The Failure of Modern Medicine
As a head’s up, this post is a little longer than usual (that too after a LOT of cutting and editing!) but I felt that I needed to put it all together instead of splitting it up.
As I stated in my last post, how is it possible that with the ever-growing body of available knowledge, with the lightning-paced expansion of medical science and with all the incredible technological advances, that we still fail our clients in modern medicine?
I feel as though I came close to some sort of an answer to the above just recently.
Or at the very least a brief glimpse into what could be part of the answer (or maybe a better way of putting it would be part of the problem!).
I know I started off by talking about chronic pain, but this realization could just as easily relate to almost any type of pain or injury.
In our hurried and hectic world, we’ve stopped treating the person and we’ve started treating just the symptoms.
The Search for Symptomatic Relief.
I realize that this isn’t exactly Earth shattering or groundbreaking news. I won’t be getting any CNN headlines with this one.
But I think a good number of people in the medical health professions forget this basic tenet, and I know I’ve been guilty of this as well.
This became very aparent to me these past few weeks when I was working with a new client. In the years that this client had been seeking the care and guidance of his various healthcare professionals for chronic pain, no one had ever asked this client what was going on in his life.
Every appointment, meeting, or test was set-up solely for the purposes of medical assessment rather than human interaction. This gentleman had seen everyone for his pain. However, all of his practitioners were too busy to actually talk to him. He’d been put through the gamut of diagnostics from MRIs to CT scans and everything in-between.
Sadly…
No one asked him what was going on in his life now.
No one asked him what was going on in his life when the pain started.
No one tried to discern any of the social or emotional stressors that would exacerbate or propagate altered pain responses.
Because that is what chronic pain usually is.
It is, in a very broad sense, an abnormal, painful response to non-painful stimuli. Things that shouldn’t hurt, do.
In modern medicine, we’ve become so disjointed and specialized that we’ve forgotten that everyday stressors do impact how our bodies respond to our environment. We forget the elegance that is the construction of our physical selves.
Whether you believe in creationism or in evolution or something in between, you would be hard pressed to deny that the body knows what’s going on inside itself.
Eventually, these distinct stressors are replaced by amorphous, diffuse stressors that no longer resemble the original instigator.
And this takes me back to what I believe are the top three causes of pain (be it low back pain, knee pain or any other type):
1. Lack of knowledge-What’s causing, contributing or exacerbating the problem?
2. Motor Control-How do we move? How do we stay still? How is our body awareness?
3. De-conditioning-Are we using aging as a cop out and letting our bodies degenerate? Can we tolerate physical stressors?
Drop your comments and let me know what you think
Yours in movement.
Dev Chengkalath
