Last updated on January 8th, 2024 at 10:07 am
…a brief summary of “Much of U.S. Healthcare is broken—How to fix it” by Les Ruthven, Ph.D. 217 pages, 155 references, pub.2023
Physicians and other medically trained professionals are largely trained in the biophysical sciences, which is proper because there are biologically caused diseases. However, the sound research finds that less than 10% of health problems arrive at the door of physicians, psychologists or psychiatrists are due to “real” disease vs. 90% are due to non-organic causes such as the patient’s self-injurious behaviors and other psychosocial causes such as anxiety.
The medically trained and the health insurance industry deal with this conundrum by viewing the majority of health problems as biologically caused diseases which includes all the mental disorders, overweight-obesity, all of the addictions, chronic pain and others.
Moreover, these behavior and other psychosocially caused health problems ignore the patient’s behavior and the medically trained and their partners (e.g., the pharmaceutical industry) prescribe drugs or other biomechanical treatments.
Even real diseases with tissue damage such as cancer, diabetes, heart disease and others have critical behavior and psychosocial health consequences which should be treated not by physicians or other medically trained but by psychologists for example.
However, physicians have been sold by psychiatry and the drug industry that these psychosocial consequences can be effectively treated by physicians with psychiatric drugs despite the absence of any scientific proof to support this self-serving “theory” which results in a great deal of unproven, poor and very costly care.
To achieve improved healthcare at lower cost self-insured health plans will have to limit physicians and other medically trained to what these medical trained professionals have been trained to do, that is, to treat the biological factors operating in many health problems.
For better healthcare health plans must be designed such that the medically trained are authorized to treat the bio physical aspects of health problems and not venture into areas in which their training is inappropriate and inadequate.
Employer self-insured employee health plans can partially fix what is wrong with healthcare by implementing the changes recommended in the short paragraph just above.
Because of their lack of formal training and expertise in certain areas of healthcare physicians are precluded from attempting to diagnose and treat the full range of the behavioral health disorders with drugs, to diagnose and treat ADD and ADHD, treating insomnia and chronic pain with drugs alone, or attempting to treat the largely preventable diseases with drugs alone.
If a physician suspects the patient may have a mental disorder, insomnia, overweight, possible cognitive impairment (Ci), chronic pain and others the patient must be referred to the appropriate carve out for diagnosis and treatment of the patient’s health problems by appropriately trained health professionals.
These changes in the health plan are necessary to insure that behavioral, non-organic, distressing psychosocial and life situation factors of the patient are appropriately assessed and treated by trained health professionals.
