On Sunday, we emailed out a survey to people on our email list asking them about their health challenges. What we received was very upsetting. What I was hoping for was to identify within our list a general trend in answers that would allow me to cater my education to help them. Instead, what we found were people who were truly desperate and needing help in multiple areas.
The problems we found were financial, multiple health problems, polypharmacy (people on numerous medications), addictions, people still healing from severe trauma, and other problems that would require serious professional support.
In my medical practice, there is always one thing that can start someone on the process of healing and sometimes it is not even ostensibly related to their health. Sometimes, getting one aspect of their life handled helps with getting their health in order. Direct person to person, one can make so much change in someone’s life. The future however I believe is the proper support with experts of various kinds helping.
Kudo’s to Dean Ornish, MD who has an integrated program that has been approved for reimbursement by Medicare and an expanding number of insurance companies. While the diet wars rage on, where Dr. Ornish is often maligned and criticized, he has quietly ignored that, pushed forward, made political connections, and gotten his program that no matter where you fall on the diet wars, extends life and the quality of it. That a program could be planned, constructed, scaled, and then approved to be reimbursed by Medicare is an incredible achievement and will improve lives tremendously. I just signed up to learn more as a clinician. Maybe I will write more about Dr. Ornish again, one lecture at a conference in California changed forever the way I practice medicine.
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