Health Pearls

DOCTORS MAKE LOUSY PATIENTS
(BoZone Health Pearl # 99)

“Talk to doctors about their experiences and you’ll be surprised by how little power they have to bend the system to their will”
(TIME: May 1, 2006)

““Doctors are terrible patients, because they know too much”, says Dr. Pamela Gallin, director of pediatric ophthalmology at New York Presbyterian-Columbia Medical Center and author of How to Survive Your Doctor’s Care. “They can’t be both doctor and patient at the same time.” They don’t like appearing weak; they are schooled in a culture of stoicism and sacrifice that cautions against complaint. In studies of the behavior of doctors, most admit to writing their own prescriptions, self-diagnosing, and avoiding check-ups. When they do have to enter a hospital as a patient, they struggle with their role, scanning their bedside monitors and watching their colleagues so closely that everyone can get a little spooked.
“I don’t like the role reversal,” says Michael McKee, vice chairman of psychology and psychiatry at the Cleveland clinic. “I suppose it is the way you feel when you’re 80 or 90 and your kids are taking care of you. It doesn’t feel right.””

The above quotes were taken from an article in TIME Magazine, written by Amanda Bower and Nancy Gibbs. It brings up an interesting discussion, one, which is closely related to the saying “Walk the walk, and Talk the talk”. The best teachers are those people who have truly integrated life’s experiences in their own heart, and who are willing to share their efforts, their tribulations and their lessons with those who are ready to embark on a similar path.

I often tell people close to me that life is what it is; we have arrived where we are today, because of our own recent as well as long-forgotten decisions. It is so easy to blame others for certain mishaps and misery; however, we have allowed these people at some point to influence us enough, that we become willing followers in stead of independent participants.
Keep in mind that someone else’s path, although similar, is not the same as the one paved for us. Knowing that, it should give us a wonderful feeling of uniqueness and individuality. We deserve to be respected for our progress, at whatever tempo that may be; and we should realize that as much as we don’t like it when somebody else is trying to butt into our life, we should respect their space, their path, their life, and their choices just as well.

Today’s article is about sharing the lessons of life, and respecting individual progress based on where it is today, without judging the past, or its possible development in the future.
Bower’s and Gibbs’ article is called “Question: What Scares Doctors? Answer: Being the Patient!” It highlights the true-life experiences of doctors in hospitals, who for a myriad of circumstances, end up in a patient’s bed, thereby getting a complete different view of how the health care system actually works in reality.

Being a patient and being thrown in this environment is confusing, scary and overwhelming. Top that off with the fact that patients are not allowed to have an opinion, and it feels you have just been transported to a foreign country, where people speak a language, which is only barely understandable.
Now keep in mind that doctors speak this language daily, but once the roles are switched, they are really not allowed to be in charge anymore.

This TIME article is a huge exposĂ© about how doctors suddenly are forced to walk the path their patients usually tread. It is not their own, and as much as they’d like to change it, they cannot. The future will tell if a TIME article such as this, will inspire doctors to change and improve their conversations and communications with their patients


“More than 1 in 3 doctors in a 2002 survey by the Harvard School of Public Health reported errors in their own or a family members’ medical care. Dr. Robert Wachter, chief of the medical service at the University of California, San Francisco Medical Center, who co-wrote last year’s best seller Internal Bleeding: The Truth behind America’s Terrifying Epidemic of Medical Mistakes, says he has seen it all: patients who had the wrong leg amputated, were given the wrong (and deadly) medicines, had surgical instruments left behind in the abdomen.
Not all the errors are due to ignorance or incompetence; even the best doctors make mistakes.”

This is not a very comforting thought, especially because of several reasons: 1) you might have a remaining lifetime of suffering and complications; 2) your bill for that procedure, as well as possible follow-ups, can financially bankrupt you; 3) it is almost impossible to legally fight the responsible doctor(s) or institutions successfully; and 4) most doctors will get off with just a slap on the wrist; not even a suspension or retraining.

Gibbs and Bowers continue with a quote from Martin Palmeri, an internal medicine resident at Dartmouth-Hitchcock Medical Center in New Hampshire: “What scares me most about the current medical environment is complacency (meaning: contented self-satisfaction, or lack of concern) with the status quo. When I refer one of my family members to someone, I want to make sure that they are the type of physician who leaves no stone unturned, and who will burn the midnight candle if need be to ensure the highest-quality care possible.”

Is this wishful thinking in a society and culture where deaths by western medicine is reaching well over 125,000 annually, while doctors are continued to be hailed as omnipotent; and where we are currently ranked about 27th in the world as far as quality of health care is concerned, while costing five times more than the country below us (Tsjech Republic), and two to three times more than any country ahead of us?

Some doctors actually claim that because patients are not always nice to them, they are not always nice to patients. I believe that there have been too many instances, too many misdiagnoses, too many mistakes, too many delays in treatment, too many side effects, too many deaths, too many lawsuits, too many lives that were scarred forever, to just give doctors, hospitals, big pharmaceutical, and health insurance companies a collective pat-on-the-back for a job well done.

As I mentioned earlier, life is what it is. However, as people we always strive to learn from mistakes and get better. If it takes doctors to become patients and learn first-hand about the shortcomings in today’s health care, than this should encourage any patient in this country to help these doctors by speaking-up and letting him/her know that their observations were correct.

It is time to talk the walk that is needed for a serious overhaul. This is one path we should NOT walk alone; we need to walk the talk together, because we will all benefit from it. Being #1 in health care is not the most important, unless it is achieved without any one being left behind.

Jacobus is not a Doctor and does not intent to diagnose, treat or cure any disorder. The information is based on self-study, interviewing experts on his weekly 3-hour Sunday morning Radio Program “Gesundheit! With Jacobus” (www.GWJhome.com), which runs from 7-10, on AM1450-KMMS, and on feedback received from retail customers. If in doubt please visit a professional of your own choice and/or educate yourself with available published materials.

THE PLAN: A FAIR SHARE FOR ALL!
(BoZone Health Pearl # 98)

“This past decade has demonstrated that three out of four Americans do not know if they enjoy the benefits of improving Health Care. It’s time to ask ‘Why not?’”
Margaret E. O’Kane,
President of the National Committee for Quality Assurance

An Associated Press article on October 2 of this year suggests that, according to the National Committee for Quality Assurance, which accredits and certifies insurers, the quality of health care improved across the U.S. The changes are not significant, only a few percentage points; but it is definitely better than the other way around! The association tracks dozens of care measurements, submitted by many of the nation’s insurance plans. Over time this should improve overall health care.

Improvements were seen in cervical cancer screenings, colorectal cancer screenings and the controlling of high blood pressure in hypertension patients; also more children (77.7%, up from 72.5%) with private health insurance are getting all their recommended immunizations. Those who were trying to kick the smoking habit received better advice from Medicare.

On the other hand there were some decreases in quality care also. The percentage of women in commercial insurance plans, ages 50-69, who got a breast cancer screening in the past two years, dropped from 73.4% to 72%. Similar drops were seen in insurance plans covering Medicare and Medicaid patients.

The problem here is that, according to this report, three-in-four Americans do not enroll in a plan that is accountable for measuring and reporting improvements or decline in health care. So we just don’t know if everyone is getting a fair share, or if many people are paying top-dollars for something they don’t know will benefit them.

These are interesting concepts, because several things come to mind. We should have the right to choose any type of treatment we desire; however there are so many different options these days that it would be good if we know some type of track record about the practitioner and/or therapy.
The above article talks about common preventive screenings, and regular readers of my articles understand that I can appreciate these types of diagnostics, but that I consider it only assessing a moment-in-time, not health care! Caring for one’s health is an individual thing, first, and getting help from others, second. In my opinion, every practitioner, therapist, doctor, counselor, body-worker and healer should keep track of the work they’re doing on patients/clients, and, when needed, make that information available for the common good. This way it will keep the practitioner sharp, to be the best he/she can be; and it will expose to the world that there are many great alternatives and common therapies available.
This way insurance companies will have to admit the reality of success, or not, in any type of health-related treatment, and admit the validity of a whole new field requested, and already used, by an ever-growing percentage of the population.

What we have in this country is a certain medical bureaucratic hierarchy that determines the rules by which all need to abide. The problem with a bureaucracy is that there often is no compassion for reality. People, who are neutral, while being experts on a specific topic, make these rules.
The pain and agony many people suffer from before they even decide to see a professional health care provider is often so intense every day, that they don’t know how to verbalize it when face-to-face with a professional. And unless that practitioner has the sensitivity to feel that pain, there is almost no way to truly diagnose it with the current technical equipment.

By, again, going back to the above-mentioned article, we see that today’s health care is qualified by the use of diagnostic technical equipment that is extremely limited in reading the entire person, but very good in looking to see what’s wrong physically. Some times the help comes NOT from diagnosing and treating the ghost of a disease, but addressing the individual who is chased by the pain of the unknown.

“Time” is an important noun in the healing world: taking time, spending time, going back in time, and giving time to others are all aspects of healing often ignored by the health professional. Those of you who have spend time in a doctor’s waiting room, followed by the hasted and short actual visit, realize that you’ve wasted a lot of time, and didn’t get any, once you saw the person who was going to tell all you need to know about your body and health.
And now, while driving home, you feel like you have been kicked in the groin, you realize you’re on your own; you’re going to have to figure it out by yourself. Conflicting thoughts run through your head, about treatments, medications, therapies and supplements you’ve heard and read about, contrary to what the doctor just told you to do.

There is a theory that is being further explored at several top-notch universities, including Harvard Medical School, Brigham and Women’s, Cambridge Hospital, A Harvard-affiliated branch of Cambridge Health Alliance, as well as at the University of Pennsylvania Medical School; and that is that doctors need to be retrained to care for their patients. Harvard is doing that with its current medical students.

According to an article in TIME (May 29, 2006) most doctors are really not connecting with their patients, and because they only spend about one-and-a-half minute with them, these doctors are not able to relate to the real issues at hand. The problem with most medical students, they state, is that they’ve never been really sick.
And these aforementioned universities are now letting their third-year students, who usually immerse in a series of clerkships in the major fields – six weeks in cardiology, six weeks in intensive care and so on -; spend more intense time with patients from the moment they have been admitted to the medical facilities. “Educators are beginning to realize that empathy is as valuable to a doctor as any clinical skill. Whether it’s acknowledging that a patient was inconvenienced by having to wait an hour before being seen, or listening when someone explains why he didn’t take his meds, doctors who try to understand their patients may be the best antidote for the widespread dissatisfaction with today’s healthcare system”, states the article.

“Every patient is a complex combination of sickness and health across multiple biological systems, and patients are regularly shuttled between various parts of the hospital in the course of their treatment. The best doctors in the future will make those connections across fields and treat the patient as a whole individual, not a series of symptoms”, says Dr. Erik Alexander, who directs the new program at Brigham and Women’s.

Top that off with a change in our culture (i.e. elementary education, media, parent-classes, and medical schools) of learning and teaching people how to take care of their personal health better, and we will discover that, instead of promoting the training of more doctors and specialists, we actually need less of them. That way there will be enough physicians to treat those who really need help. This will keep healthcare costs down and the quality of life up.

Jacobus is not a Doctor and does not intent to diagnose, treat or cure any disorder. The information is based on self-study, interviewing experts on his weekly 3-hour Sunday morning Radio Program “Gesundheit! With Jacobus” (www.GWJhome.com), which runs from 7-10, on AM1450-KMMS, and on feedback received from retail customers. If in doubt please visit a professional of your own choice and/or educate yourself with available published materials.