Heart Failure or Medical Institution Failure?

If you or someone you know has heart disease, the book to read is Dean Ornish, MD’s Reversing Heart Disease. This writer, a Harvard cardiac surgeon, tells you how to reverse heart disease without surgery or drugs. Plus you’ll learn some amazing, head-spinning facts that make you wonder about how flawed our health care system is in the United States. Dr Ornish writes:

…the third party reimbursement system (health insurance, Medicare, etc.) encourages the use of drugs and surgery rather than health education. In America, more money is spent on treating heart disease than any other illness — $78 billion annually. Last year, over $7 billion was spent on bypass surgery in this country. If I perform bypass surgery on a patient, the insurance company will pay at least $30,000. If I perform a balloon angioplasty on a patient, the insurance company will pay at least $7,500. If I spend the same amount of time teaching a heart patient about nutrition and stress managemet techniques, the insurance company pay no more than $150. If I spend that time teaching a well person how to stay healthy, the insurance company will not pay at all.

It is not surprising that doctors tend to spend time on what is reimbursed, especially since we do not learn much in medical school about nutrition or how to motivate patients to change their lifestyles. W are not taught skills for copying with stress in our own lives or for teaching these skills to our patients. So doctors practice medicine in ways that we are trained to do and in ways that we are paid to do.