The reality about healthcare.

What’s wrong with US Healthcare, why does it cost so much… and how to fix it!

Aetna’s CEO Mark Bertolini highlights the two big drivers of health care costs in the U.S.

He’s right about a few key things and makes one HUGE error in his discussion, more on that in a moment.

He correctly identified one massive problem with healthcare.

Our healthcare strategy in our country is to wait until there is a major crisis, then do something about it.

Often that something is to go get some medication to help our symptoms.

We do not, as a rule, address what caused the problem because the hard, cold truth is that most often it’s our lifestyle choices over time that caused the crisis.

It takes many, many years for the most common and costly healthcare problems to develop… heart / cardiovascular disease, cancer, autoimmune disorders, diabetes, even arthritis… among many other serious problems.

We wait until we are forced to do something as our body gets to crisis and serious symptoms.

This is clearly not the fault of Medical Doctors or any other health care provider.

At this point, it’s much harder to improve, correct, or even help the symptoms.

Yes, often things can still be done to improve your symptoms or even the condition with conservative care (like Chiropractic for neuro-musculoskeletal problems) and  lifestyle changes…

Most of those things though involve the person who is suffering to make major changes in their life to adopt healthier habits. It would’ve been better to do those things much earlier before a crisis struck.

Prevention is far better than cure, but as a nation we continue down the wrong path for real health.

We think we’re healthy because we don’t have any symptoms – or we think because they’re mild we’re ok… or that because a medication helps the symptoms we’re healthy.

Health is lost for most of us through our daily habits, slowly day by day over years and decades.

This happens to most of us.

Our strategy is to wait until something that has been developing for decades to scream at us to change… we must change this attitude in order to save our health and to have a shot at improving health care in our country.

What Is Health?

“Health is a state of complete physical, mental and social well-being and not merely the absence of disease or infirmity.” World Health Organization

Health is not the absence of symptoms. Health is functioning and performing optimally.

Health is lost in most types of health problems (expensive chronic diseases that are killing and crippling us) many years before we have symptoms.

We have to change this if we really want to fix health care.

The current path is not sustainable (economically and healthwise) and this current path will lead to a lot of suffering.

His second point,

The US takes far too much medicine. 

We consume 80% of all opiate medications worldwide as he stated in the interview.

The US is only 4.3% of the world’s population!

The latest year for which fatality statistics are available is also 2014.

In 2014, 28,000 people died from opioid overdoses, according to the CDC. This is the highest number on record.

More than half of these deaths were linked to prescription opioids.

A recent survey by the National Safety Council revealed that about 99 percent of physicians exceed the recommended 3 day dosage limit (CDC guidelines) for , with a 25% of physicians writing prescriptions for a full month.

“Opioids do not kill pain; they kill people,” said Dr. Donald Teater medical advisor at the National Safety Council. “Doctors are well-intentioned and want to help their patients, but these findings are further proof that we need more education and training if we want to treat pain most effectively.” – cited from the previous link.

“The majority of … these misused prescription opioids are coming from legally written prescriptions,” says the US Surgeon General Murthy.

Americans consume approximately 99% of one specific narcotic medication, hydrocodone.

The Drug Enforcement Agency (DEA) reclassified hydrocodone from a schedule III to a schedule II drug in 2014, because of its potentially very high risk for misuse and abuse. This re-classification has reduced our consumption of this one particular narcotic.

71% of doctors prescribe narcotics for chronic back pain.

Chronic back pain is a huge problem in our country.

This problem often starts with a past sudden injury like a motor vehicle accident, a fall, or even a sports injury.

Unfortunately these powerful drugs are often prescribed before other effective treatments, like Chiropractic Care for chronic pain. Better still would be recommending Chiropractic Care immediately after most of the injuries so that chronic pain can be avoided.

Narcotics are well known as addictive substances and that is why our country has a huge problem with them.

Many people start down the path of opiate addiction from simply taking a prescription pain reliever for some painful condition. Ultimately taken over a period of time, addiction is a very real probability regardless of race, gender, age, or socioeconomic status.

Ultimately, addiction can move an addict to the illegal market because the narcotics are cheaper and plentiful there. Unfortunately, they also have no way of knowing what they are buying and using. This leads to many opiod related deaths in our country (28,000 Americans die every year from opiods).

This is leading to massive problems with countless Americans suffering and dying every day from the unfortunate side effects and addiction to these powerful medications.

Pain and Chronic Pain can often be helped through lifestyle changes and safe, conservative care like Chiropractic.

It does not make sense for most people to start with powerful drugs before putting some time into other treatment options including changing a highly inflammatory lifestyle that is often contributing to your pain and illness.

We can not afford health care using our current approach.

Treating chronic pain and chronic disease is far too expensive.

Add to that, people with so many chronic diseases don’t even get better.

They continue suffering for the rest of their lives – unable to perform well at work, at home, and during their important daily activities like playing with their kids or grand-kids.

We have to change our entire paradigm to ‘fix‘ health care and it starts with each of us, even though it’s difficult the alternative is much, much worse.

If we don’t change our perspective on health, it doesn’t matter what the government does or doesn’t do with health care.

The mistake that Mark Bertolini makes in his interview?

He states that Medical Doctors, Dentists, and Chiropractors are prescribing too many opiates (narcotics).

Chiropractors do not prescribe narcotics or any other medication.

We, as chiropractors, use non-drug treatments and therapies in addition to healthy lifestyle recommendations to restore function and improve health.

Chiropractors are not part of the problem, Chiropractors are a big part of the solution.

Do you live in Texarkana, have pain or a neuro-musculoskeletal problem, and want to see if we can help you get better? 

Click the link here to -> schedule your first visit to our Texarkana office.