Part 1: The Box
We are in a Box!
As I contemplated this subject for a paper, I began to realize how complicated it is. I have addressed aspects of it before – thinking about social trends and health, and also thinking about different approaches to healthcare both for civilian and military populations. I don’t want this to be a paper about healthcare costs, although the industry is just about the largest in the world, and with costs still growing and exceeding inflation.
We are in a box of the kind I suggested in my last paper. We built this box from a well-meaning desire. Who wouldn’t want good health for everyone? But what does good health mean, to whom, and under what circumstances? In the West, we have adopted a very mechanistic approach to health. This is our box. We treat our physical bodies as if they are machines. They need fuel, they need to be kept clean and well-oiled, and when some part malfunctions, breaks, or wears out, then we do our best to fix it or replace it with drugs and surgery. In this box, we focus on the external environment – bacteria, viruses, pollution, accidents… and more, but pay little attention to the non-physical, non-mechanical parts of ourselves.
Prescription drug costs are still soaring with increases in costs running at more than 10% per year. Insurance coverage costs have also increased dramatically. I will deliberately avoid discussing the ACA and its possible successors. Some employers have started preventive programs, some are hiring physicians and nurses to provide primary care in the workplace, some are providing in-house complementary health services and others are teaching employees how to use the Internet to obtain better information about diseases and prevention
It seems strange that, in spite of huge advances in healthcare (drugs, technologies, treatments…) people are not getting healthier and the U.S. infant mortality rates are worse than those in many other countries. Recent data show that American are increasingly spending their health care dollars seeking complementary health services outside the traditional health care system.
One aspect of healthcare that has emerged over the last few decades is that of mental and emotional health. Depression, anxiety and stress disorders have become commonplace among both children and adults. And opioid addiction has reached epidemic proportion. Aside from the costs of drugs and medical care to combat these illnesses (which are almost double those of non-depressive illness) , Dr. Philip Wang from Harvard suggests that the economic costs from lack of productivity in the workplace caused by these problems total in the tens of billions of dollars annually.
Many in the medical profession are beginning to recognize that stress can affect our health – making us more vulnerable to both the external environment (weakening of immune systems, allergic reactions…) and in our internal environment (changes in the chemicals produced in our bodies, and various internal stressors, resulting in depression, addictions, loss of energy…) But most still think of health problems as physical problems produced by some external agency.
Outside of the Box
What can we do to break out of this box? What is outside it? Are we merely flesh, blood and bone machines? Or is there more?
In my papers on Social Values Models[1], I discuss some groups that we call Inner Directed (ID). They are people who are moving towards self-actualization. Unlike the other groups, these people have a greater sense of how their emotions affect their health, and they have a greater locus of control than the other groups. Indeed, in surveys we have done, we see that the Inner Directed have the lowest levels of illness than the other groups. The Sustenance Driven have the highest level of illness. These people believe that one is born with a state of health – one either has good health or not – and there is little that can be done to change that situation. The Outer Directed are concerned about health issues, but believe that the medical profession is there to “patch them up.”
This growing group of people, the Inner Directed, want to take responsibility for their own health. They are more inclined to prevention than any other group, and also more inclined to use less costly, effective, complementary treatment. And they are the long-term trend setters. If we can expand the attitudes and behavior of other groups in the population so that they are more willing to adopt preventive approaches to healthcare, and become less dependent on conventional suppliers of healthcare, then we will be able to start on a path towards both a new box – a new paradigm of healthcare – and towards decreasing both direct and indirect costs.
The ID already have many like-minded professionals, including physicians and surgeons, in the health-care community, who believe that there is more to life and health than just the physical body – that there are mental, emotional and spiritual components that are even more important than the physical. Eastern medicine has recognized these for centuries, and today there is growing acceptance of their approaches to prevention and cure in the form of integrative medicine, acupuncture, homeopathy, energy medicine and more. It’s relatively easy to see how these can be part of an individual’s approach to healthcare, but less easy to imagine for hospital settings.
As with education, healthcare has been a “push” system[2] but, increasingly, Inner Directed want a “pull” system in which they have choice. In the next article, I will explore ways in which this might be accomplished.
[1] (https://www.bizcatalyst360.com/social-values-one-of-the-best-segmentation-models-part-1/, https://www.bizcatalyst360.com/social-values-one-of-the-best-segmentation-models-part-2/
[2] https://www.bizcatalyst360.com/the-future-of-education-a-personal-perspective-part-1/
The day I sent this article to Dennis, the UK Guardian paper published an article that commented “Thousands of people could be undergoing unnecessary, risky and expensive surgeries as most procedures have never been subjected to the rigorous testing drugs are required to have, a leading surgeon has said.” I did not see that article until yesterday!