When you work in healthcare and particularly in the mental health arena, nowhere is it more evident that our system is ineffective, enables dependency, costs a fortune and likes to grab and keep people entrenched in the system instead of making them healthier. The blinders fell off somewhere in the first decade of my nursing career, and they’ve stayed off to where my disappointment has turned into a quite rumbling rage. Lives are destroyed under the guise that our healthcare system is about health—when in fact it is all about the money. Never mind the fraud, rote mechanical responses and ineffective treatment plans—all of that contributes to our fruitless system, because the real goal for all healthcare establishments is to increase their bottom lines.
If more people understood that healthcare is a business—a business that provides services with the goal to make a profit, would people assume more control over their health? If people understood that in order for our current system to be profitable, hospitals and doctors need a steady flow of customers…if this fact was forefront in our minds, would we open our eyes and change our behavior?
Do consumers understand that the hospitals gain nothing when people achieve a state of wellness, but they stand to gain a whole lot if they can keep you hopeful that they are helping—but not hopeful enough to be fully cured? As I mentioned, nowhere is that sort of mentality more obvious than in the mental health and substance abuse arena. Families are desperate for help. Services are shoddy, limited, or ineffective. I knew for certain we were in trouble when I sat in treatment team one morning and the doctor talked about how he encourages his patients that are in their twenties and thirties to get on Medicaid programs for their substance abuse disability. The worst thing that can happen to an addict is to provide them with a structure where they can continue to comfortably use drugs/alcohol. Enabling people to stay sick removes any accountability or incentive for them to clean up their lives. In addition, as far as other mental health concerns, the most any doctor will offer a mental health patient is medication, and they prescribe a whole lot of it—while more often than not, the person’s life continues to deteriorate.
Time to Wake Up and Speak Up?
What our current healthcare system does brilliantly more than anything is cost a fortune, keeps people trapped, enables those who want to abuse the system to abuse the system, and fails those that want help. After twenty-four years of working in healthcare, I have developed opinions and views that would be impossible to have had I not become a registered nurse and worked in the system and seen firsthand how this all works. I am also a recovering alcoholic so please spare me the lecture that I don’t understand addiction, because I understand it all too well and what the hospitals do is anything but offer help to the addict. The doctors continue to think they can medicate someone out of their substance abuse and depression, and what that ongoing practice does is keep people stuck in their disease sometimes decades longer than they should. What a disgrace.
Our Healthcare System is Sick.
If more consumers would stop accepting the status quo and take more of their healthcare into their own hands, we might see more wellness. If we continue on the way we are—particularly in the mental health arena, we will continue to see doctors and hospitals help people to live half-lived lives, families will continue to be destroyed, and the only winners in all that sea of misery will continue to be the hospitals and pharmaceutical companies who make money whether or not the patient gets well.
The reason why nothing gets better or changes is because few if any are willing to change their way of thinking. As one doctor in recovery pointed out “That’s the way it’s always been done and no one wants to change.”
Too many doctors are bogged down in the system as well and they don’t always care if what they do works for you. Their lives will go on regardless. They will go home to their families and do what they do, and if you’re at home suffering, well—make an appointment. Studies have shown that I doctor gives a patient all of 12 seconds, another study said 18 to 23 seconds. Regardless, the exact number of seconds isn’t what’s important, but what is important is for you to realize that you have seconds to talk. Why would anyone put the balance of their life and their mental health into the hands of someone who will tell you what you need in a matter of seconds?
My suggestion: reclaim your power and stop racing to the doctor for every real or perceived malady or feeling that’s uncomfortable. The health care system won’t change, but people can change their dependence on the health care system. We can change our perception of what they can and cannot do.
Modern medicine has its miracles, and I have seen those as well—people recover from unspeakable traumas and diseases, and some surgeries are lifesaving—but here’s a reality check. The third leading cause of death in the United States is due to medical errors, after the top two killers, heart disease, and cancer.
After working in healthcare for twenty-four years, I can tell you—it’s not as safe as you think. The hospitals are a cesspool of germs. People can acquire life-threatening infections such as MRSA just from going to the hospital. Couple that with overprescribing, medication errors, and incompetent staff. Mistakes happen all the time in all departments. I’ve thought about speaking up for years, but when I was raising my boys it was easier to go with the flow and accept that our system is not perfect but it was all we had. I guess I’ve reached the point where feel at least I can do my small part and offer up another perspective. Of course, it doesn’t fit the narrative that the hospitals want you to believe that they care about their patients. No, what they care about is accreditation, money, and not getting sued.
If we want wellness, we need to be personally accountable to pursue wellness through lifestyle changes. We have to get away from thinking that some person in a white coat has all of the answers. We would all benefit from taking a few steps back from traditional medicine, and ask, do I want a quick fix that’s sure to include a lot of pills, or do I want to be an active participant and make the necessary lifestyle changes that will offer long-term benefits?
It’s a conversation worth having, but some people get quite angry when you suggest they need to assume more accountability for their health. If people would eat better, exercise, and get honest about their alcohol and/or drug use, much of the illnesses wouldn’t exist. When I worked in the ED it became quite obvious that the majority of people were there because of illnesses secondary to obesity or drug and alcohol abuse.
If people don’t want to help themselves, what can healthcare really offer besides a handful of pills?
We need a radical shift away from pharmaceuticals. The only way to wellness is through a more holistic approach. Only then, will people see the sort of changes in their lives that they had hoped to see with medication.