Last week I gave a speech at my Toastmasters club on the importance of connection in healthcare. I don’t want to brag, but it was a great speech. The presentation and content were both on point.
Part of speaking at Toastmasters is receiving evaluations. During the evaluation portion, since the content and delivery were good, my evaluator instead suggested that I should start my speech by sharing what makes me able to speak on the topic. How about because I’m interested. Let me start by saying that I love the person who evaluated me, but she has a background in government. I’ll leave it at that.
One of the biggest problems we have in society is the belief that only certain people, the “experts” should be allowed to share their opinion on any topic. This was basically her argument. I need to list my background and qualifications before suggesting any solution. Here are my qualifications. I am a human. I’ve been studying this. I have shared what I studied. I am qualified.
The gist of my speech is that healthcare is broken. Doctors are overworked with a patient load that is more than they can handle and this prevents people from being seen. Few people actually are seen in the current model because there are high utilizers who take more time from the doctor than most of the other patients. Given the time constraints of the doctor, all solutions are pharmaceutically based and there is no true path to healing. Solutions are therefore an attempt merely to relieve symptoms and the patient never actually gets any better.
The vast majority of diseases people seek treatment for are lifestyle related and can be healed through a combination of diet, movement, community, sleep, and prayer. The problem with the system is that you can tell people that, but without helping them, they will never achieve that. The doctor does not have the time to help people in that way using the traditional model, but through group visits and health coaches, people can get the support they need to actually heal themselves.
It shouldn’t matter who I am with that message. The fact is we heal in community and we are seriously lacking community these days. I honestly believe it’s the biggest reason that society is as sick as it is.
I had this realization at church a while back and sure enough, doing a quick web search, I found that statistically, churchgoers are healthier and live longer. I am 100 percent sure it is entirely due to being connected with a community.
I’ve been thinking about this for days now and then something hit me this morning during my Bible study. Credentialism is nothing new, and it’s got a history of being used by the ruling classes. Jesus and his relationship with the Pharisees is the exact same thing.
For the last three years, we have been told to trust the experts when the experts were, and still are, clearly wrong. It’s only by listening to people who take a step back and look at things from a new perspective that we grow. Of course, there’s the old saying, “If you’re a hammer, everything looks like a nail.” To certain people in healthcare, they only saw one solution, and many people bought it. To people entrenched in healthcare, they are so convinced their way is right that more of the same is their only solution.
One of the best books I’ve read in the last few years is Range by David Epstein and in it, he argues that specialization is both overrated and often harmful, and having a generalized knowledge is often where we find our best solutions because we are able to see problems from a different perspective. And yes, I have a monkey mind, I am a generalist, and I love it.
I’ll end with this. You don’t need to be a doctor or a healthcare administrator or a public health official to see that our healthcare system is broken. And you don’t need to have a degree to be able to read and share information that clearly shows there are solutions to the problems we are having. You also don’t need to be a genius to see that the current healthcare system is not implemented with the best interest of the people it’s supposed to care for. It has become more concerned with profit and healthy people don’t provide profit to the system we have. In other words, they want you sick. The system, not the doctors. Doctors want to help, but just because they are intelligent enough to graduate medical school it doesn’t make them immune to being sheep to the system.
I hope you enjoyed this. I enjoyed writing it. If you’re interested at all in what I am currently reading, before bed every night I am currently enjoying Deep Nutrition by Dr Cate Shannahan. I’m currently listening to Find Your People by Jennie Allen and really enjoying it. If you are struggling to find connections it’s a really good listen. I am rereading and recently started a father/son small group and together we are working on The Intentional Father by Jon Tyson. That is a fantastic book and really inspiring me to step up my dad game.
