Hello and Welcome Back!
Thank you for following along.
So, what happens when your treatment program doesn’t seem to work for you?
Most times a person is told to continue and believe in the process, or perhaps they refer you to some other specialist who scratches his head, too!
Too often people present to their doctor, are given a diagnosis and a course of treatment that has to be administered by the patient himself!
Get this…,
The guy with all the training has just made the guy without any training the doctor, and the doctor never follows through to see how good of a doctor his patient is being to himself!
We see this all the time with antibiotic prescriptions.
Patients are given a one size fits all broad-spectrum antibiotic that they are told to take for a week or 10 days, and which most stop taking as soon as they feel better because,
“I really hate taking pills!”
And in turn, the patient now creates a superbug which is immune to antibiotics!
Here’s another reason…,
If a treatment program doesn’t seem to be working, the smart doctor will immediately find out exactly what the patient is or is not doing, rather than abandoning the treatment program as unworkable and starting a new course of therapy.
How many times throughout history, and not just in terms of healthcare, has a productive course of action been abandoned because it was reported to not be working by people who misunderstood the process and were unable to apply the correct procedures and get results?
When a workable course of action is applied correctly it miraculously works and the patient gets the results they are looking for.
We see this all the time with dietary recommendations and home exercises. When asked the patient is typically doing something incorrectly or not at all!
Another reason patients don’t seem to be getting better is that the doctor is treating the wrong problem.
In most cases, the patient really doesn’t know what’s wrong, and any doctor that spends a lot of time trying to treat a patient’s complaints will soon discover he has wasted a lot of time and a lot of the patient’s money.
As odd as this might seem if a person really knew the reason why his elbow was giving him trouble, the problem would practically cure itself…, poof! It’s gone!
If a patient is in a doctor’s office saying that his elbow hurts from playing too much tennis, and he is still sitting there or presented in the first place, the first thing we know is that it isn’t an elbow problem from playing too much tennis.
The correct reason why is the cure!
On the other hand, a doctor can spend a great deal of time examining a patient’s elbow and can find no explanation for why the patient is having elbow pain, and dismiss the whole thing.
Unfortunately, the pain and dysfunction are very real to the patient, and because it can not be explained and diagnosed does not make it any less real to the patient.
I once read an absence of explanation does not make it an explanation of absence.
These are typically the “medical misfits” who eventually wander into chiropractor’s offices.
I personally think that the main reason patients don’t seem to be getting well is because most healthcare practitioners miss the obvious, and are unaware of the fact that for whatever reason that person standing there is asking for help, and for what…, most have no idea.
They just know they need help, and are now vulnerable because they realize they are unable to do for themselves.
Healthcare practitioners spend a lot of time trying to figure out what’s wrong and providing a solution of some kind, a solution that invariably becomes tomorrow’s problem.
What if your doctor spent more time determining what was right, what was working well, and learning more about what you were able to do and encouraged you to do more of what you can actually do?
How can one fix what only one thinks is broken?
Improve ability and a person will have more ability and more life, isn’t that why you went to the doctor in the first place?
Take Care,
Dr. Dave
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