Welcome to Self Powered Healing. I’m Barbara McNeely, the creator of Self Powered Healing, and this month, November, I’m doing something quite different. Perhaps you’ve heard of this thing called National Podcast Post Month, or maybe you haven’t, but it happens every November, and podcasters commit to publishing 30 episodes within the month of November. I hope you enjoy!
Welcome to episode one of national podcast post month. Today I’m going to be talking about our health care system, which in reality is a sick care system and it was designed to be that way. Just listen in and I’ll explain it to you.
Does this sound familiar to you? You go to the doctor with a problem and you walk out with no resolution. He can’t help you because he can’t determine what is really wrong. They’re likely to tell you a diagnosis, or at least write one in your chart, and possibly, likely even, to give you a prescription. Yet, you know they haven’t really understood or helped you.
The reality is, most of the time, doctors have a decision tree that they use in order to determine what might be your problem. You know the decision tree. You start off with the basic first question, and then if it’s yes, you go this way, and if it’s no, you go the other way, and eventually you’ll come to a diagnosis.
For an example, you might go in with some symptoms like a stuffy nose, a headache, and you just feel not good. I mean, you might have a cough even. And it could be a number of things. It could be a cold or an allergy or the flu or even COVID. And the decision tree will be used to help them determine what is wrong with you. Or else they will need to run some tests. It’s a process that works well for the common acute conditions like a cold or the flu or even COVID.
But what happens when you fall off their decision tree? Well, I can tell you because it happens to me a lot. My husband says I even play stump the doctor, not intentionally, it’s just how things work out. Too often, though, I’ve had to go out and research and resolve my own issues.
The decision tree works really well for acute illness, but not for chronic conditions, such as migraines, fatigue, chronic pain, and such. Too often, when they can’t make a good diagnosis, They may not have a good answer. A drug for every diagnosis seems to be their mantra.
In reality, after drugs, surgery, and testing, doctors don’t have much else in their toolbox to offer anymore. Even if they know that food and lifestyle changes could help, they aren’t really able to help give you advice on that.
I actually reached the conclusion that we don’t really have a health care system. Instead, we have a system that is a sick care system. One that can only help relieve symptoms of an illness, but not really help you get to be healthy again. Well, imagine my shock when I learned that our system was actually designed as a sick care system.
Before I continue, I do want to make one thing clear. If you have a heart attack, or if you break your arm or leg, or if you’re in an accident or in a Our health care system is where you want to be, because they can treat that and treat it well. We have an excellent system for acute care, but too often it falls short for chronic conditions.
Many chronic conditions such as high blood pressure, diabetes, arthritis, and others, many more, are related to chronic stress and inflammation. That includes the stress we feel in our fast paced world and the oxidative stress resulting from poor food choices, toxins in our food, and toxins in our modern environment.
Today’s doctor, though, is primarily trained in prescribing drugs. In fact, one thing I’ve learned recently is that pharmaceutical companies are there in medical schools training doctors how to prescribe drugs. Furthermore, Big Pharma, the drug companies, fund the FDA, about 50%. And drug companies are also the biggest advertiser by far. In fact, they spend billions every year on advertising. Which means they’re basically funding the media. So the media’s not going to be reporting anything against Big Pharma because that would be biting the hand that feeds you basically.
A doctor can manage your prescription by prescribing drugs for your high blood pressure or your digestive issues or whatever your condition might be or even for all of the stress you are feeling. But he has no idea there are better ways to manage stress and much better ways than drugs. Your doctor may or may not be aware that your diet plays a role, but either way, nutrition is not a part of the focus of modern medical training.
Medical school only offers about three or four total hours of training in nutrition. I’m not talking about a three hour course like you took in college. It’s a total of three or four hours.
As it turns out, keeping patients healthy is not a focus of modern medical training. And that is why I say that our current health care system is, in reality, a sick care system. One of the most shocking things I’ve learned in the past several years is that we actually do have a sick care system and it was designed to be that way.
I’m going to be honest with you here. I did not want to believe that this could be true. But I’ve done the research and can provide sources for what I’m about to tell you. It all started in the early 1900s. John Rockefeller and the Carnegie Institute commissioned Abraham Flexner to study the medical schools in our country and in Canada.
At that time, they were not standardized. They had sprouted up across the country without any real standard for medical training, from one school to the next. So Abraham Flexner produced a report, it was a long report, titled “Medical Education in the United States and Canada.” It was a report to the Carnegie Foundation for the Advancement of Teaching. And that report came out in 1910 and became the defining document for medical schools going forward.
There is a Wikipedia page solely devoted to the Flexner Report that has a lot of information in it. In there, it talks about the impact on the role of the physician. It says,
“The vision for medical education described in the Flexner Report narrowed medical schools interest to disease and not on the system of health care or society’s health beyond disease. Preventive medicine and population health were not considered a responsibility of physicians, bifurcating health into two separate fields, scientific medicine and public health.”
And there you have it, our sick care system as it was designed.
Well, who has responsibility for preventive health? Who has responsibility for preventing medicine and population health? I don’t know that they have an organization set up for that, and I honestly think it’s up to each of us to be responsible for our own health.
Furthermore, the Flexner Report deemed any treatments not based upon modern scientific research as being invalid. In the Wikipedia article, it states,
“Flexner clearly doubted the scientific validity of all forms of medicine, other than that based on scientific research. Deeming any approach to medicine that did not advocate the use of treatments such as vaccines to prevent and cure illness is tantamount to quackery and charlatanism.”
So that was the beginning of the attempt to discredit any type of treatment that Flexner and the Carnegie Foundation deemed as quackery. And that is why we have the term today of alternative medicine, and it includes everything from herbal medicine to traditional Chinese medicine, to acupuncture, to chiropractic, and more. And these were all things that have been around for thousands of years and have served humans well.
I also found a report from Thomas Duffy. Reporting in 2011 on the 100 years after the Flexner Report was published. He was a medical doctor at Yale School of Medicine in Connecticut. And this is how he described the report.
“The Flexner Report of 1910 transformed the nature and process of medical education in America, with the resulting elimination of proprietary schools and the establishment of the biomedical model as the gold standard of medical training. This transformation occurred in the aftermath of the report, which embraced scientific knowledge and its advancements as the defining ethos of a modern physician.”
So the report had a good intent and there was definitely a logical reason to have a standardized medical training across the country, but at the same time, it changed the relationship between the doctor and the patient.
Duffy continued.
“Review of medical care in the last century documents that the trust and respect that were extended to the profession years ago have been substantially eroded. There’s been a fall from grace for our vaunted profession.”
Duffy even suggested that the Flexner Report caused medical education to focus more on the science and less on the patient. He said, “The profession’s infatuation with the hyper rational world of German medicine created an excellence in science that was not balanced by a comparable excellence in clinical care.”
In 1903, Thomas Edison wrote,
“The doctor of the future will give no medicine, but will instruct his patient in the care of the human frame, in diet, and in the cause and prevention of disease.”
Clearly Flexner did not talk with Edison.
We are not there. We are not even close. And if only we could have taken that road. Can you imagine what this world would be like if Thomas Edison had prevailed?
Instead, we’re to the point where medications, drugs actually, are prescribed for just about anything you go to the doctor for. And we have so many patients that expect a prescription. For whatever they come in for.
Health, though, is our natural state. If you feed your body well and take care of it, it knows how to heal and it knows how to keep you healthy.
There once was a time when going to the doctor didn’t always mean a prescription. It was also a time when getting older didn’t mean that we took more and more prescription drugs. A time when getting old didn’t mean you were in pain, or frail, or sick.
We are far from there.
How, then, can we change things?
Well, it’s a big train and it will take a lot to turn it around.
Socrates said,
“The secret of change is to focus all of your energy not on fighting the old, but on building the new.”
I think of it as like crowding out the old. It’s the best way to change what you eat. So maybe it can work here as well. It starts with each of us. We can start taking charge of our health by paying more attention to what we need to do to keep ourselves healthy and keep out of that broken sick care system.
Or if we do have to see a doctor, asking more questions. Is this drug really necessary? Are there alternatives? Are there food or lifestyle changes that I could make instead?
That’s really, what self powered healing is about. We can do things to heal, but we can also do things that keep us from getting sick in the first place.
Margaret Mead said,
“A small group of thoughtful people could change the world. Indeed, it’s the only thing that ever has.”
So maybe we all start today with ourselves and our family working on becoming self powered healers.
Thanks for listening today. If you have any comments on this episode or on the whole NaPodPoMo concept in general, you can visit this page to leave comments. selfpoweredhealing.com/november2024. You can also find a listing and link for all November’s episodes on that same page selfpoweredhealing.com/november2024. You may want to save this link as, going forward, all the episodes in November will be published there. If you like, you can subscribe there to keep up-to-date!
By the way, Self Powered Healing is still looking for interviews with people who are want to share a story of healing. Do you have a healing story? I would love to hear about it and see if maybe you could share it on our show. So if you’re interested in sharing, then visit selfpoweredhealing.com/share to schedule a chat.
You aren’t committing at this point, you’re just having a chat with me to see what your story’s about it will be confidential unless or until you decide you want to share. And if you get there and there’s not a convenient time for you send me a message because we’ll always find a time.
And remember this always:
You are a magnificent being with powerful innate healing abilities!
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