Crisis and Change in Medicine

Modern conventional medicine has been in crisis for some 30 years with the inability to stem the growing avalanche of chronic diseases. According to an editorial in a prestigious medical journal in 1968 and later quoted by President Richard Nixon, "The Germ Theory of Disease and its use of drugs is ineffective in treating chronic diseases".

Conventional medicine’s failure to adapt to changing disease patterns reflects a frozen mind-set. Unable to change its mission or tactics after winning the war against diseases of poverty (infectious communicable diseases caused by nutritional deficiencies, germs and parasites), conventional medicine uses the same tactics with chronic lifestyle diseases that include heart, cancer, diabetes and kidney disease.

Chronic diseases are caused by a lifestyle of affluence as we over eat, under exercise and pollute our environment. We overly consume calories and eat processed foods without burning off the extra caloric intake, managing stress and protecting our environment from pollution.

Chronic diseases are caused by affluence as we over eat, under exercise and pollute the environment. Medical educators and most physicians continue to work with the 19th century model that was used to fight infectious disease; each disease was believed to have one cause (a pathogen) that could be destroyed with one drug—the magic bullet. Medicine remains locked into the old strategy that won the last war against acute diseases rather than dealing with the present challenge posed by chronic diseases that have multiple causes. Chronic diseases are largely preventable. Medical education fails to prepare physicians to treat patients outside the old model of acute disease warfare. Medical researchers continue to search for magic bullets for curing chronic illness with drugs. Drugs only suppress symptoms. The solutions reside in behavioral and institutional change more than with high-tech tools of drugs or surgery.

Our medical care system focuses on treating people after they become ill instead of promoting health. The Center for Practical Health Reform charges that our medical care system focuses on treating people after they become ill instead of promoting health. Waste and inefficiency abound from doctoring preventable chronic diseases after they arise with expensive drugs that primarily mask symptoms. Our medical care system swallows one out of every seven dollars in our economy and is consuming a larger share every year. Medical insurance policies are helpless to control escalating costs. Consumers are temporarily insulated from the costly consequences of their lifestyle choices as they clamor for unlimited services. None of the major parties shoulder responsibility for the waste and inefficiency they each create according to the Center for Practical Health Reform.

Simply using the medical care system now causes more deaths than heart disease according to a new study by several physicians. (See Death by Medicine by Gary Null et al., October 2003, at http://www.garynull.com/documents/iatrogenic/deathbymedicine/DeathByMedicine.pdf

In its aggressive efforts to fight disease, modern medicine kills patients by prescribing drugs with lethal adverse reactions, performing unnecessary surgery, spreading infections and making a wide-range of medical mistakes.

Some pioneering physicians are championing ‘integrative clinics’ offering both CAM and modern therapies. More consumers are seeking to enrich their health. Not only are most chronic diseases preventable, the skills involved in building health differ greatly from those used in fighting disease. Medical schools still largely prepare physicians to wage war against disease by teaching detection and management of disease with drugs and surgery rather than promoting healthy lifestyles and behavioral change. The curriculum focuses on the biochemistry of disease, rather than promoting health. America needs more health promoters, empowering patients in the collaborative work of enriching health and preventing disease. Waiting to treat chronic disease after the damage occurs is costly, often ineffective and sometimes fatal.

This book is about a cultural shift in America from doctoring disease to enriching health. The popularity of complementary and alternative medicine (CAM) expresses this shift from a disease centric to a health centric model.