Chopping Patients Up into Little Pieces: Modern Medicine's Approach to Health

I was killing a few minutes tiptoeing through the topics and noted a schizoid presentation of related medical issues. For example, AC lists separately Alternative Medicine, Diseases and Conditions, Drugs and Medications, Fitness and Exercise, Health and Wellness, Mental Health, and Pregnancy and Fertility. I compared that to other similar websites, for example, Helium, which offers Health and Fitness as a main topic with a slew of subtopics from Alternative Health to Dentistry to Vision, plus a separate topic for Medical Science under Sciences. Xomba is simpler in its approach, but still separates Fitness and Wellness from Health and Medicine.

So what? You may say. For me, this confusing separation of topics, all having to do with related health issues, is symptomatic of the patchwork western approach to medicine, the flavor of so-called modern medicine that has pretty much taken over the world, for better or worse. We have become used to the bizarre idea that medicine is not directly related to personal health practices. We also accept the strange notion that it's about the compartmentalization of our bodies and minds.

I'm the first to admit that if I were in a car accident or been shot by some animal exploiter or suddenly came down with appendicitis, I'd want to be taken to the ER of my local hospital (where I would worry that the medical staff were not too strung out on drugs and got their quota of REMs the night before). But for help with lesser physical maladies, I try to stay away from doctors, because although they've been taught to First, Do No Harm, unfortunately harm is often the first thing they do. Modern doctors excel at treating acute disease conditions, performing emergency procedures on folks who would otherwise die, and patching up broken bodies. In other words, they're good mechanics. For dealing with anything else, like the chronic diseases: cancer, cardiovascular disease, arthritis, AIDS, diabetes-or the psychiatric illnesses: schizoaffective disorder, bipolar disorder, depression, anxiety-you're playing Russian roulette when you accept the advice and treatment of a typical western-indoctrinated physician.

In many ways, western medicine still occupies the Middle Ages. As in the days of scientist/philosopher René Descartes, who believed that animals had no more capacity for pain or thought than a mechanical timepiece and who used to dissect them while fully alive and unanesthetized, biomedical research is still centered around the torment and suffering of nonhuman animals in a largely futile effort to try to come up with cures, treatments and safe drugs for human animals. And this continues despite clear evidence to the contrary that vivisection can do great harm to human patients as well as the countless animals sacrificed in testing.

But there's always someone around who will ignore this and sanctimoniously intone, IT'S FOR THE GREATER GOOD OF HUMANITY, a statement intended to stop dead all debate on the subject. It's as if people believe that all life revolves around the welfare of humans and takes second place to that; as if animal experimentation actually works, so you should shut up about animal suffering already. If it's really for the greater good of humanity and it works, then why did Patrick Swayze and Farrah Fawcett die so young? Why has the War on Cancer lasted longer, and cost more in terms of money and lives, than the Vietnam, Iraq and Afghanistan wars combined?

To get back on topic, many of us have learned, sometimes the hard way, how to take care of ourselves not from our doctors, who, as I've said, are focused on disease and mechanical insults to the body, but from our own research and trial-and-error testing as well as from so-called "alternative" practitioners. Some of them, like Deepak Chopra and Andrew Weil, are also M.D.'s. They are in a unique position to recognize the serious limitations of western medicine and offer their own twists on it. Unlike the typical doctor, who is given almost no training in the role of factors like nutrition and the mind in creating disease, doctors like Chopra and Weil focus on how you can keep yourself healthy by taking control of your own body. What a revolutionary idea! They are at the forefront of an effort to combine the best of folk/traditional and western/modern medicine in a more holistic approach to health. And thankfully, the alternatives are still out there: homeopathy, herbology, Ayurvedic, Unani, traditional Iranian, traditional Chinese, Siddha, Islamic, acupuncture and others. Happily, many cultures still encourage practitioners of traditional medicine because they attract many patients who swear by them.

There's a relatively new branch of modern medicine called preventive medicine that concentrates on wellness rather than disease, i.e., how to be proactive to keep from getting the common but avoidable disorders of western culture caused by the standard American diet, mental stress, environmental pollution, and lack of adequate exercise. Then there's mind/body medicine, which explores the connection between thoughts and disease. So there is hope for western medicine if it can only become more accepting of tried-and-true traditional medical knowledge.

I don't recall any doctor ever asking me about my diet or how much I exercised, as if my personal habits had nothing to do with my state of health. The receptionist always hands a new patient the standard sheet listing all sorts of diseases and disorders and whether you or a family member have any of them, but I suspect most doctors don't even bother to read it.

So why does this dichotomy between what a doctor is taught is important to know about his patients and the obvious significance of their personal health habits persist? Why are toxic drugs, lethal radiation and bloody butchery still the best treatment tools medicine has to offer after all these years of research and study? Is the war on cancer ever going to end, at this rate? And why does Gregory House, with all his mad genius and his crack team of brilliant doctors, still have such a difficult time figuring out what the heck his patients are suffering from?

And people wonder how the insurance mafia has become so wealthy at the expense of its human victims. It's not hard to figure out, when you put together all the pieces.