Medicine is Asking All the Wrong Questions

Medicine is asking all the wrong questions, and we’ve been programmed to follow along and ask those same wrong questions when it comes to our health. The whole situation reminds me of a scene from Moneyball where Johan Hill’s character Peter Brand is explaining what’s wrong with the way baseball players are being managed and selected to Brad Pitt’s character Billy Beane (see below for video).

A short recap of what is said if you don’t want to watch the video above:

“There is an epidemic failure within the game to understand what is really happening and this leads people who run major league baseball teams to misjudge their players and mismanage their teams…Baseball thinking is medieval, they are asking all the wrong questions and if I say it to anybody I’m ostracized. I’m a rebel, so that’s why I’m cagey about this with you, that’s why I respect you Mr. Beane and if you want full disclosure, I think it’s a good thing you got Damon off of your payroll. I think it opens up all kinds of interesting possibilities.”

This so wonderfully translates to medicine right now.

– There IS an epidemic failure within the medical industry to understand what is really happening.
– Patients ARE being mismanaged.
– A lot of the thinking behind some of the ways we need to treat disease ARE medieval.

The goal of standard medical therapies is to manage symptoms. But the goal of all doctors should be to eliminate underlying dysfunctions and restore health so the body can manage itself.

“If I had an hour to solve a problem and my life depended on it, I would use the first 55 minutes determining the proper question to ask, for once I know the proper question, I could solve the problem in less than five minutes.”

Albert Einstein

So what are these wrong questions:

• What is the diagnosis?
• How do we treat a patient with {insert diagnosis}?
• How do we manage the symptoms of {insert diagnosis}?
• How can we find ways to detect a disease earlier?

What we SHOULD be asking:

• What are the exact causes of a patient’s unhealthy state?
• How can we best restore health of the body, mind and spirit?
• What treatments and medicines are best for the individual patient (not the disease)?
• How can we prevent disease from ever happening?

We need to stop looking at the disease all the while spending billions looking for the magic pill that will solve everything, and start looking at the person who has the disease. Each of us is so unique, and our current state of health or disease is also just as unique and so multi-faceted that we require a truly comprehensive and personalized solution. In this manner, we can also take real preventive measures, locate dysfunctions at their source and correct them before they every manifest.

And yes, these questions normally do get me ostracized with many in the medical community, but sometimes it takes a fresh outsider’s perspective to ask these questions and make real change happen.