Health Care Reform has been a hot topic for years. Now it comes before the Supreme Court of the United States of America. This is a sober moment for lawyers and justices, commentators and media, patients, and you, the public. But if you only really KNEW the medical system a little better, you might be laughing instead of fighting and fretting.
Here are a baker's dozen of reasons to laugh about so-called health care reform:
1) There is no such thing as health care. Physicians know next to nothing about health. They never take a single course in health. They only know about disease, and not all that much about many of them.
2) It follows that there is simply no such thing as health insurance. All we have is disease insurance, which very often adds to the cost of medical care because physicians believe in their disease model. They test and test and test at your expense.
3) The present medical model promotes spending, duplication and waste -- regardless of any intended reform. This pattern has been developing since the 1940s, when Tinsley Harrison, the famed editor of a textbook on internal medicine named after him, wrote about "the present-day tendency towards a five-minute history followed by a five-day barrage of special tests in the hope that the diagnostic rabbit may suddenly emerge from the laboratory hat."
4) The bottom line very often in the medical office, clinic, and hospital is income not care or service. The whole system caters to medical professionals and not human beings in the grasp of patienthood.
5) Physicians use protocols, guidelines, algorithms, and most of all, guess work to pursue diagnoses of patient problems. Your physician generally knows only tidbits about the medications s/he prescribes, less about diseases diagnosed, and practically nothing about the human beings who consult him/her.
6) If you only knew how little your doctor knows about so many diseases. There are dozens of ways your physician can and does say "I don't know," while using medical terminology and professional verbosity to make you think otherwise.
7) Physicians get paid for dealing with illness, not with making you well. Job security and income are based on keeping you coming to the clinic and the hospital, not for helping you stay home and at work.
8) Medics takes bigger and bigger bites out of western economies because we believe they KNOW what they are doing. Most of the time, they use tests, procedures and scientific propaganda to hide their ignorance. Our ignorance and their ignorance add up to large medical bills.
9) We live in an age of technology which has taken men to the moon. We imagine physical and medical scientists to be akin to rocket scientists. But we have yet to usefully understand arthritis, diabetes, high blood pressure, heart disease, stroke, schizophrenia, etc. The list is almost endless.
10) Clinics and hospitals are memorials to disease, not healing. Today, hospitals are treated as shrines and physicians as priests. Yet, how holy, healthy, and healing are they really?
11) Medical and cancer centers get larger and larger, and more and more expensive -- but not because people are cured. Cancer, like many other modern diseases, is largely incurable for the simple fact that its causes are almost totally unknown. How can such a disease be reasonably treated and dealt with when its causes are yet unknown?
12) Westerners pay huge bills for medical care which may be no more effective than the machinations of witch doctors. They actually may be less effective while costing fantastically more money. Many witch doctors and shamans work for free.
13) Physicians NEVER give guarantees on their treatments and surgeries. If any thing goes wrong, you suffer physical, emotional, financial and other consequences. You pay for doctors' mistakes.
Why do patients and the public accept this and so many other blatantly absurd situations when they put themselves in medical hands? I have commented a number of times to friends about the POWER of a physician: "How many people do you know whom you might meet and within 10 minutes you will be willing to get naked at their request? And pay to do it?" Two answers come to mind at the present. One is a physician, the other is a prostitute. Both take your money -- often under questionable circumstances. They may leave you feeling better for a few moments, but the long term effects may not be good for your health -- physical, financial and otherwise. And, that's no joke.
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