Modern Medicine: Killing You or Saving Your Life?

Dr Lisa Rankin writes about a TedX talk she gave, at the onset, on the subject: “Is Your Doctor Killing You?”
Entire article can be found at WWW.MINDBODYGREEN.COM …

I had an angst-filled week as I prepared for the TEDx talk I just gave in Fargo, North Dakota, and it took me a while to figure out the source of my angst. The speech I had written was initially titled, “Is Your Doctor Killing You?” and it was all about how preventable medical error is the #3 cause of death, behind heart disease and cancer but ahead of chronic lung disease and stroke.

It wasn’t just about medical error. It was about the very nature of the pill-popping medical culture that doctors and patients alike have adopted, a culture that is more about slapping Band-aids on symptoms than on healing from the root. The case I was trying to make in my TEDx talk is that doctors need to help patients illuminate stressors in their lives that might be contributing to health issues. And patients need to take responsibility for how their stressful lifestyles might be causing or exacerbating their health conditions, rather than just covering up the symptoms with the Band-aid of more pills or more surgery. That we need not just drugs, but soul medicine as well. That’s when I realized there’s this whole polarity in medicine between two often vehemently aggressive camps. There’s the closed-minded Western medical camp who believes that it’s all bunk unless you can prove it in a randomized controlled clinical trial. (These are the mind-body skeptics for whom I wrote Mind Over Medicine! For years, I was firmly in this camp. Dr. Paul Offit, who wrote Do You Believe In Magic, is still firmly in this camp.)