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Prevention or drugs? Is that the question?

In the last few decades doctors send more and more patients to expensive medical examination instead of focusing on prevention.

Possible situation: Your back is hurting you for some time now. You go to a specialist who sends you to CT to see where the catch is. CT shows that you have changes on the spine. Doctor prescribes you drugs against pain in the back. After some time your stomach starts to hurt, so you go to another doctor which sends you to gastroscopy. That specialist finds that your problems are caused by drugs against pain, so he prescribes you drugs against gastric acid. But, those drugs cause dizziness, depression and anxiety. When you go to visit another specialist, according to your symptoms he sends you to an MRI examination. Fortunately, the results show that you don't have a brain tumour or anything similar. After he sees those results your psychiatrist starts to heal your anxiety with additional therapy. In the meantime your heart starts to jump. Now fifth doctor sends you to do the EKG and the new doctor gives you drugs against cardiac arrhythmia. After all those examinations you can feel very lucky. All test shows that you don't have any dangerous disease and thanks to God no cancer. In the meantime your back healed itself.

It is the fact that doctors in the last few decades more and more lean on medical devices and drugs and less on conversation with patients. In too many cases society is not trying to solve the problem of high blood pressure or fat in blood by educating people how to eat properly from early ages or, like in our story, to treat the back by losing weight, walking or exercise regularly. Serious studies show that 30 percent of new drugs offer more benefits than harm. For 30 to 40 percent of drugs we are familiar that they do more damage that they benefit to our health, and more than 25 percent of drugs definitively do more damage than benefit.

Although Americans spend approximately 30 percent more money on healthcare than Cubans, they live only one year longer. This is one more fact that proves that our health and longevity depends on more factors than new drugs, numbers of examinations and modern medical devices. On the contrary, our health and the fact how long we live depend greatly on how much we pay attention to our body. And of course, how much our parents and doctors from our early ages influence us. With better prevention we would have less number of patients which blood vessels plugged by hamburgers, cola and chips, and hearts damaged by lying in front of a television.

On the other hand, people may die exactly because of the modern medicine. As we get older the chance is that we will be more often and we'll need more drugs. But it is not unusual to see people using ten or more drugs every day and four to five drugs only because of one medical condition. More than one million people dies in America every year because of mistakes of conventional medicine, including unnecessary surgical procedure and wounds caused by lying. Around 106.000 people die because of prescribed drugs. Those are just some of the numbers. Add to that the number of not registered cases and number of how many people dies because of reaction to drugs. The real number of medical mistakes is probably 20 times higher. So, how's your back today?

October 16, 2008

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