This is long, and not as clear as it could be. I’m just too swamped this month to trim it, and my priorities are biased towards self-preservation. People with serious or complicated medical problems will probably want to wade through it anyway.
The U.S. health care system is the best in the world, but is heavily burdened. Its personnel and infrastructure are stretched thin, HMO bean-counters and lawyers drive decisions about your health, and you’re just a drop in your hospital’s and your HMO’s buckets. More than four times as many people are killed by hospital error as by automobile accidents. And if you think health care is overburdened and overpriced now, just wait until it becomes free (i.e., socialized) and collapses under its own weight as people swamp it.
Until government control takes away freedom of choice in your health care, it can be significantly improved at no financial cost. Loose ends can be tied up, tests and treatments can be accelerated if necessary, your confidence in your treatment will improve, right tests may replace wrong tests, and you can actually choose your own doctors. The result will be better care, plus immeasurable satisfaction in important cases.
Here’s the free improvement you can implement immediately: Do It Yourself. No, don’t heal yourself; just make sure the existing system heals you properly and promptly. Take charge of your health care, up to the point medical expertise is necessary. Doctors diagnose your ailment and plan its treatment, nurses execute your treatment (with help from surgeons when needed), HMO accountants strangle it, lawyers bleed it dry, and you fund it with your insurance, cash, and taxes. But who in that whole system and process is looking out for you? (OK, the nurses are, but they’re also looking out for a few dozen other patients as well.)
The person in the best position to look out for you is you. Who in the health bureaucracy is coordinating everything? Who knows your symptoms best? Who cares the most whether you’re pain free now and ultimately healed? Who makes the ultimate decision about your treatment? Who’s in the best position to catch things that fall through all the cracks in that cumbersome “system”? Who’s the only person thinking about your case up to 16 hours every day, if warranted?
The obvious answer is you, of course, but what the heck do you know about serious diseases or injuries? What do you know about illnesses, medical tests, prognoses, treatments, drugs, and drug interactions in general, or about chemotherapy, 5-HIAA tests, OctreoScans, or carcinoid tumor metastasis, surgery, and chemoembolization in particular?
Me, neither, until personal experience and urgent need motivated me to start reading and get involved in my health care. What did that gain me? All of the benefits outlined in the third paragraph of this article. When I realized that my government-appointed medical provider had ignored obvious red flags until my PSA rose so fast last year that I’m likely to die from my prostate cancer (PC), not just with it, I began devouring authoritative PC websites and books. The most useful are written for patients, obviously, but after a few of those some of the doctors’ books and websites begin to make sense if we skim over the technical mumbo-jumbo.
