If You Had a GOOD Doctor

You probably have a compassionate and well-trained personal physician whom you trust to practice good medicine. We all together – the populace needing health care – have “doctors” who practice bad medicine.

The doctors who make “treatment decisions” for us collectively make no attempt to discover the reasons for illness of our system. Practicing good medicine requires treating the cause of illness, not the signs or symptoms. If you have chest pain and the doctor goes directly to doing heart surgery: that is malpractice. Suppose you had an ulcer and not heart disease at all?

Imagine that healthcare is a patient and the symptoms are called rising cost (instead of chest pain) or medical errors (instead of diarrhea). What would you call a doctor who listened to that patient’s complaints and then just reduced payments or put caps on medical negligence awards, in other words he offered answers without finding out WHY costs are going up or WHY people are making mistakes? You would call this medical negligence (malpractice): treating without knowing why the patient is sick. That is what all of us are experiencing from those who tout their simple, sound-byte answers for healthcare.

Whether the sickness is in an individual person or a whole healthcare system, we expect doctors to practice good medicine. That means treating the cause of illness. No one can treat a cause without knowing first what it is. Therefore, those who minister to our healthcare system must first determine – in discussion with us – WHY the system is sick and what we want any new, better system to do.

A good doctor finds out WHY the patient is sick before offering therapy.

System MD

Tweet This Post Buzz This Post Delicious Digg This Post Facebook Stumble This Post