Posted on 01/07/2007 7:32:51 AM PST by shrinkermd
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
(Excerpt) Read more at nytimes.com ...
I'm in good health and exercise on a regular basis. Maybe I should see a shrink.
--the lawyer-driven and lawyer-dominated society--
Q: What do you call someone who got "D"s all the way through medical school?
A: DOCTOR.
This blog site follows these issues and I highly recommend it for anyone that follows the health care industry:
http://hcrenewal.blogspot.com/
What were your grades in medical school?
I still don't see a pill for my malady, Egregious General Anxiety Disorder Syndrome (EGADS). I'll "feel" much better when they "create" one.
Problems? Yes. Diseases? No.
If Martians came to this country, they'd wonder how we survived this long.
You're right.
Ban all direct marketing of prescription drugs. I stopped watching television pretty much because there is a drug for everything normal in life.
A Nation of Victims.
I understand the article, and while it brings up good points, that illnesses trend and become faddish. That meds are overused and some things are over diagnosed. I do disagree to an extent.
We do NOT know all there is to know about the human body, brain and illnesses. It's like saying we've reached the edge of the earth where the horizon drops off, so nothing new is out there.
Maybe it's because I'm a geezerette, but I think it's wonderful that things that went untreated, that made folks lives a living hell, now have diagnosis and root causes.
Hell, it wasn't that long ago that we thought ulcers were from stress, now we know they're caused by a bacteria. GERD wasn't treated, now we know that untreated, it's a precursor to cancer.
Mental illnesses, which for so long had the 'it's all in your head' attitude, now daily are having clinical data show up supporting actual brain deformities, specific chemical imbalances, genetic links etc. Folks that were seen as hopeless now have shots at actual lives.
I'd rather live now, in a time where people are looking for answers, than in my mother's wonderful day when you were told to think happy thoughts if depressed (and the suicide STILL happened) or 'it's all in your head' for the relative with migranes, or 'you're possessed' for my cousin with epelpsy.
I remember that when I roll my eyes at the upteen commericals on TV. Now is way better than the snake pit days.....
"Hell, it wasn't that long ago that we thought ulcers were from stress, now we know they're caused by a bacteria.
Some are, some aren't. It is important to know what is causing them in a particular case.
Did you notice when they were advertising the same drug for "social anxiety," postpartum depression, post-traumatic stress disorder, and attention-deficit? That was funny.
(If I had any of those, I'd probably treat them with cheap wine and pretzels :-).
I think you meant to say "snake oil" days.
I see they have lowered the goalposts for serum cholesterol again down to 100 mcg/Dl.
This should triple statin sales, and fund more suppertime TV advertising for Lipitor™ etc.
I am conviced that someday there will be a terrible reckoning concerning these drugs, and the studies that created this industry, beginning with the now-ancient Helsinki Study.
Whether one believes that the metabolic pathways chart was divinely designed, or designed by a billion years of evolution, there are REASONS for synthesizing cholesterol.
Given disruption of liver enzymes such as transaminases in some people, together with a host of other side effects like peripheral neuropathy, there had damned well BETTER be an overriding reason for this avalance of prescriptions besides absurd prices for quite simple compounds.
Otherwise the future will provide something a lot worse than the Dalcon Shield, Thalidomide, and the Schiley heart valve, and the lawyers will have a feast.
I take them. But under protest, because there is something about this whole episode that is intuitively disquieting to me.
It used to be that one of the treatments for insanity was to lower the person into a pit of snakes....
The belief being that if it would scare a sane person crazy, it would scare a crazy person sane. What it did do was show up the fakes. The poor, truly insane person was either oblivious, or scared deeper into madness.
That is where the term snake pit came from.
Good points, najida. As frustrated as I've been with my own health issues, it's *really* nice to have pain pills that don't make me loopy. My son gets one "poke" every three days for his diabetes rather than 5-6 pokes a day. (he has a pump.) When you look back just 30 years, home care for diabetes was horrible.
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