In a recent post, The Myth of Evidence Based Medicine, I explained that conventional medicine is based not on evidence, but on profit.

So how’s this working out for us?

The U.S. spends far more than any other country in the world on healthcare – a whopping $2 trillion per year.

Considering this enormous expenditure, we should have the best medicine in the world. We should be reversing disease, preventing disease, and doing minimal harm.

But that’s not what’s happening at all. The U.S. ranks just 34th in the world in life expectancy and 29th for infant mortality. Of 13 countries in a recent comparison, the United States ranks an average of 12th (second from bottom) for 16 available health indicators.

Even worse, a study published a few years back in JAMA suggested that medical care may be the leading cause of death in the US. (For more on this, read my article The Failure of U.S. Healthcare).

Yes, you read that right. Medical care kills more people than heart disease, strokes or cancer.

How can it be that we spend nearly 16% of our GDP on healthcare, but have one of the worst health care systems in the industrial world?

The answer, in short, is that we don’t have healthcare in the U.S.. We have disease management. And there’s a world of difference between the two:

Wellness care is what we need. Disease management is what we have.

Wellness care would save insurance companies billions of dollars each year. But it would devastate the bottom lines of the pharmaceutical industry.

Wellness care is what I will offer my patients. And it’s the vision I have for what medicine could be here in the U.S. and elsewhere.

I’m just not holding my breath. Until we can lessen the influence of Big Pharma, disease management will rule.

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