According to a study, conducted by RAND Health, only about half of all Americans are getting the proper care they should be getting, regardless of their insurance coverage. Lead author Elizabeth McGlynn, and associate director of RAND Health, said, "There is a tremendous gap between what we [know] works and what patients are actually getting. Virtually everyone in this country is at risk for poor care."

The study, published in the New England Journal of Medicine in June 2003, is one of the largest and most comprehensive studies done on the quality of American health. The study surveyed nearly 7,000 adults in 12 metropolitan areas of the United States and then reviewed their medical files. Here is a sample of what they found.
More than 75 percent of diabetics were not given semi-annual blood tests by their doctors that could help prevent kidney failure and blindness.

About 46 percent of patients put on antidepressants never got any follow-up from their doctor to see if the drugs were effective or had any side effects.

Crisis Intervention vs Prevention

So how can a health-care system so expensive and so technologically advanced be so deficient? The answer is simple; the system is designed to treat disease rather than to prevent disease. Most doctors are merely trained to intervene in the face of some urgent medical crisis, treat the illness rather than the patient and then just wait for the patient to come back in the midst of his or her next crisis.

Conventional medical doctors are also not taught to respect the inherent healing capacity of the body or the wisdom and power of nature. They are taught to treat symptoms and diseases rather than individuals. They use drugs and surgery to suppress symptoms and cut out weakened organs rather than using symptoms to show them which organs to support or build up.

Micromanagement of Symptoms vs Treating the Whole Person
The faulty system exists in part because conventional medical doctors have been taught to speak Latin, which prevents them from communicating with their patients. They have also been convinced that their learned knowledge is too immense to communicate to their patients. Additionally, conventional medicine has been divided into so many specialties that they have frankly lost sight of the whole person they are treating. Although the symptoms may lie in one specialty, the cause of the symptoms may lie in another. Since most doctors do not understand the interrelationships of the various body systems, how can patients be expected to know where to go for help? Most patients wander from doctor to doctor searching for someone to find a cure for their disease when they should be searching for a doctor to find the cause.

So What's a Patient To Do?
"Patients need to be more proactive," says Dr. John Pronovost, associate professor of anesthesiology and critical care and health policy at Johns Hopkins School of Medicine. If you have a specific disease, ask your doctor to help you treat the cause, rather than just the symptoms. Also inquire about alternative, non-drug, non-surgical, therapy choices and their outcomes.

For their part, "physicians need to be receptive," Pronovost says. "They need to listen, encourage and accept patient participation.” They must learn how to address health care consumers' questions and speak their language. They must learn to treat the whole person and work to support and enhance the inherent healing mechanisms within the body. Drugs and surgery should become the treatments of last resort rather than primary care.

Doctors, insurance companies and patients all need to learn to recognize and appreciate the power of prevention, including annual wellness exams that review the whole person. Then comes the hardest medicine of all to swallow: we must apply what we learn. We must make the difficult lifestyle changes that we all know prevent disease, enhance our health, increase our vitality and extend life.