by Carlos M. Garcia, M.D.
At Utopia Wellness we encourage patient interaction. The main reason we do so is that based on experience, people want to tell their story. They want to share their injustices. Give people enough time they will tell you why they are sick, when it happened and individuals or institutions associated with the incident. The patient is the only one who knows how incidents have affected them. Without their input, a medical practitioner is just speculating on a remedy.
As stated above, people have a particular manner in which they execute their crafts. Because of this truth, venturing out of a known environment, especially if it is too distant or in contrast to a professional’s comfort zone is frequently met with opposition. Depending on the individual and their self-trust, resistance to deviation from a comfort zone may range from mere reluctance to overt fear. For examples: 1) Mere reluctance – okay you can give your son a tea for his indigestion, even though it’s not evidenced based, and most likely a placebo effect. 2) Overt fear/distain – treating cancer in any other manner that is not FDA approved is tantamount to malpractice or charlatanism.
It is interesting to note how short of a memory span mankind has… People have had cancer for millennia. I wonder how cancer was addressed prior to the FDA’s founding. Women in the 1940’s to the 1990’s drank and smoked while pregnant. Today, arguments are had about a glass of wine while pregnant. My generation was not born with two heads. Arguably we have become more apt at identifying learning disabilities, but it seems to me that there were a lot less of these during my childhood. The more we try to suppress individuality and attempt to make the art of medicine become the science of medicine, the worse the outcomes appear to be. America is sicker today than 100 years ago, and getting sicker. The incidence of cancer in the early 1900’s was less than 5%, today it is over 50%. Nice job evidence based medicine. The reason medicine will never be a science is because of our uniqueness. That is why there are numerous drugs for each disease, and not everyone with the same diagnosis is on the same medications. Additionally, when there is only one drug, it only works for a select few and usually does not work forever.
However, when you eliminate our individuality and ignore our uniqueness, then protocols can be dogmatized and imposed based on diagnoses. Once the diagnosis becomes the focus of treatment, you begin to understand marginalization. When it is all about the diagnosis, then the patient does not matter. Their role is to transport the diagnosis. Thus what the patient thinks, does or eats is ignored or marginalized because the person is irrelevant. The tissue diagnosis is the true patient being addressed.
It is society’s programing to stay somewhere close to society’s comfort zone that fuels medicine’s stagnation. Today’s “modern medicine” revolves around FDA approved procedures, medications, and technologies. Predetermined dogmatic treatment algorithms, are assigned to specific tissue diagnosis. Specific treatment protocols are designed to further curtail flexibilities in the use of these modalities. Since straying too far from protocol exposes you to litigation, painful and agonizing deaths as accepted as the norm. As far as cancer treatments are concerned the phrase evidence based medicine is used to limit acceptance of non-FDA approved treatments. Evidence based medicine is mainstream medicine’s religion. As long as practitioners believe and follow its commandments (protocol), it will protect you from litigation and scrutiny. If you don’t, then you will be declared heretic or quack, persecuted, ostracized or perhaps worse, a federal raid. It’s a wonder we exist at all. After all the FDA was founded on 6 June 1906. How did anyone survive prior to that?
