A short time after I became a “customer” of the Western medical system I questioned myself, why did nearly everything I had experienced until today, while I was channeled through this system, ended up in a desaster. For some reason, I started to get the feeling that Western medicine always assumes the “worst case” as the standard, like if someone would walk around with a knight’s armor in daily life to be theoretically more safe all the time.
Thereupon I began to ask myself: “Nature has already equipped our bodies with their own protective and self-healing mechanisms, why is there so little recourse to them in Western medicine?”.
So I wanted to find out where this “worst case” behavior might come from. As a management consultant, when things went wrong, I was often confronted with statements like:
- It was bad luck!
- The market is bad right now!
- It is like it is!
- Destiny!
- Bad Karma!
- etc.
In my experience the root cause of the most problems I was faced with was settled somewhere very far away from these statements.
My absolute top number one of root causes when things went wrong is and was:
- Reason 1: Wrong motivation!
The second one is:
- Reason 2: Wrong or incomplete information!
Based on my work life experience I started to examine our Western medical system, is there maybe a “wrong motivation” installed that leads to wrong treatments?
I asked some (german) family doctors how they got billed by the health system when they treat their patients and they said (in general):
“Per quarter we always get the same amount of money per patient, no matter how often the patients show up and how long the medical consultations take.”
Note: After some research I found some information that was showing a little bit more detailed how a german doctor can bill his/her services (and more or less) their statment was right (see here for a german source).
This is a very interesting information, because:
“What would you do if you get the same money from your customer no matter if someone shows up 20 times (each for one hour) in one quarter or only one time for 5 minutes? Or in other words how would your motivation look like?”
I don’t say that this is automatically resulting in bad or wrong treatments, but it might be an indication, in worst case, for a higher risk that a doctor might (because of economical reasons) not be able take enough time for his or her patient’s therapy.
As an assumption (from the perspective of a business consultant) a lack of time might result in (Quick-)Fixes as discussed earlier in my other post “Why Treatment, Fix and Cure are not the same.”.
And (Quick-)Fixes are mostly based on chemical solutions in my experience.
An example:
If you are young, healthy and only have a slightly raised blood pressure, there are many things you can do about this issue:
Plan A. Reducing your body weight, change nutrition (less salt, less (artificial) sugar), do sports, do meditation, etc. frequently supported by your doctor.
or
Plan B. Take a betablocker (or another blood pressure agent).
What do you think is more attractive from the systems business model perspective.
(Hint: It is B)
This in my eyes fulfills my “Reason 1”, as explained further up, but to be honest this “billing-based” causal chain alone is, in my eyes, not explaining why treatments in Western medicine (especially in my own experience) are so often far away from healing.
There must be some other reasons.
A wonderful quite touching interview (sadly available only in german) I have found has been done by Rubikon and is exactly adressing this topic. It has been given by the best selling book author of “Rette sich wer kann!” (Rescue oneself if you can!) Sven Böttcher. The author explains his own experience with the Western medical system after being diagnosed with Multiple Sklerose.
The father of three is initially treated with a cortisone therapy, but intuitively decides after some time to stop the medication recommended by the doctors and to start looking for a solution himself. Following the motto: Why does my body not like me anymore, why do I lose it as an ally, who actually discovered that MS is autoimmune?
At least he found a way for himself based on common sense and listening to his body completely off the beaten track of all medical advice and standard therapies for himself. He changed his life radically and as it seems (at the time of the interview) his condition seems to improve bit by bit and he overcame his condition, which doctors didn’t think was possible. His story gives much courage to everyone who is on such a road him/herself.
One thing he pointed out that was quite interesting for my own research was, that he said that a doctor who does not follow the standard protocol quickly gets into very risky legal situations and that the standard treatment protocol is usually set by the healthcare system based on the guidelines of profit-driven interest groups such as the pharmaceutical industry.
Note: Bötcher also points out that medical errors are the third often cause of death. He says that 500,000 people die annually in Europe and the USA from the side effects of drugs. (A study from Anthony Hopkins University, I have found, underlines this for the US.)
My further conclusion out of this is that a doctor who follows the standard protocol is legally quite safe and if a standard protocoll as much as possible covers the “worst case situation” the money output for specific “interest groups” might be maximized for their business model.
That means the doctor is as more safe as more he/she assumes the worst case scenario, but for the patient this might be not the best (or safest) treatment regarding his/her healing process.
Getting back to my blood pressure example further up, this means if the interest groups, who have designed the standard protocol of “blood pressure” treatment based on a “pill based product”, they may be more likely promote their product (Plan B) and not another (natural) way (Plan A).
Note: From this perspective the medical industry (like mostly all other industries) seems to be “infected” by the (fatal) idea or goal of continious endless growth, what results into the simple strategy that more and more “ill” people are needed to achive this goal, because healthy people would counteract it. By the way: “Ill” is sometimes also just a question of its definition as we will see further down.
I tried to find more evidence if this claim could be true and found a quite interesting video contribution (sadly only in german again) from the SWR (Südwestrundfunk) about how this “Bloodpressure” business model actually seems to work.
The conclusion of the video contribution is that “the medical industry” and their interest groups do ignore the information that providing blood pressure agents below a blood pressure of 160mmHg/99mmHg seems not to have any positive effect in otherwise healthy patients based on studies of the Cochrane Collaboration, but they still push the standard treatment protocol of taking bloodpressure agents as a treatment anyway.
So it seems like that at least healthy or ill sometimes is just only question of its definition.
This in my eyes fulfills my “Reason 1 + 2”, as explained further up.
So, what is the conclusion out of this all:
At least I think it is very important to know that by evidence the Western medical system is driven by different motivation than only “healing” its patients (as it should) and this is important in the way how to deal with given information.
The “worst case” assumption leads to treatment protocols that are not always the best for the patients healing process, sometimes less is more.
This doesn’t automatically mean that everything is “wrong” and “bad” in the Western medical system, but everybody should be sensitive before making a treatment decision, maybe like when buying a used car.
Please always remind the Disclaimer as a condition for the use of this blog.
Get rid of AFib Blog 