Episode Eight: It's all about Numbers

As we delve into the dysfunction of our health care system, the most salient problem is that of numbers.  We as doctors and as a profit-driven health care mega-complex have reduced patients into a series of measurements that, if abnormal, label them with defined diseases and subject them to number-fixing treatments.  Whether medicines to lower sugars and cholesterol, stents to fix blocked arteries, medicines to "fix" low bone density, or going on blood thinners to cure afib, we are tabulated into numerical disease states and carved up and treated.  Patients love this stuff; it fits well into their cognitive biases that everything is measurable and fixable.  I mean, who would want to walk aroud with a 90% heart blockage or a bad bone density if they can be fixed, and why not get the sugar and blood pressure as low as possible?  Sadly, though, none of this helps the person being "fixed." Doctors don't care if patients get sick in the process, if they feel horrid, if they become more medicalized and anxious; the drive to slice people into numbers and fix those numbers is ingrained into the very ethos of American health care.  And what's worse, we keep changing the "normal" numbers so more and more people are abnormal, more people think they are sick, thus creating "numerical epidemics" like diabetes and hypertension that leads to more drugs and tests and procedures and more $$$ for doctors and industry at the expense of longevity and quality of life.  To understand everything wrong with health care, you must first understand just how dangerous it is to treat people as numbers.