An article caught my eye on the front page of this past Sunday’s New York Times which focused on hospitals that currently offer chefs, butler service, and marble baths to the wealthy class in New York during their hospital stays. The article describes how hospitals across the country are competing “not only on medical grounds and specialties,” but by using Four Seasons décor and pampering.
One can examine this article from many different perspectives, e.g., the obvious growing gap in health inequity detailed in the article where one Columbia University faculty member’s graduate student spent two days on a gurney, in terrible pain, waiting to be seen in the ER of the same hospital. My reading spawned two related writings, both focusing on the current state of our medical care system and its ability to keep our population healthy. The first (Part I) is below, discussing prevention; I will post Part II in a separate piece.
Prevention as a primary goal of our health care system
Take a look at the menu printed on page 2 of the New York Times article – the menu taken from Cornell Hospital’s special unit – hamburgers, pasta, scaloppini…. “We pride ourselves on getting anything the patient wants. If they have a craving for lobster tails…we’ll go out and get them.” While I believe that the usual inedible and nutritionally poor food in hospitals is a major problem, I believe that the menu choices cited in this article indicate a much larger problem: the inability of our major medical institutions to provide their “clients” with individualized and preventive health strategies.
To illustrate, you can now have elective surgery to remove your gall bladder in a hotel-like environment, but be served the same food that helped create the problem in the first place. You can be a cardiac or oncology patient in many major medical institutions and still not receive information about what you can do to prevent your condition from recurring. Nowhere is this more true than in the inability to provide our population with coherent messages regarding the pivotal role of proper nutrition in long-term health, quality of life and longevity.
Individualized medicine is the future of medicine. Individualized information suited to your long-term requirements is the key. My best recommendation, today, is to take a Convergence Medicine approach, to cover all bases, from the best of all medical traditions.
Call us at 415-345-0099 or email info@anataramedicine.com. One of our doctors will be happy to discuss how Convergence Medicine can serve you.