“Health”care
Our current healthcare model is failing to keep people healthy. This should not seem like a bold claim and might be obvious. All we need to do is look around us. We can see that Americans are getting more overweight, more stressed, more sedentary, more infertility and unhealthier. Our reliance on convenience has improved some aspects of our life but hindered others. Bedtime scrolling has created more sleeping problems and a loss of connection between partners and spouses. Remote work has decreased our activity level and strained our eyes. The cost of groceries has pushed many of us into aisles of the store that offer little value in nutrition. We eat not knowing exactly what we are eating and put blind trust into three letter agencies that they will “make sure” these additives, GMOs and artificial ingredients won’t harm us. Yet here we are a generation of people suffering from more chronic disease burden than the previous. It has been said that this is the first younger generation that has a shorter life expectancy than their parents since America was formed. I am not sure if that is true and how it was measured but it seems it could be true.
How do we get back to the basic and overcome this current crisis? The answer is simple in one sense but a mountain to climb in another. From one perspective, we clinicians can push back against some of the trends that are more obviously harming our patients. We can personalize care in the sphere of influences we have. We can counsel on nutrition, integrative different forms of care, use supplements and medications, develop exercise programs, coach our patients to achieve greater goals physically and emotionally. We can support causes that will improve transparency in how drug and other companies lobby and ask questions like: how a board member of a drug company can be a powerful voice in a governmental agency? Seems like a conflict of interest but it has been going on for a long time and no one seems to care. We can support drug advertisement restrictions, which may limit the excessive cost of many medications that can improve health outcomes.
As much as I would love to be positive about a great wave of impact rushing over our current healthcare model, I am a realistic individual. Providers like myself feel burdened and burned out trying to survive in the current healthcare landscape of “red tape”, click box, pack the schedule full, rushing from patient to patient all for the insurance to direct the care. For now, it seems nothing will change on a large scale. However, there is a large movement of providers who are directly impacting their patients to individualize care and find low cost, more accessible, more affordable, and more efficient care.
I wanted to join this movement so I can positively impact the patients and community that I live and serve in. This is one reason I started Red Letter DPC. My hope is that we can be a source of hope and health for years to come.
