American Health Care

. . . this deal is broke

Now that I’ve had a close encounter with ‘health insurance’, in my case Medicare Advantage from United Health Care, I have discovered that doctors don’t actually work for the patient, they work for the insurance company. What?!?!

Yeah - you need a procedure, you need some medication? ‘We’ll let’s run that thru our system, we’ll decide,’ says the insurance company. You want your doctor to spend time with you so they can understand your symptoms better? ‘I don’t think that’s really necessary.’ they say. You want to stay in touch with your doctor and let them know how you’re doing so you can be encouraged and facilitated? ‘Don’t really have time for that either unless you’re prescribing pharmaceuticals.’

‘Doctors’, atleast the ones I encountered, are trained to test, diagnose and prescribe. That can actually be done by a machine. What a machine can’t offer is support, empathy and a listening ear.

We now know that listening has therapeutic value. It’s used clinically. That’s right, just listening causes positive intervention in the patient. But doctors are not trained for that, they’re trained to test, diagnose and prescribe. That’s what they’re taught in their AMA certified medical schools. The AMA is in bed with big Pharma and big Pharma is in cahoots with the health insurance companies; it’s a triopoly. You don’t get to be an M.D. unless the AMA says so and from what I’ve seen you’re pretty much programmed to test, diagnose and prescribe by the time you graduate from their school.

‘Programmed’, isn’t that a little harsh? Not from what I’ve seen, it’s a system and the goal of the system is to get you on pharmaceuticals and for the rest of your life. Once you’ve got your first order in, it’s easy as pie, the pharmacy will even text you when you need a refill, they’ll call you on the phone and leave a message. Way easier than talking to your doctor.

Actually it’s the body that heals itself. Doctors don’t know that because they’re not taught that. The drugs can help reduce symptoms, mask pain, open arteries, etc. but it’s the body that does the actual healing, if given a chance. The internal organic wisdom of our body knows how to put itself back together. Every cell knows how to be in homeostasis, it’s in its DNA, it’s natural.

That opens a whole bunch of opportunities for doctors to help the healing process, not be the boss of it. Simple positive feedback (also called conversation), massage, acupuncture, range of motion therapy (which is what I used for my joint pain) , water therapy (as in using the healing power of water) and many more; it’s almost up to the limits of your imagination. How do you think doctors healed people 10,000 years ago? Well they weren’t called ‘doctors’, they were called shamans and they drummed and sang you through it, they burned herbs and touched your body and gave you super intense attention until the sickness was gone.

If doctors actually did something like that: spent time with their patients, followed them through their recovery, stayed in touch with them and not just once every 4 weeks when they’re scheduled for an appointment, but learned about the nuances of their patient’s symptoms by talking to them (and listening) - that would accelerate healing alot. But that would also slow down the production line money machine. Test, diagnose, prescribe.

And how would we pay for something like that, doctors actually taking the time to care about their patients? I don’t know. We manage to finance the largest military in the world, by far, and if the point of that is to intimidate and destroy people, then maybe we can spend half as much on something that will enhance and support people. We could be at the top of the pile instead of halfway down. U. S. health care is the most expensive in the world but is rated only 37th in quality by the WHO (just behind Costa Rica and just ahead of Cuba). That, my friends, is a travesty. No one seems to be talking about it though, because . . . well because those industries: AMA, big Pharma, health insurance companies have powerful lobbies.

I haven’t talked much about my illness but I will now . . . this is what happened to me. My thyroid got hacked, it was pumping out thyroid hormones; T3 and T4 at a high rate, at an alarmingly high rate. They were affecting every part of my body - my metabolism, which is pretty much everything was in overdrive; my heart, which is also pretty much everything, couldn’t pump enough blood because it was swollen and stiff.

I visited my doctor, I was short of breath. He ordered an echocardiogram. Logical. No problem there. When the echocardiogram came back (which is basically a picture of your heart made by sound vibrations), that’s what it showed: systolic dysfunction, which is a fancy word that means your heart isn’t pumping enough blood. My doctor chose to frame in the most dire of terms, ‘you have heart failure’ he said and then added, ‘if you were going to live 25 more years, you won’t’.

I took the blow, not quite believing him but still trusting him as a doctor. After all, just a month ago, I was riding my bike and riding hard. My heart was strong and healthy. It seems strange that it would suddenly ‘fail’. My doctor was aware of my personal narrative, we had talked about it, but he chose to ignore it. I don’t know why, maybe because his student doctor was in the room and he was showing off how to break the bad news. Either that or he was intimidating me so I would swallow the pills and leave his doctor’s trip intact. That was my conclusion. Not only did he present only the negative part of the diagnosis - I mean he could have said, ‘hey there’s a problem with your heart, it’s serious, but let’s see what’s going on and how we can fix it’, he didn’t say that, and he didn’t allow for other exigencies, like maybe hyperthyroidism. That can cause a similar kind of heart condition and is treatable and reversible.

Actually that’s exactly what happened next. He ordered a thyroid panel to see how my thyroid was doing (I was having other symptoms like tremors which are typical for hyperthyroidism). On the next visit to my doctor (we’ll call him Dr. X), he entered the examination room with the test results and before saying a word slashed his hand across his neck in the cut throat sign. I wasn’t sure what that meant (still not sure) but it didn’t fill me with confidence, it didn’t give me the feeling that my doctor and I were in this together and we were going to see it through. In fact, the very next thing that happened was a referral to an endocrinologist, who would take over the thyroid portion of my treatment.

This is the part of the story where I was completely neglected by Dr. X. The endocrinologist he referred me to wouldn’t accept my insurance and the next 3 referrals over the course of 6 weeks wouldn’t take my insurance either. What kind of a doctor’s office would set you up with a 4 non-valid specialist referrals and take 6 weeks to do it? My doctor’s office, that’s who.

By the time I managed to get an actual appointment with an actual endocrinologist my symptoms had increased alot, I was flat on my back. I could barely walk around. Going to the grocery store was an ordeal. Driving my car to the appointment in the Medical Center was a real challenge, but I knew I had to do it. The endocrinologist saw me, tested, diagnosed and prescribed me and I got my Methimazole. Things slowly started getting better.

Around the same time I came down with a case of shingles. Holy shit. They called it ‘hell fire’ in the old Viking tongue and it is descriptive. This is the chicken pox virus, which if you ever had it as a kid, lies dormant in your nerves. A weak immune system and stress can activate it. I had been lying in bed all day every day for a couple of weeks. Home hospital, I called it. Knowing that the raging torrent of hormones coming from my thyroid could permanently damage my heart, if it wasn’t controlled, and it wasn’t being controlled, was plenty stressful. Feeling helpless and abandoned by my medical provider didn’t help alot either.

The shingles knocked me on my butt, even after the Gabapentin (one of my favorite drug names so far). Imagine having an iron cage on your shoulders and neck with spikes inside. That’s pretty close. Not only is the pain debilitating but the weight of that thing actually bent me over. I’ll blame that on Doctor X too. There’s no reason to delay treatment, especially when the symptoms are becoming so dire that you’re bedridden, no reason at all except for being uncaring, out of touch and focused on the test/diagnose and prescribe model of health care.

Doctor X told me (and it may have been his attempt to change the subject in a conversation where I was basically telling him my all about it) that if you needed a neurologist it might take six to eight months. What?! The poor guy would be half dead by then, if not completely dead. That’s when I realized that the doctors work for the insurance companies, not for the patient. That’s when I realized that our health care system is completely broken.

How to fix it? I really don’t have a clue. Number 1 in healthcare costs but 37th in health care quality. Maybe we could start by bringing some humanity into the system. How do we do that? I really don’t have a clue.

Americans spend 3.8 trillion dollars a year on healthcare. Somebody’s making money. Actually a whole lot of people are making money. The truth of it is a whole lot of people are making a whole lot of money. They’re fine with that. Actually I’d be fine with that too if they were doing a good job. They’re not.

I’m trying to start a revolution (as usual). Give the people back their healthcare! HEALTH CARE. Care as in when you CARE, you have empathy, you take care, you help and assist, you check in and make sure the patient is doing alright. This has always been a basic human right, just like food and shelter and clean water. When it becomes a business (like everything else in this country) it becomes . . . well, a business; your health care is bought and sold to the lowest bidder.

In large part due to my acupuncturist, Dr. Tan and her bi-weekly consultations, where she listens to my symptoms and makes adjustments with lifestyle and dietary suggestions, my condition is improving steadily. Her acupuncture treatments consist of 2 needles in my wrists, 2 or 3 needles around my knees and a bunch of needles in my feet. It feels like it has strengthened my body’s ability to heal itself (the inner doctor). It’s also helped restore the balance within my body, including my thyroid; it’s helped beat back the shingles. I feel relaxed when I go to see her and I feel rejuvenated when I leave. The scent of smouldering mugwort, which she also uses as part of the therapy, lingers with me most of the day.

I’m on an upward trajectory. I feel stronger every day. Balancing the allopathic medicine (Doctor X) with the Chinese medicine (Dr. Tan) seems to be a good combination. Of course anything that’s not AMA certified is called - ‘complementary medicine’, A swipe? An intentional put down? Control the definitions, control the conversation? I’m not sure. Maybe we can just agree that there are many ways of healing. That would be healing.

So that’s my story. If you’ve had an experience with American health care that you’d like to share, please comment below. Maybe your experience was better than mine but maybe it was worse, please share. If you think I’m full of it, please share that too.

Wishing you good health and a smooth ride.