In our days, due to the pressures of the health insurance companies (private and public), the legal system, the physician shortage and academia there is a push towards standardizing the medical care at all levels. This would work well if everyone of us were genetically and culturally equal, with the same responses to infectious agents, dietary habits and the stresses of life in general. However, as you probably already concluded, this is not the case.
Health insurance companies base their profit models in statistics. They use averages, standard deviations and trends in order to make decisions. An individual with a unique problem, who does not fit in the pattern usually creates some degree of stress in the system that needs time to be solved. In many occasions, neither the physician nor the bureaucrats have the time to actually solve the issues.
The legal system uses the “standard of care” as the standard to compare the practicing behaviors of physicians with at the time of malpractice litigation. Because of this, the practicing patterns of physicians tend to be similar regardless of the patients’ uniqueness. This is one of the characteristics of “defensive” medical practice, which increases the cost of care without necessarily increasing its effectiveness.
The physician shortage has created a situation by which physicians do not have enough time to analyze the situation of a particular patient, specially if the problem is complex. This is one of the reasons, why diagnoses of rare conditions can take longer than they would if the physicians had the necessary time to study the rare and complex cases.
Academia has pushed for the practice of “evidence-based medicine”. While this is a great concept specially at the time of gathering knowledge, it can become a problem if the practitioner applies the conclusions of research to patients who do not fit the inclusion criteria of the same research.
There is no simple fix for the healthcare system as a whole. Individuals have to take responsibility of their own healthcare and use the available resources in order to solve their problems, specially if they are complex. for example,there are the private-pay “concierge” practices. These physicians can offer more time to patients and they would definitely make the patient understand his or her own issues. There are also several second medical opinion services, which can provide access to specialists who can dedicate their time to analyze the patient’s case in detail. These services, I believe, understand better the need for individualized medical care.
Marco A. Ramos MD
