Doctors: Are You Making A Profit From Illness Or Are You Reducing the Incidence of It?
Don’t be put off. You need to re-prioritize your human values and practice
The priorities of medical providers in this country are varied, but collectively do not seem to line up with any Oath, much less, the Hippocratic one.
Many years ago, students in my nursing school were asked, “What kind of nurse do you want to be?” Years later, I understand that question to be a little off the mark.
The real question that medical professionals need to ask themselves is “What kind of a human being do I want to be?”
Amid the global pursuit for influence, wealth, and control, healthcare remains a permanent focus in news, politics, and debate. This is because every person on the planet needs healthcare to sustain and foster their lives, and because we all want to stay alive and be well.
Healthcare providers make momentary, daily, and career-long decisions for their personal practise, the progression of their profession, their personal financial portfolios, and for the communities and populations that they serve.
Unfortunately, it is often the latter, communities and patient populations of all kinds, that appear to be dead last priority in today’s business world, a place where “healthcare” has one of the largest seats at the table. The rampant occurrence of subpar care that is being “delivered” in every medical specialty from primary care (especially) to the emergency room is at an all-time, treacherous high.
The Code Blue in Healthcare
Recognizing the source of the death of true care
What has happened to traditional, thorough, effective, compassionate healthcare in our country?
The root of all prescribed evil, the love of money, now grossly outweighs genuine healthcare, empathy and compassion among an enormous number of providers and practises.
Too many doctors entering medicine initially, purposely, sell out to BigPharma and insurance companies for direct, immediate profit, choosing to sleep with the enemy outright. (Most often, this fact is linked to generational privilege, patient bias and misdirected intentions for profit, rather than community service.)
Other providers linger in the beginning of, or even throughout, their career, cautiously observing BigPharma’s and their associates’ claims and tactics from a distance. Many eventually either bend to the deceptive enticements or remain in limbo, at best, regarding whether or not to make a stand against the obvious clinical dangers and inappropriate uses of medications/procedures that BigPharma enthusiastically promotes for immoral profit.
Medical providers of all specialties concede to blatantly accept kickbacks for many medications and procedures, which are documented and easily researchable as dangerous and/or unnecessary at best, and are subsequently then not only recommended, but pushed, by physicians and other professionals to their patients.
In contrast, simple and natural alternatives to medical and pharmaceutical interventions are purported on medical practise websites as a hoax and insensible for patients to consider and pursue. Here is an article offering a reputable provider’s expertise on the same subject.
Here is a rather confusing and contradicting article on cancer risk and sugar consumption. Reading it in its entirety only confirmed my belief that high sugar intake of all kinds increases the risk of cancer, a truth not intended to be the message of the first article. Here is a more grounded article on the subject.
Doctors can re-evaluate their original personal goals, priorities, and focus at any time in their lives or careers. Doctors should realize that they are at the helm of a mostly sunken ship and that they are also the vessel for which the avarice that eliminates global wellbeing either flows through or is adamantly halted. One action results in death and illness, the other in true patient advocacy and care.
Not many medical professionals are willing to heed the national and global cries of suffering patients over the sound of exorbitant profit, but those who are willing to take a personal moral inventory (asking who is benefiting most from your “delivery of healthcare” and are you in the medical field to pursue health and wellness, or profit?) create a solid start for medicine to begin to restore health to the masses. This transition will occur only if true goodwill and compassion remain in hearts of providers and is is chosen over conformity to immoral profit.
Facing Your Position On Healthcare “Cost-effectiveness” Gains
The search for medical conscience: some questions to ponder
Are you a medical provider who knowingly advises your patients to implement standards of care for chronic and acute conditions that subtly, or blatantly, result only in the prolonged need for treatment and/or subvert a root cause of symptoms?
Are you willing to openly acknowledge your awareness of, and any personal involvement in, (even passive) the strategic and exorbitant financial benefits derived from ties and covenants with pharmaceutical companies, local for-profit hospitals, community projects and groups, health insurance monopolies, and investing entities? The true goal of these corporations is not patient health and wellness, but is profit in the trillions made from inadvertently supporting prolonged illness.
Do you engage in promoting medications or treatment modalities that not only hinder a patient’s health, but work against the very diagnosis that the medication or treatment is purported to help or correct?
If so, you certainly understand the far-reaching implications of health subversiveness and the result of such subtle, but very present, foundations of pervasive avarice in much of the healthcare field. You are also keenly aware of the subsequent global detriment created by even the passive negligence of medical providers to acknowledge and address this decades-old phenom.
Do any of these greed-oriented practises bother you?
If so, are you willing to make the sacrifices necessary to take a stand for patients’ welfare? If not, it is imperative you stop “treating” patients altogether. Health is not what you are offering patients. Make your millions in a way that does not cause direct or indirect harm to human life.
Finally, what is “best-practise” to you? Is it patient-oriented? Or is it profit oriented? Is it industry-benefit oriented?
A Shift In The Focus of Basic Healthcare Protocol In America
The true source of pervasive national and global illness
It is evident that a devastating theme in today’s American healthcare system has become the norm. This theme is the idea that healthcare providers shift from searching for and treating the origin of symptoms through research, diagnostics, and a commitment to absolute patient wellness to one where providers treat symptoms only, ignoring the origin of symptoms, thus eliminating the cost of (expensive and interdisciplinary) diagnostics.
This has resulted in widespread, prolonged adverse conditions including chronic patient illness and debilitations.
Many care plans, prescriptions, and vague, misleading or completely absent medical instructions in all specialties actually work to keep people ill, deter diagnostics, and defer symptoms to patient fault, neglect, or ignorance. Many doctors’ lack of commitment and concern for patient teaching and self-advocacy has trickled down to staff and have been lost as priorities in every specialty.
Patients have been left to do their own research, those who can, and even left to determine their own common sense treatment plans, which they have to fight to have implemented and even validated.
Holistic, unconventional, or just plain cheap alternatives to medications and treatments are not only not traditionally introduced as effective healthcare options to patients by many doctors, but are strongly discouraged by providers when a patient presents a non-pharmaceutical route to care, or an inexpensive medication or supplement known to effectively treat their condition.
Advocating for cheaper healthcare alternatives or for alternative methods of treatment would not benefit BigPharma and so would not benefit the MD associated with BigPharma.
These financially based, intentional practises dictated by healthcare moguls are solely to systematically reduce national and community healthcare spending, which obviously drastically increases profits at the expense of patients’ health and lives.
Unfortunately, these decisions do not stem from new ideals in American healthcare, but nevertheless, are now the dominant ones.
Addressing symptomatic origin with appropriate and adequate diagnostics and treatment would indeed cost American insurance companies and governmental/city indigent care programs trillions of dollars. This funding is already appropriated on paper for these medical services by government, donors, and city funding. However, much of that money is re-directed through profiteering for industry gain and is shamelessly pocketed by mogul entities, while their own patient populations remain ill and dying due to a lack of diagnostics and effective care, or are unable to pay for any ordered diagnostics due to the inflated, exorbitant costs of these services.
Insurance companies have long purported that spending adequate (or any) monies (sourced, by the way, from premiums for health coverage paid for by patients) on preventive and acute treatment and diagnostics for patients is not cost-effective. This is a ridiculously negligent and detrimental attitude toward society.
Money spent to preserve health and prevent illness unequivocally supports long term, stable profit, because the cost to treat neglected, acute, and chronic illness is much larger than preventative healthcare costs and is continually spent over time as patient conditions not treated, or under treated, progressively worsen. This requires much more care and cost in the long run.
Or, patients are just left to die, which preserves cost, entirely.
This is the malignant resolve that much of American healthcare has fostered instead of providing real and supportive healthcare to its patient populations.
The real problem is that lives no longer matter to most healthcare entities, nor unfortunately to many medical providers, and are no longer the focus in big or small decision-making in most healthcare arenas.
One futile result of the refusal to treat the root cause of millions of patients’ symptoms is then the subsequent, exorbitant emergency room and hospitalization costs, occurring from a higher severity of illness reported and increased ER visits (stemming from lack of adequate acute care and preventative care.) The thought process behind this phenom does not contain a shred of common sense, unless you understand how national and global healthcare entities think: profit over humanity.
Due to ER overcrowding caused by lack of and in-adequate and comprehensive primary care, (and coinciding lack of insurance coverage), many patients in America, specifically Texas, cannot enter an emergency room and trust that their heart attack, stroke, septic infection, or other medical emergency will be treated at all. This contrasts basic medical care and emergency room providers’ responsibilities. Personally, I have had several family members and family friends whose emergencies were ignored by ER physicians and were declined to be treated in not one, but several hospitals here in Austin, Texas. One of them, a family friend, died from infection and subsequent organ failure in her home, because of such negligence. She was 22 years old.
Over the years profiteers have not only evolved in their deceptive methods to make immediate financial gain, but also have benefited from no checks and balances for their global destructive behaviour which continues to cause the illness and death of millions. No one resists them, even if there is a desire to, due to their enormous influence and the manipulative/dangerous business tactics they employ.
Most medical decisions made in patient care today reek of profit preservation, not the preservation of life and health.
Strayed Priorities and Bias Play a Major Part In the Adverse or Negligent Delivery of Healthcare
Medicine’s true and only mission is to heal.
The priorities of medical providers in this country are varied, but collectively do not seem to line up with any oath, much less the Hippocratic one.
It is interesting, in this context, to note the removal of both the original and the contemporary versions of the Hippocratic Oath from the future graduating medical community beginning in the year 2000. The reasoning? Medical students now claim to not be able to carry out such oaths in today’s modern world, which is as frightening as it is astounding.
This omission appears to help foster a lack of foundational responsibility, accountability, and compassion as a provider, especially in America.
Medical providers of all disciplines are meant to educate, advocate for, and (by example, with compassion) shine a light to better health for patients. In no way, should healthcare now, or have ever been about profit, and certainly not at the expense of human health and life.
Biases in poverty, race, gender, sex, culture, and other patient groups in healthcare result in a decrease in prescribed diagnostics, treatment, and care in those populations and cause irreversible detriment to the lives and future of whole communities.
In the past, effectual healthcare was also delivered through routine doctor house calls, much of which were made all hours of the night. This service embodied a true calling and commitment to life and community health. Compassion for humanity used to be the root cause for one to enter the healthcare field, not the current, sordid pursuit of intricate influential relationships that have nothing to do with healthcare, and the associated wealth offered behind those relationships.
The current, pervasive methodology of profit-based “cost-effective” measures in American healthcare (which solely focus on institutional, administrative, and individual gain) can only be treated with a sound acknowledgement of the dire need to return to, and positively revamp, the art of making patients well.
When medical providers commit to bettering humanity in lieu of engaging in profiteering, there are measurable outcomes: patients get well, lives are lengthened, families are strengthened, communities thrive, and nations excel.
Providers who focus on teaching and encouraging their patients to critically think about their conditions, seek out effective, holistic options to continued and optimal health, and implement common sense changes in their lives (tactics no longer promoted by or taught in most medical environments) foster a greatly diminished need for medical visits, treatments, medications, and diagnostics.
Subsequently, the ridiculous, gratuitous profit from continued overuse of medications and unnecessary treatments and procedures would shrivel astoundingly.
Unfortunately, some of the most pervasive, patient-detriment practices in the healthcare field are mainstream throughout and are considered neither erroneous nor unethical by the majority of providers. Here a several of these practices: a) neglecting disease prevention as a priority through the lack of effective (or any) teaching tools and appropriate diagnostics. b) disregarding the presence of the glaring gaps in communication between patient and provider. c) tolerating, or even advocating for, the widespread lack of symptom root- search diagnostics.
In Closing
Supreme greed and the irresponsible, unethical belief systems of many healthcare providers concerning the worth of particular patient populations and the perceived right to profit through any measure have allowed and supported unchecked, unscrupulous routes to personal gain.
These are the true disease processes which cost unprecedented loss of life nationally and globally every day.
The medical field can change its course at any time using courage, integrity, and a moral conviction to preserve and better human life.
Physician, how will you heal this?
Do even you have the desire to?
