Has this happened to you? You find yourself sitting in your doctor’s office waiting room. It’s full of patients transmitting whatever virus or bug they have into a collective soup of infectious air.
As you wait for what seems like hours (or maybe it actually is!) for your five minute chat with your primary-care doctor, your blood pressure increases and you feel the receptionist glaring at you. You imagine she’s blaming you for the overflow of patients. When it’s finally your turn to see the doctor, a monotone voice declares your name to the room as if you were just a number and not a person with feelings, emotions and needs.
After another twenty-minute wait inside the exam room, your doctor presents and stares at a computer allowing you to talk to the back of his or her head while you explain your health concerns. After you list a few concerns, you are interrupted and asked to focus on “what’s bothering you the most” so as to make the visit more efficient. You see your doctor itching to pull that prescription pad… and finally he does quicker than Clint Eastwood pulled out his Colt 1851 in The Good, Bad, and the Ugly.
Boom! The solution to all your collective problems presents itself in a simple piece of paper. “Take this for a few days and follow up if you don’t improve”.
Feeling robbed, you scamper out of the clinic feeling depleted like a child that doesn’t get enough attention from his parents. You take the prescription medication even after reading the litany of side effects “including death”. Now angry and still having the same problem, you call the clinic to reschedule (as recommended) only to be told another appointment would not be available for “a few weeks”.
So I ask you…are you growing weary of “Co-Pay Medical Care”?
Traditional Medical Practice
This is the term I use to describe a traditional medical practice. It assumes the care of thousands of patients and schedules to capacity as if there were a conveyor belt tunneling people through every ten minutes. Is this what medical care is supposed to look like? Or has the medical model that is most prevalent shifted and shaped itself into survival mode as reimbursements decline and cost of operating a medical business has increased?
The truth is that most medical practices have to see four-patients-an-hour or 25 patients day… just to break even! Now I’ll hold back on tuning my violin for now, but the economics of a standard medical practice does influence care. Of that, there is no question!
A Better Option
The truth is that there are better options for those looking for comprehensive preventative and personalized medical care: Medical Care that links all your symptoms and underlying health problems and utilizes a multi-disciplinary team approach to address the underlying cause of the problems rather than a ‘throw-a-prescription-at-it and hope it goes away approach’. It’s an approach that dives deeper into human nutrition and biochemistry to unveil fundamental hormone, nutritional, and/or inflammatory imbalances that collectively predispose and contribute to health problems.
Wouldn’t it be nice to have a personal relationship with your doctor and have a care team that knows you well and calls you by name when you walk through the door?
Are you growing weary of Co-Pay Medical Care?
To your health,
Brian E Lamkin DO