What Doctors Get Wrong About Health

BY SOFO ARCHON

This is the transcript of a spontaneous talk.

Doctors, who are there to help us stay healthy, actually have a very limited understanding of health and disease.

You see, doctors tend to view the human body as a complex machine, and their job as that of a mechanic who is there to fix that machine when it breaks down or when it stops functioning normally. So when a patient goes to a doctor, the doctor tries to find out what is the part of the patient’s bodily machine that is problematic, and tries to address the problem on that level by fixing that part. And he or she usually does that by giving the patient a pharmaceutical, chemical drug.

That approach is very effective when it comes to treating acute conditions—conditions that are sudden and severe, such as infections or injuries or surgical emergencies. But when it comes to treating chronic conditions, that approach is quite ineffective and often immensely dangerous.

Despite the tremendous medical progress that has been made over the last 100 years or so, chronic conditions such as hypertension, heart disease, diabetes, autoimmune conditions, and depression are all on the rise and are the leading causes of death and disability worldwide. So why is that? The reason for that is that chronic diseases are multifactorial. They have a lot of different causes, not just biological. Hence, a drug alone cannot treat them.

Let’s say that a patient who is suffering from type 2 diabetes visits a doctor to ask for help. That doctor might provide the patient with chemical drugs that help manage blood sugar levels. Now the patient might find some relief from that, and be able to more or less manage their condition, but they will not be able to get rid of it. They will not be able to heal from that condition because that condition usually involves other factors in its development, such as psychological factors or social factors or factors that have to do with one’s lifestyle and habits.

For instance, a person who is suffering from type 2 diabetes might be obese. A lot of people who suffer from that condition suffer as a result of their obesity. Now, that obesity could be the result of one’s unresolved emotional traumas. It has been documented; a lot of studies have been done that show that people who are traumatized might end up overeating. Another reason why a person might be obese is that that person might come from very low socioeconomic backgrounds. That person might be poor, so poor in fact that they do not have the money to buy healthy foods. Or that person might not be educated enough to know what kind of foods are healthy. So by giving that person a drug, that drug is not going to do much in the long run. The condition will keep on existing and possibly getting worse over time.

To give you another example, let’s say that a person goes to a doctor due to suffering from depression. That doctor might give that person antidepressants, and those antidepressants might provide that person with some temporary relief. But they’re also not going to get rid of depression because depression is also multifactorial. It has more causes than just biological. Depression is often the result of psychological trauma. People who were severely emotionally traumatized tend to experience depression the most. Or a person might be experiencing depression because he or she has to, day in, day out, undergo tremendous pain and stress, working in highly exploitative, inhumane conditions, doing a job that he or she hates—a meaningless job that does not provide that person any joy and purpose in his or her life. How can a drug alone heal such a person? It is impossible.

Now, I’m not saying that drugs are necessarily bad and that they have no role to play in healing. But when they alone are used to heal complex conditions, they are usually doing more harm than good. For example, antidepressants have severe side effects. So for doctors to help their patients heal, they need to stop seeing them as biological machines and start seeing them in their wholeness. In fact, the word wholeness and the word health share a common root: The Greek word ὅλος, which means whole.

So doctors need to attend to and acknowledge all the aspects that make us human. They need to see humans in all of their dimensions—not just the biological one, but also the psychological and the social and the natural or environmental. Only then will they be able to treat chronic diseases. And only then will their patients feel understood and be able to take an active role in their healing.

How things are now, patients feel that they are not being understood by their doctors. They feel that they’re just seen as a set of symptoms or diseases, not as persons. And because of that—because of this lack of empathy between the doctor and the patient—the patients don’t truly feel supported or cared for, which is a crucial element in the healing process. And that, of course, is not just because doctors tend to view the human body as a machine, but also because of the economic conditions that the doctors themselves are living in. Because doctors too are engaged in a system that forces them to be as efficient as possible, to see as many patients as possible, or to generate as much profit as possible.

So most doctors view their patients for just 15 minutes or so every time a patient visits them. So how can they have the time to understand a person’s background, a person’s story? How can they know where that person is coming from? And hence, how can they address the condition that they are suffering from?

Over two and a half thousand years ago, the famous Greek physician Hippocrates said that, for a doctor, it is more important to know what sort of person is suffering from a disease than what sort of disease that person is suffering from. In the past, even just a few decades ago, a lot of doctors used to still visit their patients in their houses and to know their history—to know their family history, to know the tragic events that their patients have gone through, to know the socioeconomic circumstances that they are living in. And this way they were more able to effectively treat their patients. Nowadays, doctors just give their patients drugs and that’s it. The patient does not even understand why they are suffering from the disease that they are suffering from, nor do they take any active role in their healing process. The patient just patiently waits, just ingests a drug and that’s it.

But for healing to happen, especially when it comes to chronic conditions, the patient needs to take an active role in his or her healing process. The patient needs to feel empowered to take action through self-awareness and lifestyle choices to make change in his or her life. So for doctors to be great healers, they need to be educated about the many factors that lead to disease.

Nowadays, most doctors are not aware of those factors. For example, most doctors are not taught at university anything about nutrition. They don’t understand the relationship between nutrition and disease, or they are not taught anything about the impacts of emotional trauma on our health. But I think most importantly, doctors should learn not just how to treat disease, but also how to prevent disease. And for that a holistic approach is required.

But of course, doctors themselves are not enough to significantly improve public health unless wider social and economic changes are being made. As long as people live in a competitive environment where inevitably some people end up in poverty, or where most people are forced to do work that they hate and hence experience stress day in and day out, unless the environment stops being polluted, unless unhealthy foods stop being advertised as good, unless so many things happen, people will remain in a big number unhealthy.

So the change does not have to be focused only on the individuals, but on the systems, on the society, on the culture that we are living in. And now we are living in a sick society, in a sick culture that is inundated with systems that structurally produce disease. So we have to think what changes do we need to make as people, as a collective, to foster an environment that results in healthy individuals and does not produce sickness on a mass scale.