Wisdom encourages a careful evaluation of both the cost of care and the cost of not caring. The first is so obvious mentioning it seems frivolous. Read more and you will be surprised. The second goes easily forgotten, but the losses of inaction deserve more attention than they receive.
The Cost of Caring for Health
The cost depends on what you are purchasing. Purchasing bad health requires little from your purse or wallet and accrues interest in old age as chronic conditions build until they overcome you. Purchasing average health requires an occasional salad, an occasional doctor visit, and a few prescriptions taken as often as you remember.
Purchasing extraordinary health demands ongoing investment. You forgo some pleasurable obstacles like sweets and processed foods. You perform some regular activities like exercise and stress management. You choose a doctor who goes beyond pharma, who goes beyond short 15-minute visit, and who goes beyond the party line of big medicine.
Until you combine these efforts, extraordinary lies beyond your grasp. Once they have grasped you, you realize that you never want to look back
The Cost of Not Caring
Extraordinary health and its patterns have not yet grasped your life. You consider the cost. Do not ignore the cost of not caring as you weigh your options. Not pursing health when you are ill requires paying a lot of prices. You will pay the cost of lost experiences with family and friends. You may pay the cost of lost wages in missed work. You will pay the cost of progressing symptoms when unaddressed.
Decisions grow clearer with these costs set against the cost of a visit or a program or a supplement or a healthier meal. At some point you realize that you can’t afford to not care any longer.
The State of the System
The current trends of medicine drive health care providers of all types into bigger and bigger systems. Big hospital chains buy smaller ones. They then buy the doctor’s offices so that those offices only refer to the hospital system’s specialist and only admit to their hospital. One pharmacy chain buys another to control competition. Ancillary services like physical therapists must interact with these entities at an economic disadvantage.
These big medicine entities offer coordinated care and cheaper prices but drive top-down control. This control limits choices for the patients and limits time with providers. Only providers who focus their prescribing on Big Pharma and expensive procedures receive support. Lifestyle health coaching gets time only in terms of an occasional health coach or nutritionist visit. The doctor, nurse practitioner, and physician assistant making the orders focus on meds and procedures and referrals.
The Cost of Not Supporting Trustworthy Health Care
With the pressures to produce revenue in the system, the pressures to conform to Big Pharma guidelines, and the peer pressure to be like everyone else, dissenting health care providers fight uphill to stay alive. Seeking to slow down and treat whole persons with more than prescriptions, these providers either leave the system or get pushed out. They at least leave the hospital network if not leave the whole insurance shell game as well. Outside the networks of both, they must look directly to the patients for support and payment.
To survive, these providers must educate the public whom they serve how they are offering something different, something worth paying for. Potential patients face financial limitations encouraging them to look to their insurance for health care rather than paying these dissenting providers. Potential patients accept the limitation of choices to what their insurance covers rather than looking to the dissenters who can offer a broader and deeper array of options.
More and more dissenters are setting a course away from Big Medicine as the reins of control tighten. This movement encourages those who pioneered the move years ago. We welcome the further growth but simultaneously hope to see more of the public awakening to the consequences of remaining in the system. Without support from patients choosing to visit these providers, they will not remain open long.
Without more of the public leaving the Big Medicine world, at some point the dissenting providers will be forced to return to the big systems in order to provide for their families. The dissenters are providing an opportunity to find trustworthy providers, not obliged to follow the Big Medicine control. These trustworthy providers can serve the patients who come to them without the entanglement of big government regulations and big medicine financial drive.
Making the Most of Health Care Outside the System
Choosing to care for your health by enlisting a provider outside the big medicine system on your team means the following. You give up short visits and gain prolonged time with your provider. You give up limiting yourself to a set of pharma therapies and gain the best of both worlds of natural and conventional medicine. You give up supporting the big medicine system and you gain a trusted ally in your quest for the healthier, more abundant life.
Originally published on the Blog in 2021, but a good reminder why investing in health is a great return on investment as well as pointers on how to do this investing.
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Sanctuary Functional Medicine, under the direction of Dr Eric Potter, IFMCP MD, provides functional medicine services to Nashville, Middle Tennessee and beyond. We frequently treat patients from Kentucky, Alabama, Mississippi, Georgia, Ohio, Indiana, and more... offering the hope of healthier more abundant lives to those with chronic illness.
Dr. Eric Potter graduated from Vanderbilt Medical School and then went on to specialize in internal medicine (adult) and pediatric care, spending significant time and effort in growing his medical understanding while caring for patients from all walks of life.
