Rethinking the Role of Technology in Health Care

Image Gallery Every 30 seconds, someone in America files for bankruptcy in the aftermath of a personal health care problem. Unless we radically change the present system, health care costs will sink our economy. In “You Can’t Afford to Get Sick,” Andrew Weil, M.D., shows how we have let health and medicine become a crisis in our society, and exactly what we can do to fix it. COVER: HUDSON STREET PRESS

The following is an excerpt from You Can’t Afford to Get Sick by Andrew Weil, M.D. (Hudson Street Press, 2010). In this best-selling book, Dr. Weil, one of the world's foremost authorities on health, wellness and integrative medicine, explains how we can and why we must transform the American health care system to stop making corporations rich, stop making our society poor, and start each of us on the road to optimum health. This excerpt is from Chapter 2, “Exposing the Myths of American Health Care.” 

The rise of scientific medicine in the last century was accompanied and enabled by the phenomenal progress of technology. The benefits of medical technology are obvious. The problems it has caused, including the ways it has warped medical thinking, are not so obvious. But they are very real.

The dazzling effect of technology is a major reason for the health care industry’s lopsided focus on disease management. Priorities of reimbursement both reflect and exacerbate this imbalance. Insurance pays for procedures and drugs, not for lifestyle counseling. This must change if we are to contain costs.

The Congressional Budget Office has reported that 50 percent of the recent increases in the cost of health care are attributable to the introduction of new technology, including pharmaceutical drugs. Something is very wrong here, because in most sectors of the economy, new technology usually brings costs down.

Although I think our high-tech approaches are overrated and overused, I am not a medical Luddite. Medical technology is terrific when it is used appropriately. I would never hesitate to use it for the management of severe, critical, life-threatening conditions. But we are using it for practically everything, and it is costing us far too much — not only in expense but also in harm caused. On top of that, it distracts us from the more important goals of disease prevention and health promotion, and it blinds us to the true nature and source of healing, which is an innate capacity of one’s own body.

The various successes of technological medicine have made the concepts of prevention, health promotion, and the simpler modalities of integrative medicine seem lackluster and old-fashioned. Words like the “healing power of nature” sound distinctly out of context in a contemporary health care facility, with its devices, instruments and drugs. To modern ears, they suggest a bygone era when superstition ruled and the light of scientific knowledge was dim. The time-honored concept of treatment as facilitation of an innate process of healing has been replaced by the belief that treatment itself is the cause of healing and of any recovery. Before the explosive development of medical technology, doctors and patients valued more natural, less invasive therapies, even though these therapies sometimes took more time to help the body heal itself. Today, most doctors and patients prefer drastic interventions that give quick results. Admittedly, treatment of disease is much more exciting than ever before — look at the popularity of television shows about hospitals and operating rooms. Who would want to watch shows about doctors discussing diet with patients?