Health Care System Problems - Continued

Those of you who are old enough to remember the Australian bush nurse Sister Kenny (1880-1952) shown at left, will no doubt recall the brouhaha she caused within the medical establishment of her time. Elizabeth Kenny had devised a treatment for polio that was universally castigated by doctors of the day. In fact, her methods proved time and again to be efficacious, and became the forerunner for the practice of physical therapy as we know it today.

The reason I mention this woman and her struggles with the established order in the medical profession, is that licensed medical doctors often behave like members of a closed-shop union. In such an environment, no one is allowed to do work that is perceived as encroaching on their specialty, without consequent opprobrium and sanction. And, they lobby for laws to protect them from such interlopers.

In Sister Kenny's case, she struggled for years to get her methods accepted, even in the face of observable success, and testimonials from patients. The medical profession cast aspersions on her methods and her person, largely because she wasn't an accredited practitioner, and her methods contradicted generally accepted treatment standards.

In today's contentious health care environment, alternative treatments are greatly frowned upon and their practitioners ridiculed. Ask licensed doctors what they think of acupuncture, chiropractic, aroma therapy, or muscle activation therapy, and they will almost always turn up their noses. In fact, they have convinced the insurance industry that these methods are nothing more than palliatives bordering on quackery. Thus, patients are channeled into much more expensive surgical and drug treatments.

This is not to say that there aren't quacks hovering around the practice of alternative medicine, just as there are quacks who are licensed to practice the regular variety. It also does not claim that there alternative methods for most sicknesses or diseases. Not at all. And it is true that in most professions wherever there is a buck to be made, a surfeit of willing hands will be extended to accommodate. We see desperately sick people try all sorts of last gasp treatments, especially when traditional medicine has given up on them. And these seldom work.

However, in the less well defined areas of pain management, due to a variety of causes, modern medicine has proven to be quite fallible. Countless thousands of people suffer through painful days and nights of agony with only the promised relief of dangerous and/or addictive drugs available to them. Doctors prescribe many dangerous drugs in desperation, and because their pharmaceutical rep told them this was the drug du jour for these symptoms. Big Pharma and the medical profession work hand and glove to push expensive drugs on suffering patients. And since only licensed doctors can dispense them, this conduit is exploited by both parties.

Because of the aversion to examining or even testing alternative therapies, the health care system is burdened with much more expensive, "accredited" treatments that push the insured patient in that direction.

In the example I mentioned in my previous post, even though back surgery is reportedly less than 50% effective, and much less costly alternative therapies have proven efficacious in many cases, they are routinely ignored. Worse, just as in Sister Kenny's case, they are scoffed at by the establishment. Such are the ironic side-effects of our costly for-profit health care system.

As another example, a practice that is becoming more common is doctors insisting on patients coming in for an office visit just to renew a prescription. Medical practitioners continually seek newer ways to increase revenues, especially as cuts in income from Medicare go into effect (which will perhaps increase costs rather than effect the desired lowering). Admittedly for some drugs it is necessary to monitor side effects (another indication of how dangerous some of them are), but in many cases it is totally unnecessary. Once a professional is used to a certain level of income (no matter the discipline), it's hard to accept less. Doctors are no exception.

So, the bottom line is that there just might be ways to improve both the costs of health care and the patients' welfare by studying and approving alternative therapies. Currently, that's not even on the table for discussion.