Problem with Health Care: High Cost and High Dependency

The dual problem of healthcare cost inflation and chronic dependency on the healthcare system are driving patient to seek better forms of healthcare in Functional Medicine where there is a greater potential for achieving unprecedented levels of health restoration and financial savings. Functional Medicine is a crucial antidote to an increasingly unstable healthcare system. There are many issues with Western medicine, but to dissect all of these, this article would turn into a series of books that would take eons to read. The dual problem of healthcare cost inflation and chronic dependency on the healthcare system are the few issues that I would like to briefly address here.

As healthcare costs become increasingly unsustainable beyond normal variability of inflation, the patient is left with many concerns beyond just what their pocketbook allows for them to spend in a desperate fight to regain health. The frequency at which costly disease management strategies that only address the symptoms are applied is increasing while most of these management strategies completely miss and bypass the root cause of the conditions, with hardly a thought to exploration of the potential of disease reversal.

Rather than looking beneath the assortment of symptoms and diagnoses to find the underlying causes of their health problems including all triggers, antecedents and mediators, patients with chronic conditions are encouraged to follow costly, often lifelong medication regimens that lead to further compounding side-effects that they already were experiencing - just for the chase of a desperate hope for occasional and fleeting days of freedom from symptoms.

Since Functional Medicine uncovers and addresses the underlying causes of the common conditions that afflict a growing number of people, it has the greatest potential for achieving unprecedented levels of health restoration and financial savings. Take autoimmune diseases, diabetes, digestive issues, cardiovascular concerns, to name only a few - when patients turn toward an integrative health care approach in Functional Medicine, there is potential to be liberated from their dependence on costly medications that were not designed to address the root causes of their disease.

It seems like a no brainer to go the Functional Medicine route over western medicine, however, initially patients may have a difficult time in reorienting their perspective on the way they "invest in their health." This is because we are trained to depend on our medical insurance to pay for our health care. We are paying so much money toward our premiums, deductibles, coinsurance and copays, so why shouldn't it at least balance out to give us something back? We all expect an adequate "Return on Investment (ROI)." Furthermore, medications are increasingly expensive and are rarely ever covered in full by insurance, sometimes leaving hundreds of dollars more per month for patients to pay to receive the medications their western medicine doctors convinced them would help relieve their symptoms. Instead of spending this money on these high insurance premiums, medications, and costly health care programs that give very little return on investment in the way of health results and outcomes, why can we not all begin to turn our perspectives toward investing in the Functional Medicine targeted approach?

There must be a collective shift for us to break free of the antiquated western health care model. And thankfully, there appears to be a burgeoning drive toward Functional Medicine. More than one million annual searches are conducted on the Institute of Functional Medicine's Practitioner database. Dr. Leila Doolittle has worked with hundreds of patients that have found their way to her through their digital searches, desperate for a new way of regaining their health by answering the core underlying issues of their health concerns with a targeted and specific Functional Medicine health plan.

Learn more about Dr. Leila Doolittle's Functional Medicine approach on our About: Functional Medicine Page.

To schedule a free phone consultation with Dr. Leila Doolittle to discuss how the Functional Medicine approach can help you achieve your health goals, email us at info@drleiladoolittle.com or call us at 405-771-6485.