What Good Is an Illness If Doctors Can’t Prescribe a Medication or Do Surgery?

The cover of the current issue of BusinessWeek (Sept. 25) asks the question: "What’s Really Propping Up the Economy?" Turns out it’s the healthcare industry, which has added 1.7 million jobs since 2001, versus no job growth in the rest of the private sector. This article is worth a read to gain a sense of the dimensions of health care’s influence on our economy. But it is also instructive in appreciating why the medical establishment, both in the U.S. and Europe,  approaches treatments the way it does.  Consider two random situations that just happened to come up in the media today:

–There’s lots of excitement in Big-Pharma-land because of a drug being tested thathas shown evidence it can reduce the chances of developing Type 2 diabetes, according to a report in today’s NYTimes. Big Pharma types see it as a new statin-type drug–the cholesterol-lowering drug class that is generating many millions in revenues because people take it forever, or otherwise till their livers give out. But a UK official of a diabetes advocacy group expresses concern: “We’re worried that people may think there’s a quick fix, when what is proved to work is lifestyle changes. For the moment, we don’t think we can solve this epidemic with a pill.” She doesn’t get it, does she? If the drug generate big profits, who cares about silly matters like side effects or that patients remain susceptible to other lifestyle-related conditions, like arthritis? Oh, I forgot, there’s Vioxx for arthritis.

–Kitty Dukakis, wife of the former Democratic presidential candidtate, Michael Dukakis, today in the Boston Globe Magazine describes her experiences using electric shock treatments to relieve her depression. She wonders why it’s taken the medical establishment so long to re-accept shock, after it went out of vogue in the 1950s and 1960s. Well, one reason is that drugs for treating depression, taken on a daily basis, are much more profitable than some electric shock treatments administered every six months or a year.

The medical establishment hates it when you pursue treatments that don’t require drugs or surgery. Those are where the money is. Everything else is chicken-feed.