Healthcare : Is It High Time To Rethink About It ?
In older times when stethoscope was yet to be invented, doctors used to measure pulses through the wrists. Home remedies, concoctions especially placebos often made people better. Doctors used to visit homes and would get in return whatever the patient could afford. Morphine, a derivative of opium was something sold at local apothecaries to reduce pain. Most of today’s diseases were incurable and unknown. Medicine then was a nascent science.
Fast forward to today, healthcare is a multi-trillion dollar industry. Medicine has branched into 120 recognized specialities and sub-specialities, spinning out several industries like pharma, biotechnology, medical devices and so on with billions of drugs prescribed and lab tests performed every year. Medicine is no longer within the domain of the doctor and patient – it’s a science with ever increasing complexity.
While this advancement has helped in doubling our life expectancy in the last 100 years, the complexity of our healthcare system is hurting more than helping.
The demand for specialists is so high that they are unable to invest the time required to identify or address the root cause of why the patient has fallen sick, which could
depend on factors such as the environment where she lives. Further, the patient is prescribed drugs that often have interactions with those prescribed by some.A doctor gets paid more if he performs more procedures or sees more patients, not if he keeps a thousand people healthy. Most patients today would leave a doctor’s office dissatisfied if they aren’t prescribed a drug or made to go through a lab examination. The result is a business that wants to make a patient feel better for the short-term by doing something because that’s what the customer appreciates.
At an earlier time, patients visited doctors to fix conditions that were gross and obvious like broken hands. But now our expectations have changed. We want everything fixed so that we don’t have to compromise on our desires whatever those may be. But, the more we understand the workings of our body, the more we discover how little we know. The quick-fix approach to medicine fails badly because we are trying to fix a constantly evolving target – our body.
While we spend billions of dollars on human genetics, we hardly know much about our microbiome or the genome of our bacteria. Only recently we learnt that 90% of our cells is microbial and only 10% is human. That’s 100 trillion microbial cells that we know very little about. Moreover, they are changing all the time based on where we live and what we eat. How can you then target and control what they are doing or not doing?
Health can be better influenced than fixed. There are four factors that cause disease: the patient’s inheritance, environment, physical capacity and psychological state. We don’t tend to catch a cold when we exercise regularly. Our bowel movements are easy when we eat freshly cooked vegetables. We also know that we suffer body aches or fevers when we are stressed. Our body’s inherent tendency is to stay healthy unless disrupted by the above factors.
What can be cured through a better lifestyle and habits is cured through prescription of pills. Doctors today are used to find a quick fix to almost everything.
It’s time we start thinking about healthcare differently. While the pursuit of human longevity by using every medical means may be tempting, simplification in the healthcare is the need of the hour. The older role entailed waiting for the patient to arrive and fixing problems based on their complaints. When we reverse those lenses, the role might mean identifying precursors to problems and helping people maintain their health before they fall sick.
