Six Medical Myths Even Your Doctor May Still Believe--Technology Improves Health

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Published 10/26/2011 - 12:18 p.m. CDT

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It is REPORTED HERE that "The actual paradigm of medical care has not changed much in spite of all of our technological advances. Physicians have been extensively trained and have held steadfast in the belief that presenting symptoms are entities unto themselves. These symptom complexes have been treated as if they have a life of their own, separate and apart from the innocent bystander host, the person with the medical problem. We have divided the human body into a jigsaw puzzle of component parts. We've taken the jigsaw puzzle apart and assigned a specialist to address each one of these pieces of the whole, losing sight of the fact that everything is part of the whole, and everything we do as physicians to each little part affects the whole person. This has fostered the current allopathic paradigm of 'symptom care' in lieu of the more important issue of "health care."

"In order to establish a system that is truly focused on health care, we need to expose some "myths" that will allow us to unlock the door to creating a more efficient and successful healthcare delivery system." In the coming weeks we will look at these myths.

"Myth #1- Technology has improved healthcare. ... Advances in medical technology now enable us to look inside the human body with relative ease and with great detail. Our surgical tools allow us to operate on all parts of the body with a minimum of trauma and blood loss. ...technology has, in fact, improved our health. Or has it?"

"Statistically, since the age of technology, there has been an onslaught of increasing pathology. The amount of illness and morbidity in our society is dramatically rising. There are now more cases of cancer, heart disease, arthritis, auto-immune illnesses, endocrine disorders, developmental disorders, allergies, respiratory problems, infectious diseases, neurological problems, musculo-skeletal pathology, gastro-intestinal disorders, psychological illness, etc., than ever before."

"While it is true that our technology has enabled us to better handle the enormity of disorders now facing mankind, it has done literally nothing for 'health care.' If it had, we would have seen a decrease in the amount of illness and pathology in society. We would have experienced a drop in the amount of people requiring intervention from the medical community. Pharmaceutical companies would not be as rich and powerful as they are if people would be less dependent on medication to "feel well". If anything, advances in technology have fostered a narrow field of vision, focused more on early detection and intervention than on prevention. If, by definition, health care means "the maintenance of good health," then technology has failed miserably to produce any measurable improvement in the overall state of health of mankind."

More to come...

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