getting off. If nothing is wrong, the patient is allowed off temporally, and given a ticket to get back on the conveyor belt next year for a follow-up examination “just in case something may have changed.” Unknown to the patient, however, is that the follow-up visit was probably scheduled for issues of liability or financial profit, and not medical necessity. With all this sophisticated technology to move both information and the patient around, the diagnosis, if any, arrives three months later than it would have if the simpler system of patient care used decades ago was still in operation.
During the process of solving existing problems with the newly developed technology, what we have done, in essence, have created newer, more complicated problems. Any new technology creates new problems that have never existed before the technology came into existence. The problem solvers must keep working harder and harder, faster and faster, just to stay afloat to remain ahead of the competition. Ironically, problems created by technology must be solved with even more technology. The new technology must be purchased, put into operation, and connected to other technology using wires and connections that require an engineer to understand. When the new technology is finally installed and running, it is already obsolete and must be replaced by even newer technology using the newest hardware and updated software. The question is, then, whether technological advances have actually made any progress at all. The medical field ends up spending disproportionately more time playing with the new and advanced technological toys, and disproportionately less time actually working with the patient. Taking an objective view, the project of conquering disease with all this new technology appears more and more of an impossibility, a mirage of sorts, in which technological innovations are a way to get to an unobtainable destination even faster. In other words, we have gotten nowhere very quickly, and have done it faster than we could have if we did not have the technology.
Even with all this new technology, the experience of the patient has not changed much since the last generation, and, if anything, this experience has gotten much worse. To the patient, it almost seems like the doctor speaks some foreign language, and what transpires during the five or ten minute office visit raises even more questions than were answered. Unimpressed by level of the examination performed, the patient is given either the name of a test that is supposed to find the problem, or a piece of paper with the name of some chemical that is supposed to cure the problem. Often, the patient also acquires some level of doubt during the office visit, primarily due to his or her perception that the doctor did not truly hear everything they had to say. The modern day office visit to the doctor is analogous to trying to see the world through a peep hole in a door, or through a slit in a fence. The patient often gets the feeling that if they can only get to the other side of the fence, or through some door, the big picture will become evident, and everything will become crystal clear. When everything becomes clear, the path to healing is then evident. Often, however, the reason the patient cannot get any clear and definitive answers from the doctor is because the doctor simply does not have any. When the patient does not get an answer from the doctor, they usually begin to search for the answers on their own, which usually involves exploring the possibility of any number of alternative treatments.
In the mean time, while the patient is on their own search for the answer, the doctor may have ordered even more tests to “rule out” a particular disease. To rule something out is a statistical and mathematical nightmare, and is literally the dead end street of diagnosis. A potential diagnosis is ruled out when little belief, if any, exists in the possibility that the proposed diagnosis is even remotely correct. This is why the particular disease is being ruled out, and not being ruled in. The process of ruling out disease after disease leaves both the doctor and the patient with a list of diseases that the patient does not have. Even the casual observer will find little value in a list of diseases that the patient does not have. Obtaining the correct diagnosis by the procedure of ruling out is literally hoping to stumble upon the right answer. One by one, every possibility is ruled out. The processing of ruling something out in conjunction with little or no analysis gets us nowhere very quickly. By using this method, we have tremendous amounts of evidence proving what diseases the patient does not have, yet still have no evidence at all of what disease the patient does have. This exploration of dead ends is exactly what happens all too often in medicine. If the medical doctor has a good idea about what the problem is, they rule something in. If, on the other hand, they have no clue about what the problem is, they start the process of ruling out. It does not take a genius to figure out that time and energy put into finding the problem is more valuable than attempting to discover what is not the problem. When the medical doctor starts ruling out diseases, the doctor should be ruled out and a new doctor should be found.
Following a few minutes of listening to the patient, the infamous words “Let’s go ahead and try this” usually ends the office visit. This is perhaps the biggest red flag in medicine, and is actually worse than the protocol of ruling out specific diseases. Health care should not be delivered using a trial and error methodology. Trying something, just to see if it works, suggests a very low confidence level in the treatment. This trial and error methodology is also suggestive of the possibility that the doctor has no clue about what the problem actually is. The suggestion made to the patient of trying something does nothing more than give the doctor more time in hoping to discover what the real problem is. The fact that something is at least being tried is supposed to give the patient the comfort that something is being done to solve the health problem. One undisputable fact, however, is often overlooked; to deliver the proper treatment, it must first be known exactly what is being treated. This is simply common sense, and is a nonnegotiable requirement of the treatment of disease. Randomly prescribing medication in order to find the one that best suppresses the symptoms actually borderlines upon stupidity. We cannot simply rely upon luck or a Magic 8 Ball when treating disease.
The notion that health can be restored or every disease can be cured by ingesting chemical compounds manufactured in a chemistry lab is actually quite absurd. To believe that chemicals can cure a disease requires us also to believe that the reason the disease was allowed to occur in the first place is because of a deficiency in the body of some manufactured chemical. That notion is equally absurd, and is nothing more than ad ridiculum. This absurd principle of a chemical cure is most evident in healing a disease, particularly a chronic disease, or a “syndrome,” in which no specifically identifiable cause is known. The healing of a chronic disease or syndrome cannot simply be reduced to a chemical formula. In addition, if the cause of the disease or syndrome cannot be identified, how can the cure be known? What really happens is, in most cases, multiple factors contribute to any chronic disease process. Rather than address each individual issue of the disease at the root cause level, a chemical is prescribed to give the illusion that the disease is being cured. The illusion eventually, over time, becomes a very expensive illusion. Equally expensive, but much more practical, would be to take the time with a practitioner willing to treat the problem at the root cause. Unraveling the cause of a disease at the level at which it originated and subsequently treating it at that level is very time consuming, but, in the end, well worth the effort. The practice of treating only the symptoms will only allow a further unhealthy state to develop, making the real problems even more difficult, and therefore more expensive, to solve in the future.
If the above sounds like your experience with the modern day medical system, you may want to consider purchasing Why Am I Sick? And What To Do About It , available on Amazon today. If you know of anyone on the medical conveyor belt, send them a link to this article!
