21st Century Medicine in the United States
Conventional Medicine as practiced in the United States today has one way of looking at things. In an acute care setting, it can be an absolute lifesaver, which needs to be wholeheartedly acknowledged. However, in addressing chronic disease, it falls short. It is disease-centered, parcels the body up into different organ systems requiring many individual specialties to assess.
It has become a volume-based business in which health care providers see too many patients in a short time span to maximize reimbursement and keep costs down. The shorter the appointment time, the less the patient can bring up, and the less money he is going to cost the healthcare system. It rewards the use of physician extenders who see complicated patients with less than half the education and training of a physician and may be inadequately supervised. This system is beneficial to alleviate symptoms, but not to address the underlying cause. It focuses heavily on the use of pharmaceuticals because that is about all a provider has time for in a 10-minute appointment.
Furthermore, it is wrought with huge conflicts of interest, both from the pharmaceutical industry and the insurance companies. This can be both good and bad. For example, when the bacterium, Helicobacter pylori, was found to be the culprit behind duodenal ulcers, a finding that older gastroenterologists were very resistant to accept, it was the antibiotic manufacturers who pushed the science behind this as they had much to gain from this discovery.
An example of the flip side is fecal transplants. These have been used medically in Australia for over 20 years and in England for over 10 years. Stool transplants have been found to successfully treat life-threatening colitis from the bacterium Clostridium difficile. One stool transplant can be miraculous. However, because of lobbying by the drug industry, stool transplants are very difficult to obtain in the US. A patient has to fail 2 different antibiotic treatment courses before a fecal transplant can be considered. This can cause severe delays which can lead to horrible outcomes. Our current crisis with opioid addiction is largely due to the drug industry.
