I've had a big couple of nights, I haven't slept much and I'm definitely not what one would call sober or even close to. Perhaps the conversation I had with @mfxae86 was entire gibberish and I will make no sense. Perhaps I will be informing some people of the clear flaws in the system.
Please note first off, when I say flaws in the system that is not me excluding all legitimate science based medicine or treatments. In fact even the addictive opiods I take issue with still have a place in medicine, they just aren't being used correctly nor responsibly.
Over prescription
The first issue is probably the most important, due to a mixture of reasons addictive painkillers, unnecessary substances and medications are being prescribed at an alarming rate. It seems that band-aid like fixes have become the standard practice. We prescribe one medication for something without fully investigating it, that then causes the patient to require a different medication which in turn means their so and so count becomes low and so on so forth. Over time the cycle of just prescribing things that deal with the symptoms and not the underlying issue becomes a far bigger and unnecessary problem.
Take for example someone who is diagnosed with anxiety like say myself. I'm not using my experience as this example but ; someone is diagnosed with anxiety, they are prescribed such and such, increasing dosage blah blah. They begin to feel some side effects as most medication has, nautious? prescribe anti nausea drugs. The anxiety pills make sleeping difficult? prescribe sleeping pills. All of a sudden anxiety which has been shown possible to be able to be treated without substances is taking 3 different drugs to treat?
Not only does this shit on us as patients and stop us getting to the root issue of our problem but it also simply lines the pockets of pharmaceutical company's. Not conspiracy fact. I'm not saying doctors are in on it, or all of them. I don't think my local GP is doing this because they will make some money, I think they're just brainwashed to genuinely believe that is the best course of action. Others may well do it because it is simply easy for them. One reason why if you manage to find a good doctor who listens and goes through multiple options with you, you should keep em around. I spent a longgggggg time seeing doctors who either didn't take me seriously or didn't even explain it properly to me and just tried to pump me full of shit.
Advancements and keeping up to date
Another thing I think to be a big issue is how quickly medical knowledge become obsolete, plenty of people will tell you that not just in medicine, but most fields, 50% of what you learn is either useless or now considered incorrect.
It made me think of a story someone told me about being diagnosed with such and such. The patient had one form of treatment they thought would be best, the doctor had another. Now obviously they usually know better, they spend years training to be qualified to tell us how to fix ourselves. Of course they think they're right. Problem is as it turns out, this doctor hadn't really dealt with a similar case in years, almost a decade. The information they had was right, 5-6 years ago. Now it's not "wrong" but there were far better and more effective ways to treat the issue.
Obviously things like this are less prevalent in hospitals where staff would encounter a massive range of things on a daily basis and ongoing education is often mandatory. However when it comes to the local gp who is the one usually prescribing us the drugs, our first line of defense, they may well not be up to date with the best methods.
I know there is obviously some mandatory education they would need to keep up with but every country would be different but if they're not paying real close attention plenty of things can slip past their noses.
Dr. Mercola
The results are discussed by lead researcher Dr. Vinay Prasad in the featured video. Prasad and his team found that reversals are common across all classes of medical practice, and a significant proportion of medical treatments offer no benefit at all.
In fact, they found 146 reversals of previously established practices, treatments and procedures over the past 10 years. Many new medical treatments gain popularity over older standards of care due to clever marketing more than solid science.
source
Obviously this is a point where specialists become quite useful but in places like Australia with universal health care it can take months or years to get in to see one, otherwise the price is astronomical. Aside from that many things end up treated by the local GP unless they are quite serious or the GP honestly doesn't know.
mistreatment/misdiagnosis
Far too often you hear about a wrong diagnosis. I will try and make this long story short but basically my mum had an accident, broke her spine and a bunch of other stuff, caused a lot of issues. Fast forward a few years she's pretty much fine but she starts to get breathing problems, They do scans blah blah, decide she needs a "cage" in her neck. Now im not 100% on the details but I think it essentially held everything open and in place.
The surgery required cutting down the back of the neck, peeling away the muscles and inserting the cage, this was painful time consuming and rehab was a bitch. It did however seem to have some effect, her breathing wasn't perfect but it was improved. A week later it all of a sudden got worse again, they did some scans, intubated camera etc and apparently the cage had collapsed. Now from some stretch of the imagination they decided that wasn't the cause. The actual cause was now an "overactive larynx" and the only treatment available was throat exercises. After spending weeks in hospital and being back and forth for uncomfortable follow up appointments she cracked the shits and went home. The breathing was still bad, and then one day she had a coughing fit and out flew a... tooth. A tooth had come loose or fallen out and gotten stuck in her throat. After multiple cameras shoved down there, x rays the works they didn't see it and she went through surgery and everything else for nothing. It was a disaster.
Now thats obviously nothing more than anecdotal evidence however according to Dr. Mark.L.Gaber a senior fellow at the research institute RTI International and founder of the Society to Improve Diagnosis in Medicine.
Misdiagnosis occurs in between 10-20% of all cases annually and that diagnostic errors alone account for up to 10% of all patient deaths. This is an alarming number of lives lost due to misdiagnosis or error.
source
I understand not all of this is preventable, in fact between thousands of diseases there are only really a few hundred symptoms or signs. The problem is when Misdiagnosis occurs due to avoidable circumstance. This can tie in with the lack of necessary up-keeping of knowledge, misplacement or labeling of samples and even simple human error. Whilst no one and no industry is perfect when it comes to our health and the amount of money and time required to be licenced i feel like 20% is far too high of an error margin.
Honestly there are a lot of other issues that I may go through at another time but I am about to fall asleep right now.
These are probably the biggest and most obvious/important to fix issues. at least in my opinion. I know everyone has a bad story about hospitals or whatever but there's a difference between a bad experience at hospital and a shitty system that runs the whole thing.
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