Current Medical Practice needs to be restructured.

Despite the current medical science and technical advancement, and promises of medical cures, the list of functional disorders seems to be growing. The failure to find the cause in today’s practice means that focusing of treatment falls on the symptoms and our dependence on the trillion-dollar pharmaceutical industry is growing. It is a well-known fact that symptoms are not the disease itself.

The current medical practice disintegrates the integrity of patient as-whole person by outsourcing the problems to talking cure professionals and using psychotropic medication. The delivery of health care seems to be opposed to its application for various reasons such as political, cost-effectiveness, evidence based medicine and bureaucracy.

With the current standardized care system, the compassion is surrendering to science and practitioners, patients and economy are all paying the price.

Doctors are required to practice medicine according to a set guideline or face punitive consequences. Patient’s unhappiness is reflected in the growing trend of litigation.

Health is more than an absence of disease and root cause of patient’s problems could only be found by looking at a patient as a whole-person in a non-standardized practice, with the understanding  that every individual is unique to him or herself. Practitioner require to recognize individual attitude, thoughts, feelings and behavior, and family, social and economic  issues. The body and mind operate as a single system, therefore, patients should not be grouped to be sent to separate body repair shops for physical and mental disorders.

Our disorders are not purely a product of cause-and-effect processes and our thinking processes have a large impact on our health. Our disorders can not be resolves by application of purely mechanistic rules.

In order to achieve whole-person healing, care providers require to engage in a effective communication/relationship with patients that individual patient’s internal-self is clearly recognized, respected and addressed.

Dr G Senanayake.