Today, let’s talk about healing disease vs. managing symptoms. It’s important to understand the difference and how it affects your battle with an autoimmune disorder.
During the decades I struggled with lupus, I saw dozens of doctors who prescribed over 30 different medications. Yet I was never told to exercise, change my diet or manage my stress. Not one time. In fact, when I asked my rheumatologist whether diet changes or exercise could help me, he flat-out said no! Of course, it has been proven time and again that a healthy diet and exercise can help anyone.
So why did my doctors only focus on drugs? Why didn’t they suggest other methods that could have improved my health or even cured me? There are a few reasons:
- The goal of healthcare today is to manage the symptoms of disease instead of curing (or preventing) them.
- Doctors have little or no training in nutrition and other holistic approaches.
- Some doctors are financially incentivized to push drugs and keep you sick.
Let’s take a closer look at each one.
Treatment vs. Cure
“U.S. healthcare is the most expensive in the world by far… The emphasis is on treatment rather than prevention.” America’s Health Crisis and the Easterlin Pardox, Jeffrey D. Sachs
Modern healthcare does a great job of treating acute problems such as a cut, burn, infection, broken bone, etc. Doctors are well-trained to fix these problems using sutures, splints, antibiotics, casts and sometimes surgery.
Chronic diseases are another story.
Instead of curing or preventing chronic diseases, modern healthcare treats their symptoms with drugs. Studies have proven that many chronic diseases, such as heart disease, type 2 diabetes and many forms of cancer, are both preventable and reversible with lifestyle changes for most people. Yet this is rarely prescribed in standard healthcare.
If you’ve had lupus or another chronic disease, ask yourself how much time your doctor has spent educating you on how to eat healthier, how to exercise correctly and how to manage your stress better, compared to the amount of time discussing drug options.
Drugs will never heal you. They can only help manage symptoms, while introducing their own dangerous side-effects. While I have yet to see a single person with lupus healed by drugs, I’ve seen many healed by lifestyle changes. Our website is proof of that.
If you look only to drugs, and never consider other options, you’ve basically accepted that you will never be healthy again.
It is important to look at the body holistically. Everything is connected, and the cause of one symptom could be rooted somewhere else. Functional Medicine is a medical approach that looks at your body as a whole, instead of treating specific issues or symptoms. Functional medicine focuses on understanding the actual (root) cause of your disease, and then addresses it with solutions to restore your health.
Here is an example: Let’s say you break out in hives, which is common with lupus. Your rheumatologist will probably tell you that it’s part of your lupus and there’s nothing he can do except give you drugs (usually corticosteriods) to manage it. A skin specialist (dermatologist) will focus on your skin, and may give you creams or other medications to reduce the hives.
But what if the cause of your hives lied elsewhere? What if the root cause was emotional (stress), or environmental (allergy) or the result of a problem in another part of the body (like your gut)? If you never figure out what’s actually causing you to be sick, you will never fix it! You will remain sick and spend a lifetime dependent on drugs to manage the problem.
So why don’t doctors focus on options other than drugs? One reason is…
Training
For a long time, I went to my rheumatologist by myself. It wasn’t until the latter years of my sickness that my husband started going with me. Each visit was the same. My doctor would ask me how I felt. If I felt OK or no worse than the previous visit, he would keep my medications the same, and do nothing else. If I was worse, he would increase dosages or “try a new one”.
Does this sound familiar?
During one visit it finally hit us: that’s all he can do! He’s not a surgeon. He can’t mend a broken bone, heal a wound or do a heart bypass. With little to no training in nutrition, he can’t recommend specific diet changes. The only thing he is really qualified to do is prescribe drugs.
That epiphany became another turning point for us. Before going to our next appointment, my husband asked me if I wanted more drugs, and my response was “absolutely not”. “So why even go?”, he asked. We didn’t.
The diet and lifestyle changes we recently made were already having a positive effect, so we never went back. Three months later, I was off most of my drugs and symptom-free for the first time in over 30 years.
But why couldn’t (or wouldn’t) my doctor provide nutritional options for us? One answer is that nutrition is rarely taught in medical school and when it is, it is not emphasized.
NutritionFacts.org said this:
“But unfortunately, the prevention of chronic disease through diet and nutrition is an area of medicine in which most doctors are not trained and subsequently lack sufficient knowledge to properly advise patients. Seven out of ten deaths of Americans each year are from chronic diseases, and it is known that diet is a major factor in these deaths. Yet, efforts to require nutrition education in medical schools have met with serious opposition.“
The fact is most doctors are not adequately trained in nutrition and therefore not qualified to give nutritional advice. Of course, any doctor could easily get certified in nutrition, but most don’t.
For some doctors, there is another reason for knowingly keeping you sick…
Money
This will sound harsh, but it’s true: some doctors are not interested in your well-being. They would rather keep you sick than try to find a cure. They would rather “manage” your worsening disease with toxic drugs than find out what’s actually causing your illness. Doing so keeps you as a customer for life. Many of these doctors are highly rated because they are personable and sound like they care about you, but they don’t. This was my doctor.
Let me be clear: most doctors are wonderful, amazing people who truly care about their patients. As with all people and professions, there are good and bad. Unfortunately, when it comes to the medical profession, whether it’s a doctor, hospital or pharmaceutical company, bad is really bad, and usually means pain, suffering and cost for you.
But why would a doctor do this and how can he be compensated to keep you sick? To better understand this dilemma, we need to talk about how the relationship between doctors and pharmaceutical companies works. This video is a great place to start.
In his paper: Conflicts of Interest, Institutional Corruption and Pharma: An Agenda for Reform, Marc Rodwin wrote:
“Why do physicians have financial conflicts of interest? They arise because society expects physicians to act in their patient’s interest, while simultaneously, financial incentives encourage physicians to practice medicine in ways that promote their own interests or those of third parties. Because physicians’ clinical choices, referrals and prescriptions affect the fortune of third parties (providers, medical facilities, insurers, drug firms and suppliers of ancillary services), these third parties may offer physicians financial incentives to make income-driven clinical choices… Physician relations with pharmaceutical firms are a source of conflicts of interest that can bias their prescriptions and advice.”
There is a disturbing relationship between pharmaceutical companies and doctors, to your detriment. Basically, pharmaceutical companies pay doctors in several ways, with the expectation that the doctor will push their drugs, sometimes whether you need them or not. This is a conflict of interest and should be outlawed. Most other industries (where people’s lives aren’t at stake) don’t allow this kind of relationship. Most companies don’t allow their employees to take any kind of gift or payment from a vendor, to prevent even the perception of a conflict of interest. How can doctors be allowed to accept huge sums of money from big pharma to push their drugs? It’s unethical and it makes no sense.
I went to my rheumatologist for almost 30 years. During this time he prescribed dozens of medications, yet my health deteriorated under his care. Sometimes he prescribed drugs that had no relationship to my symptoms, like when he prescribed gout medication for my chronic hives. Over all of those years, he never offered any option other than drugs. Was it because he was only trained to treat symptoms? Maybe he wasn’t properly educated in nutrition, exercise, stress management and other options. Did he just do it (keep me sick) for the money?
In the video above, you’ll learn that as part of the Obamacare program, the government created the website OpenPaymentsData.cms.gov to provide transparency into the doctor/pharmaceutical company relationship. It allows patients to look up their doctors and see how much money they have accepted from the companies whose drugs they prescribe.
We searched for my rheumatologist, and found that over a two year period he had accepted over $2.6 million dollars from a dozen different pharmaceutical companies. Most of these payments were in the vague category of “Associated Research”. Suddenly, his enthusiasm for prescribing drugs made sense.
What about big pharma, do they care about you? No, they don’t. If ever there was an industry that defined big business, it would be them. In various publications, they have been called everything from “thugs of the medical world” to “America’s new mafia”. I’ll be writing a separate article on this subject in the near future, because it deserves it. Let me just say that the drugs you take were created to make a profit, not to make you healthy.
So what’s the point?
Don’t assume the path you’ve been on is the only one. Or the best one. Don’t assume your doctor always has the best answers or even your best interests in mind. Be aware of the limitations, biases and sometimes even corruption in our healthcare system. Understand that drugs are not a path to healing, only lifelong maintenance.
Take control of your health by educating yourself and understanding all of the options available to you. Ask the tough questions. Challenge when necessary. Stick up for yourself, for the sake of your health and well-being.
Ultimately, your health is your responsibility, not your doctor’s. Don’t blindly delegate that responsibility to someone else without doing your due diligence. Nobody will ever care about your health as much as you do.
Finally, understand that managing your symptoms and curing your disease are two completely different paths, and you’ve probably been on the first one. Don’t settle for that. There is an alternative that just might result in real, lasting healing and a better life.
