Important new kinds of medicine becoming more available....

Today's Post: Thursday, 3-10-2011

1. Effective prevention and personal responsibility are beginning to take over the practice of medicine. This change may not be perfect or complete or done as soon as we need it to be. But the evidence for it is solid and the case is developing more and more momentum.

This week our local free newspaper covered a new book by a well known and highly regarded local doctor. His views often influence medical research and programs at Stanford.

He comes from a family of doctors and is himself old enough to have seen many changes in medicine.

His book is about the needed changes and improvements in medicine today.

It’s available at Amazon.com & is new enough it may also be at your local bookstore.

Next Medicine: The Science and Civics of Health - Hardcover (Jan. 3, 2011) by Walter Bortz MD.

His other books are on how to live a healthy life that is also a long one.

He points out that medicine now needs very much to begin to teach people to take responsibility for managing their health and inform them how to do this.

Current medicine is good at throwing fast fixes for some things that need it and often uses drugs.

But Dr Bortz points out that it not only is less wasteful and easier on people to prevent many diseases in the first place, it is often far more effective than doing a rush job after the fact.

I’ve not yet read his book. But, he is absolutely correct. Because the approach he advocates is not in universal use yet by every doctor and doctors are now so pressed for time, it isn’t yet being practiced enough. Much of his book is his ideas on how to change this.

Because of the high medical costs and disability and suffering it now causes that this is not yet the mainstream practice, I’m very pleased he has written this book.

Also, some of the reasons why he is correct may not be in his book.

There is now a massive amount of correct and tested information on what kinds of preventive actions are effective.

But so far, though there are doctors like Dr Bortz who keep up to date on this field, most haven’t the time to do so.

And, most medicine is still focused on the expectations created by antibiotics over 60 years ago.

(For a very moving description of how that time affected medical people, read the stories by veterinarian Alf Wight who wrote as “James Herriot” as he experiences the change from when he could tell a farmer what their animal had but could do little to make it better to being able to make it improve dramatically and with great reliability when bacteria were the cause.)

Both doctors and the public came to expect that doctors would have drugs like antibiotics that would create good, reliable, and very fast fixes for things.

The problem is that even effective drugs often cannot reverse the damage that has built up over many years the way antibiotics clear out harmful bacteria.

But, in addition to that, many drugs only deliver partially effective effects and some even deliver side effects that cause damage about as often as they create good outcomes.

Statin drugs only prevent a small fraction of heart attacks, 3% according to one study I saw while they also tend to cause about 3% of the people taking them to get eye cataracts that they would otherwise have escaped.

That’s not yet well known – including by many doctors.

Yet eating right and regular exercise and completely avoiding tobacco smoke over a decade ahead of time confers closer to 100 % protection.

But most doctors don’t yet know that and even the ones that do have no good idea of how to help people begin to do these things. Worse, some try unsuccessfully and then give up trying.

Meanwhile, lured by the example of the antibiotics that WERE so effective most doctors tend to prescribe drugs instead.

So, Dr Bortz is SO right in saying that the medical profession needs to learn these things and how to keep people well by using them effectively.

And, he is quite correct that it needs to be done as a system change.

The best news is that due to the clear evidence this approach is correct and badly needed and pioneers like Dr Bortz, this kind of medicine will gradually become mainstream.

2. We are beginning to know enough about the multiple systems people’s bodies use and how to test them with accurate high tech methods so that we can tailor the treatments precisely to those that will make the patient better.

This approach is also a coming thing. It’s pretty simple why. In something like 90 % of the cases it gets faster and far more complete results for individual people than just putting a label on the overall diagnosis and handing out the common drug for that condition.

You can make a case for calling this approach individualized systems medicine.

But it’s best and most knowledgeable champion is Dr Marc Hyman who calls it Integrative Medicine.

By systematically checking the systems of the body of patients who come to him who are ill or not functioning well and doing a particularly thorough job on those that can cause the symptoms or prevent healing, he is then able to correct many of these systems to function well and as they should.

In many cases, that does the job without needing the more general drug that doctors would have prescribed after only labeling the condition.

And, in other cases, it shows other drugs to be needed and combining those with the traditional drug and the indicated nondrug methods then produces a cure or effective treatment when the more general drug alone would fail.

It is precisely shaped treatment based on that individual at that time and is often dramatically superior to a more generalized, less informed, and less exact treatment that is more commonly in use now.

So, to me, since these two trends or medical paradigms produce dramatically better results, I think they each will gradually become mainstream medicine.

Once that happens, fewer people will need to see doctors for treatment of illness since they will usually stay well. And those who do see doctors for treatment of illness, will reliably get better and with far fewer side effects than is now the case.