Health care has been heavily on my mind recently. Maybe because it has been spoken of at length during our provincial election. Maybe it is because of recent appointments or changes bound to come in our system. It has definitely been affected by the video that went viral about a poor mom who went undiagnosed for two years. Either way, I have been losing sleep over many different issues.
In this Part I about our health care, I wanted to bring up the idea of maintaining health and what we are told versus what can actually be carried out.
The ill and disabled are often viewed as non-contributing members of society. I won't get into all of the different reasons why this is absolutely not true.
What I do want to talk about is the fact that that thought tends to encourage the idea that funding should be cut for those people because they don't contribute.
When I was young, it was very normal to have regular appointments with a family physician. Not just once a year. We were all encouraged to see a physician once every 6 months, or 3 months for those who have some sort of chronic illness.
After being diagnosed with Ulcerative Colitis, I was told that I would be essentially married to my physicians.
It was vital to see my doctors every three months. Not only if there was an issue. Not just for prescription refills. A regular appointment - to maintain. A real checkup where we TALKED about recent symptoms, potential side effects, general mood, sleeping and eating habits, and any pain or discomfort. You would walk in and every single time you would be weighed, measured, and have your vitals checked. This was policy. This was law, as I understood it.
This does not happen anymore.
We have lost our ability to maintain the health of patients.
Whether that is because there are too many patients and fewer doctors, or lack of funding, or the rise of patients with google-degrees demanding thorough care every week or two, or the cap on medical school residents ... I don't know. I don't know exactly which factors are causing the most unrest. What I DO know is that maintenance is no longer a priority, and that is confounding the problem. I also know that, in my personal experience, my doctors would LOVE to provide the care we once had. For some reason, however, they have lost that opportunity.
So patients, like myself, are left to fend for themselves until something goes really wrong. We are encouraged to take care of as many of our symptoms and side effects ourselves until we have our yearly follow-up. We have lost the maintenance - which means we may be suffering for months and months, using the Emergency Rooms when we have lost the ability to deal with the issues on our own. My doctors and specialists have always gone above and beyond for me - for what they are able to provide. Things have changed. Their hands are tied.
Now, instead of tackling symptoms and side effects as they affect us, and preventing or dealing with those fallouts every three months, we have to document them and give our doctors an entire LIST of issues at our yearly checkup.
What does this result in?
A ONE-ISSUE-PER-VISIT policy. (I will discuss this in another post).
What would happen if we were able to get back to an attitude of maintenance? What if we put the priority back on monitoring patients and helping them tackle issues that can be taken care of if we are all seeing each other regularly?
When that system was working, guess how many more chronically ill patients were still able to work and be productive?
As much as we, chronic illness patients, know our bodies, we are not physicians. We don't always know that the recent fatigue we have been feeling, along with the rise in muscle twitches, and pain in our legs and ribs and joints, can actually be signs of something bigger; something dangerous. So we write down these symptoms to ask our specialists about the next time we see them (in 8 months).
I am not placing blame here. The blame is spread all around. What I do know is that maintenance and monitoring can help every single person. I also know that cuts to funding and caps on doctors and threatening privatization are all going to make this problem a lot larger.
On the up-side - if it gets worse, you won't have to worry about us chronically ill patients anymore. We may all simply die off slowly, in our beds, trying to fend for ourselves while our bodies kill and torture us... All while we try to decide whether or not our symptoms warrant bugging our specialists about. Or become destitute trying to pay for health care.
(Okay that was a bit dramatic, but I hope I am getting my point across).
Somehow, we need to get back to an attitude where we would notice and take care of subtle changes in our systems before they become these monumental problems that take years to rectify.
Maintenance is key. It is the key to better health care, better productivity, faster diagnoses, better medication management, and catching issues before they become dangerous or even deadly.
