Health Care, or Medical Care? Words Matter.

In light of the results from June 2014's performance analysis by the Commonwealth Fund, it must be made clear that the U.S.'s "health care system" is no health care system at all: it's a MEDICAL system, and "health" and "medical" are not synonymous, no matter how often they are used interchangeably by every day people, television, or government departments.  While there are other issues that contribute to the U.S.'s terrible health, when we truly understand this problem of semantics, we can better understand why the United States "health care system" ranked dead last (again) in comparison with eleven other countries, despite "it" being the most expensive in the world.

Until this concept is addressed (perhaps only possible when huge numbers of people voice the truth so loud that our government no longer itself uses the terms equivalently, and also no longer allows "Medicine" the monopolized "right" to talk about itself as "Health care") and the "system" is actually called what it is ("Illness care", or better yet "the big U.S. mandatory, government-subsidized business network that answers just about every call for help with expensive tests that usually are not necessary, drugs, and/or surgeries, along with little to no patient education), we ALL MUST focus more than ever on personal responsibility, self-care, our own research, and possibly doing things we may have never done before.

YES, that means you may well have to pay for a service entirely out of your own pocket. It may involve you doing things your medical doctor never suggested to you, things your medical doctor told you "wouldn't help", or better yet (this is where it gets juicy, and controversial), maybe doing things your medical doctor explicitly told you NOT to do.

Consider the people who found yoga eliminated their back pain, but their MDs never told them to do yoga. Consider the people who found relief from allergies by doing a fast with an alternative practitioner, but the MD said "that won't work, don't bother." Consider the patients who suffered from debilitating migraines, and had also been told by their MDs that their x-rays or MRIs are "so bad" that these patients "should never see a chiropractor because a chiropractor would hurt them more"...but some of those same patients felt real health answers could lie somewhere else, tried chiropractic, are alive and well, and no longer have migraines?

Would these things happen if they relied on, and waited for a cue from, our "Health Care system"?

Own yourself. Live YOUR life, take chances, and strive for quality. That's the best health advice you could ever get, and it did NOT come from someone in the Medical field.

(Illustration by Sally Thurer)

Call Dr. Sheena today (208) 557-3640