Is All of This Helping?
IS ALL OF THIS KEEPING US HEALTHIER?
This is a question I have been asking myself quite a bit recently. As those of you who are patients in either or both of my practices know, much of what I have been forced to do by our Commonwealth government has been counter to my overall philosophy regarding Health and Wellness. You see my true philosophy is counter to the "crisis treatment philosophy" of our medical establishment. My overall Health and Wellness philosophy revolves around prevention not necessarily acute care. Although, we certainly do treat a lot of patients who are in an acute, and chronic state. My job then is to correct the underlying cause for their current state, and then see that they never go back there again. I always say that I wear 3 hats in my practices. I am a doctor first, but I am also a teacher, and a coach. All 3 of these hats are necessary to help a patient correct what is wrong and develop a new philosophy. That new philosophy involves changing their belief system relative to what is necessary for them to incorporate into their lives to develop independence in order to progress further down the road on their Health and Wellness journey.
Unfortunately, due to this unprecedented "pandemic" I have had to "bend" my philosophy to continue to care for those patients in need who "qualified" for the care that was permitted. And what was permitted was extremely limited. I was only permitted under the Governor's "guidelines" to treat "Acute Patients". That meant that no "elective care" was permitted. Therefore, I could not assist my patients
in "staying" Healthy and Well.
Unfortunately, what this all meant was that many of my patients who required regular maintenance, or supportive care, which was considered "elective care" by government officials, would deteriorate over the 3 to 4 month period of our restrictions. And they did. To a level that caused many of them to begin to call my office for appointments due to their acute flare ups of their prior conditions. These conditions had previously been managed so that these patients were comfortable, and in most instances totally symptom free.
Fortunately, we are now beginning to get back to some semblance of order in which we can once again care for not only our acute and chronic cases, but also aid our patients in maintaining a pain/symptom free lifestyle. However, our new problem is that we are still required to comply with some of the restrictions such as how many patients are permitted in our office at a time. We are required yet to social distance our patients, and therefore we have a new set of challenges. We simply cannot get all the patients into our office that need our care. I suppose that some would consider that a "good problem" to have. Unfortunately for us it is a frustrating situation. You see our office philosophy is to help all of those who seek our care.
There are several other requirements that we must comply with that totally rub against my grain as well. I understand that we may have needed to do most if not all of the things that we did during the acute phase of the "pandemic", but I question whether some of what we did were the most health promoting techniques that we could have chosen.
I will touch on those in my next installment on this topic.