Chronic Diva

The necessity for a more integrated medical approach.

Let’s face it, everywhere you turn you are blasted with information about how important it is to treat your body, mind and soul. While it may have begun as something of a New Age thing, or maybe something that only those Yogi’s did, has quickly integrated itself within our mainstream society, philosophy and medicine. These non-medicinal reaches extending into our surgical units, where recent research has been done regarding the use of aromatherapy to combat nausea after surgery. The reason I bring this up is that every day we are being introduced to more and more reasons why maybe, we should step back and take a look at the bigger picture of our body and why we should perhaps not reach for this or that pill. But when we go to the doctor seeking help, we are often treated like a car on a conveyer belt and directed to this specialist or that specialist. While this is fine in some respects, for many of us with chronic issues, it’s a nightmare. Especially when you have 7-8 specialists and they don’t communicate with one another. This needs to change.

I’m not rebuking Western medicine here, nor saying that we need a complete upheaval of our current medical care. In fact, I’m only suggesting one, small change. Talking to one another. This has been the subject of other posts as well because, in an age where we literally have the power to talk to someone at our fingertips, I don’t understand why doctors can’t talk about their patients. And some do. Some are very involved in how they treat a person, while others remain quite apart from it, leaving it to the patient to relay messages and information that might be muddled before it gets to the doctor’s ear. We’ve all played telephone, right? How does a doctor expect a patient to relay information to the next doctor in the same, exact form in which it was received? What if the doctor has questions about what was advised to the patient? Where is the debate about treatment when the patient has no medical background? But sadly, it hardly ever gets to that point. You go to the neurologist and he gives you medicine for problem A. You go to the gastroenterologist and he gives you medicine for problem B. You go to the Rheumatologist and he gives you medicine for problem C. You go to pain management and he gives you medicine for problem D. But, what if problems A, B, C and D are all interconnected? What if it’s not the medicine that you need at all but someone to connect the dots and take stock of the whole you?

Integrative Medicine: A form of medical treatment that combines practices and treatments from alternative medicine with conventional medicine. There is an emphasis on the “whole person,” and focuses on wellness and overall health, rather than only treating the disease.  

My favourite part of that whole definition, besides “whole person,” is “rather than only treating the disease.” We’ve become, in my opinion, rather over-zealous in the treatment of disease and the use of pharmaceuticals and I think this has been our greatest downfall in our application of conventional medicine. Once upon a time, to become a doctor was as sacred a calling as becoming a priest. It was generations of fathers (as a male-dominated field) who had sons, who were followed this path of healing. “First, do no harm,” was an oath breathed out upon the lips of these doctors with reverence. A reverence that extended to the profession, the body that they would be treating and the manner in which they would be treating them. I’m not saying that there weren’t bad doctors in the past, what I am saying is that the approach they took for the treatment of the body was more holistic than what we have now. There was a relationship between the doctor and the patient that you cannot cultivate in the 15 minutes you may have to speak with a patient now. There was an emphasis on the treatment of the whole person, which meant taking into account what they ate and what they did for a living and what they did in their leisure time that you may never know about a patient now. The prescription of medicine was given with far greater care and with an honouring of how these medicines might affect the rest of the body. Western medicine has never been as holistic as Eastern medicine, however, we are looking towards pharmaceuticals to solve all of our ailments, without looking far closer to home first. And to be fair, it’s not just physicians or pharmaceuticals, it’s the patients too who want these “quick fixes,” without regards to how much of a chemical cocktail they might be putting into their body. I’m one of them. We all want to feel better. And we all want to feel better right now. But at what cost?

My PSA: I’m not pushing the No Medicine/Totally Holistic philosophy. I fall somewhere in the happy medium. And I greatly understand the need for medicine. It saves lives. No doubt in my mind. What my message is here, is balance and respect for both the pharmaceuticals and for your body. I respect people’s decision regarding their treatment. This is my decision.

The cost equates to side-effects from medications that begin to impact your body and where you develop symptoms and other (possibly) long-term problems from these medications, which end up requiring more medications. It’s a vicious cycle and one that I’m half-convinced that pharmaceuticals count on to keep you as a patient. Think about the long-term revenue that both doctors and pharmaceuticals earn from those of us with chronic problems that have no cure? We’re cash-cows. We’re the Golden Ticket. Keep us functioning; keep our symptoms managed and you have steady millions of patients who have to be prescribed countless pills, including pain medications and who will never get better. Is that not the perfect plan? But what about those of us who aren’t content with managing symptoms? What if we dream of something better? What if we dream of something more than “conveyer belt medicine,” where you’re rolled through in 15 minutes and written a prescription by a specialist who doesn’t care about x and y problems and only cares about z. Our body, our future; we need to advocate for ourselves this balance until our medical community is once again reminded of its roots.