Posted on 01/03/2007 12:14:13 PM PST by neverdem
For most Americans, the biggest health threat is not avian flu, West Nile or mad cow disease. It’s our health-care system.
You might think this is because doctors make mistakes (we do make mistakes). But you can’t be a victim of medical error if you are not in the system. The larger threat posed by American medicine is that more and more of us are being drawn into the system not because of an epidemic of disease, but because of an epidemic of diagnoses.
Americans live longer than ever, yet more of us are told we are sick.
How can this be? One reason is that we devote more resources to medical care than any other country. Some of this investment is productive, curing disease and alleviating suffering. But it also leads to more diagnoses, a trend that has become an epidemic.
This epidemic is a threat to your health. It has two distinct sources. One is the medicalization of everyday life. Most of us experience physical or emotional sensations we don’t like, and in the past, this was considered a part of life. Increasingly, however, such sensations are considered symptoms of disease. Everyday experiences like insomnia, sadness, twitchy legs and impaired sex drive now become diagnoses: sleep disorder, depression, restless leg syndrome and sexual dysfunction.
Perhaps most worrisome is the medicalization of childhood. If children cough after exercising, they have asthma; if they have trouble reading, they are dyslexic; if they are unhappy, they are depressed; and if they alternate between unhappiness and liveliness, they have bipolar disorder. While these diagnoses may benefit the few with severe symptoms, one has to wonder about the effect on the many whose symptoms are mild, intermittent or transient.
(Excerpt) Read more at nytimes.com ...
Hey!
I can tell you that psoriasis is indeed unpleasant, although not perhaps heartbreaking.
"MITRAL VALVE PROLAPSE (don't have it).....and IBS (don't have it)."
I was just diagnosed with Mitral Valve Prolapse. I had to take a sonogram. It is now four weeks since I took it and no results. When I ask my doctor about it, he says if it was serious I would already have been contacted.
So I was diagnosed with something by a new doctor that my old doctors haven't noticed in 45 years and I am told not to worry.
As for IBS, If it is what I think it is, I think I got a case of it on election night.
That's pretty much my belief.
He died at 103 in the hospital having broken his hip. Caught pnuemonia while in the ward...
I don't remember. Mostly thought it was good sarcasm...
The average person walking into a doctor's office and getting a full checkup, is the same insanity as taking an old car into a hungry mechanics's garage and asking him to check it over and do whatever he thinks the car needs.
Ping
Regards, Ivan
I don't clean house so I have to have a mammogram every year.
How else is Big Pharma going to make a profit and pay for new research too? /s
I was thinking the exact same thing many years ago when the first one went off to school and i saw how the "modern" classroom was arranged. Having the desks facing each other in groups instead of aisles and the area rugs and toys ,activity centers etc. annoyed me as how can a small kid pay attention and work with all these distractions.
ADD was the disease of the month back then.
This style of classroom was also in their parochial schools and the same type of teaching too.
Excellent article. Thanks for posting!
For a good read, go to www.allnurses.com, find the forum and look for a thread called "what was the most ridiculous thing a patient came to the ER for".
It's 80 some pages long - you will not believe that this happens.
IIRC, at the time, the law/regulation required that they not say what it was for. (Dont't ask me!)_
The left medicalizes all our pains while the right criminalizes all our pleasures. Greta Garbo had it right. She just wanted to be left alone.
Back in the late 70s or early 80s, doctors went on strike in California, Israel and one other place I forget (not related!). In each case, the death rate went down.
I don't know how old you are, but as late as the late 50s, early 60s, there were little ads in the back of magazines that offered relief from "the heartbreak of psoriasis." Honest!
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