In the USA, we are too focused on how we will be paid and on how much. Medicine is driven by profit-loss statements. France has apparently similar problems. Doctors may compete for status and income to the detriment of their patients.
I have no quick solutions for medicine since it took us a while to get here and it will take us a while to change back.
I do have a simple proposal that could be tried in several
geographical regions as a test drive. What if we tried a
new way to pay doctors based upon the concierge model? What
if I was paid a set fee each year to take care of a patient, period?
My friend who is a family doctor in Scottsdale, Arizona, charges
each person in her practice $2000 per year. She limits
her practice to 250 people. She has no staff. She
sees people for as long as she wishes and as often as she wishes.
She makes more money than she ever did in the other system (in
which she had three people coding her visits and sending bills to
insurance companies and one receptionist), has more free time, and is
less stressed. To her surprise, she found that people
don't want want to come as often as she wants them to come and they
won't stay as long for appointments as she wants them to stay.
Of
course, some doctors would abuse this system, but patient complaints
would most likely identify them quickly, and they could be sanctioned in
some way.
I would be happy in such a system and would do my utmost to keep people healthy (but then I have studied CAM and have more methods than pharmaceuticals for doing so, including traditional Chinese medicine, homeopathy, aromatherapy, Cherokee osteopathy, guided imagery, hypnosis, meditation, relaxation training, and the art of listening. I would really enjoy helping people to change their lifestyle. We could even exercise together. I could have some come to teach all of us yoga in the office, or t'ai chi, or chi gong, and offer my classes to my clientele as part of their fee so that I could take them, too. Each of us could try different approaches in our practices for keeping people healthy. We could come together at conferences like the one I am at, to compare notes on what seems to work best for each of us.
Back to the conference. My favorite presentation was that of Dr. Mario Beauregard of the University of Montreal. He spoke about spiritual neurobiology. I loved this, because I love studying the brain. I don't know how this study helps anyone get better, but it's fun. Dr. Beauregard concluded that neuroscience cannot answer the question of the existence of God, but it can show what parts of the brain light up on functional magnetic imaging studies or PET scans when we feel the presence of God or have spiritual experiences, and we can confirm that not everyone who has extraordinary spiritual experiences is having temporal lobe epilepsy.
Science probably has limits for helping us to make people heal better. All things being equal, it can compare two very similar treatments to each other. It can detect dangerous treatments, such as ibuprofen's adverse effects upon the heart and kidneys. But it can't help us as much as we wish to help people feel better. Proving the existence of auras doesn't do much to tell us how to work constructively to heal the aura.
