Our Healthcare Crisis
Yesterday I watched a video by Dr. Andrew Winge, who works in Emergency Medicine. During the video he talked about the crisis in medicine. He sees many patients with heart problems, diabetes, and other illnesses that are caused by poor lifestyle. He said that ninety percent of the patients he sees are obese and that visceral fat, the fat around our internal organs, is the cause of most chronic disease. He felt that unless the inceasingly serious problem of obesity was solved, our healthcare system will collapse under the load of new patients. It felt strange to hear a conventional doctor say what Iǘe been saying all these years. So in response I am writing my proposed solution to the heathcare crisis.
First, I need to clarify the distinction between hygine and medicine. Hygine is what you do to keep yourself healthy when you are not sick. This includes diet, exercise, stress lowering, and healthy relationships. Medicine is what you do when you become unhealthy becuase of poor hygine or other reason. The practice of medicinne covers real illness and apparent illness. Apparent illness is cured when its external cause is removed. For example, insomnia because of stress is best treated by removing the stress instead of drugs. Real illness is illness in the absence of any external cause or illness that persists despite the removal of the external cause. For example, insomnia caused by a traumatic experience, such violence.
Proper hygine will always be more important for public health than medicine for the simple reason that it is easier to keep a person healthy than to restore them to health when they are ill. And diagnosing and treating illness is more difficult than teaching proper hygine, because medicine requires diagnosis and individualized treatment, while the rules of proper hygine are largely the same for everyone. So it is wasteful to design a healthcare system around medicine with little attention to hygine.
Also, doctors are not well trained in medical school on hygine. Learning medicine takes their full atention and leaves little time for learning practical hygine, which is a separate discipline. And the format of a doctorś visit is too short and infrequent for proper coaching on hygine. What we need is a separate pracctice of health coaches, which should be the predominant form of health practice, as it is the predominant problem today. Health coaches should work along side doctors and with businesses who wish to reduce their health care costs. Without this change to medical practice, the costs of health care will only keep increasing.