Health Care Reform

What will happen if we try to build a beautiful and expensive building without foundation ? Certainly it will collapse. Similar is happening in our health care system.We are trying to give health care with most modern and advanced technology without basic things.All these advancement are useless without these basics.We are not providing health care in real sense.We take care of our health in three ways,(HEALTH CARE, DISEASE CARE & SYMPTOMATIC CARE). In all acute diseases,(Malaria, typhoid etc) we give disease care and treat both symptoms and etiology of diseases, But we don’t manage deeper root causes in majority of cases. In all chronic life style diseases we merely manage the symptoms without paying serious attention to root causes.According to W.H.O., health is not merely the absence of disease.

We are not following the guidelines given by W.H.O. (World Health Organization). The present RDA (Recommended dietary allowance) for nutrients and normal values of laboratory test of various parameters are according to prevention and detection of illness and not for maintaining optimal health. We should change them if we want to follow according to instructions of world health organization(W.H.O.).We claim that we practice EBM (Evidence based medicine). But are we really doing that ? There are a lot of scientific and statistical data. But we are not utilizing them for detection and management of health and disease.We are also not aware of complete action and functions of many essential nutrients according to latest research. If these chronic diseases are due to our life style, then primary remedy should be by life style modification only. But practically it is working in how many cases and to what extent ? Why ?We don’t know exactly what & how to modify our lifestyle. Our standard medical text books don’t describe it in detail.We know that it does not work efficiently, so we are advising our patients half heartedly. Ultimately patients also don’t follow.The text books describe all chronic diseases as Idiopathic (exact cause not known).So we have got our fixed mindset.And practically we start managing our patients with traditional symptomatic management. Why a lot of basic things are not in our standard books ? While there is a lot on modern technology and latest and advanced drugs. Who is responsible for this ? Is it due to corruption at very high level ? This seems unbelievable. But if it is true, then it’s very unfortunate.