A post by John Mandrola, M.D. came up on my social media that said: “I’m concerned about the practice of Medicine. “Productivity” is slowly but surely extracting care from healthcare. It’s bad. Really bad.”
He wrote an article in Medscape, the largest online medical journal that goes to approximately 5 million healthcare provides worldwide. It’s such a painful eye opener that it’s worse than having a huge infection in both eyes. But we all better open our eyes soon. Care is being taken out of healthcare. YOU, the patient, as has been the case for decades now, suffers the most.
Dr. Mandrola explained that every month, most employed doctors get colored graphs that report their monthly productivity based on something called “relative value units” (RVUs). These are graphed values that represent the doctor’s own “productivity” compared to other doctors across the country. It tells employers if the doctor is a worthy hard worker.
How your doctor’s actions are being driven and evaluated:
- What’s the hard work that earns higher credits? Doing procedures. Such as ablations, catheterizations, stent or valve replacements. Procedures earn RVUs.
- What gets less credit? Listening to patients, examining patients, counseling patients, or hugging patients. These actions earn very few RVUs.
- What earns zero RVUs? Doing important research, teaching colleagues, and reading the medical evidence.
RVUs, bemoans Dr. M, have become the primary way doctors are assessed for success in too many medical systems. A doctor is considered a valuable employee if they use the standardized templates on their electronic health records so your documentation is systematic (which doesn’t require in-depth thinking), or if they order loads of costly procedures to keep the money flowing into their hiring institution. They are also “good” if they don’t complain about this way of doing things. Doctors as “medical automatons” are fostered by this new healthcare system. It’s all about money, and not about YOU, the patient.
In comparison, if a doctor takes time with you, puts thoughtful narrative notes into your records rather than filling out templates, or comments or complains about non-patient-based policies, they are labeled as trouble makers. These doctors are at high risk of losing their jobs. And will probably find it difficult to get another.
This is the atmosphere, warns Dr. M, within which today’s young doctors are learning to treat you, the patient.
One major teaching center, says Dr. M, “entirely” compensates its teaching faculty on the basis of RVU productivity. Not on bedside manners or thoughtfulness.
This applies to institutions and clinics that use insurance and PPO models. If an institution is running on a prepaid model, like an HMO, then the reverse might apply as they want to save money.
But for many of us, CARE is being taken out of healthcare.
Do doctors know best, most of the time?
On top of that, we still think that when we go to see a doctor, they are in touch with the Akashic records (a philosophical term for all the knowledge there is to know) of all there is to know about medicine. For example, if we go to an eye doctor, especially a specialist, we think they know all about eyes. But this is often not the case, as shocking as that might be.
I recently interviewed Dr. Robert Ritch on my Dr. Berkson’s Best Health Radio. No one is more of a top expert in glaucoma that Dr. Ritch. His career spans almost 5 decades. Many of the conditions and surgeries that were first invented or written about glaucoma, were done so by Dr. Ritch.
Dr. Ritch explained that about 30% of glaucoma patients actually are misdiagnosed. They really have a different kind of disease called exfoliation syndrome. Yet they aren’t always diagnosed accurately because many doctors, even specialists, don’t know how to examine an eye accurately for that condition. This is difficult to wrap your brain around. But not if you are in my practice. I see misdiagnoses and poor recommendations like this so often, it takes my breath away. And who suffers? The patient.
Dr. Ritch is a top ophthalmic surgeon and researcher. Today, Dr. Ritch has also embraced nutrition. He wonders how any cogent physician could not do so. But then he dropped this bomb during our interview. Dr. Ritch said, for decades, physicians were taught that nutrition, nutraceuticals, energy medicine, and natural healers were quacks. Why? Listen to this!
How medicine went down the drug path versus the nutrition one:
In the 1930s and 1940s, nutrition and energy medicine were starting to pick up steam. Pharmaceuticals had not yet become the only show in town.
Dr. Morris Fishbein was the president of the American Medical Association. He was AMA president for 25 years from 1924 to 1950, and was also the chief editor of JAMA, the Journal of the American Medical Association. Fishbein was the most powerful man in medicine at the time medicine was developing as an industry.
Dr. Fishbein, Dr. Ritch emphatically stated, realized the money to be made by nutraceuticals and tried to buy the first vitamin company when it was in development. They refused to sell. If Dr. Fishbein couldn’t make the money off of nutrients, he determined that no one could. So Dr. Fishbein went on to vilify nutrition.
Fishbein influenced generations of physicians to regard nutritional interventions as witchcraft. All nutrition education was removed from American medical schools that were, of course, backed by the AMA. Instead, Fishbein pushed the synthetic drug industry forward. It is alleged that the AMA, and Fishbein himself, profited from these liaisons.
Today, there is much literature that demonstrates that nutraceutical treatments provide more benefit and less risk than many pharmaceutical meds . . . if one reads the literature. The appreciation of nutrition in medicine is turning around. But we lost decades!
Dr. Ritch then shared his story of the Rife machine and energy medicine.
Royal Raymond Rife was an American inventor who created a machine, called the Rife machine, that diagnosed and treated “energy glitches” of various diseases. Fishbein saw the value in energy medicine and wanted to make money from it. So Fishbein attempted to buy Rife’s machine. Rife wouldn’t sell. So Fishbein denigrated Rife, his machine, and energy medicine. If Fishbein couldn’t make the money off of this energy machine and medicine, no one else could. He campaigned heavily against Rife, who lost credibility and ultimately committed suicide.
But energy medicine and nutritional medicine are emerging once again.
Several years ago I took a 40-hour relicensing course by the neurosurgeon Dr. Norm Shealy, who invented pain medicine. He also invented an energy machine that treats pain, which he adapted from original units invented by first a chiropractor and then a naturopath. At the conference, Shealy had all these original machines out on tables for us to see. By the way, Shealy gave those other docs credit for the very first machines. But only he is world-wide renowned for them. Yet, none of them got any money at all! Life!
For 33 years, Shealy also headed the only hospital wing in the U.S., in a Missouri hospital, that treated depression and obesity with energy, light and nutritional medicines. This unit had some of the best success statistics for these conditions ever reported.
When you look at the history of orthodox medicine, it was so OCD-like. It plunged down the pharmaceutical rabbit hole, without recognizing natural and often safer answers because of the ego and avarice of one man. And life is so ironic. Bet Mr. Not-Nice-Guy Fishbein was considered the husband catch-of-the-year by many ambitious Jewish American Princess moms!
It is shocking and frightening just how powerful and far-reaching the influence of one greedy human can be.
Morris Fishbein ran the AMA like a dictatorship for twenty years, until he was finally ousted by a group of fed-up doctors within that organization. During this time, the AMA, a supposedly “non-profit” agency, recommended cigarettes even though the link with cancer had already been established. One JAMA journal ad read: “Patients with coughs were instructed to change to Philip Morris cigarettes.” It is said that Fishbein and the AMA made money for years off their connection to the cigarette industry. (PS my mother, as perhaps many of yours, smoked all during her pregnancy with me because her coveted physician reassured her it was not only okay it was helpful. Fishbein had a lot to do with that.)
Also lost was the use of energy and electrical current as possible treatments. Today, these are being looked at for treating diverse conditions from ankle injuries to preventing blindness. But again, we lost decades. To greed. As the saying goes: follow the money.
Fishbein and the AMA were found guilty in 1938 for violating the Sherman Anti-Trust Act. But during the next several decades, many natural treatments for diverse diseases were silenced as quackery.
Now, in 2017, greed still runs the show. Doctors are valued (and kept on as employees) if they use mainstream orthodox procedures that make money, rather than using natural remedies and in-depth exploration in dialogue with the patient to try to get you well. And cost less.
You, the patient, lose out.
Did you know this is the history and the story behind the men and women in white coats?
Once you know this history and the way medicine works today, you can awaken and try to find better natural answers. Otherwise, you continue to be the patient sheeple and to receive less than optimal medical care.
Getting quality health care means you are going to have to seek out alternative teams. This usually means cash. But it also means that practitioners take time to listen to you and to seek out natural effective answers with less damage to you in the long run. Where you go to seek CARE, matters!
- What moves the world? Money and marketing.
- What would we like to move the world: Love and justice.
- You can add more positivity to the negativity, but you have to first be aware of the real news, not the fake stuff.
- Knowledge is power.
- Get buffed.
- Please consider passing this information on.