When Specialties Don’t Work

What's wrong with this picture?

 Jamie goes to the general practitioner for her lower back pain, who does some testing and thinks it's a kidney problem, who then sends her to nephrologist, the nephrologist, after looking at the kidney says its a muscle problem, who then sends her to the physiatrist, the physiatrist tests some muscles and range of motion, and after not finding much says it's all in her head, then sends her to the psychiatrist who is so booked with regulars getting their weekly fix of legal drugs that he only has time to write her a scrip for depression and walk out the door.

This cost weeks, probably months (maybe year!), of time.  It cost thousands upon thousands of dollars.  And Jamie still doesn't have an answer.  Now, I'm not blaming any of these physicians, they all did their best with their schooling, and I'm not going to provide an answer to Jamie's problem.  What I am doing is pointing out a system that is broken by "specialization."

Don't get me wrong, I want the surgeon who has done nothing for the past twenty years but specialize in his/her brain cutting skills when removing something from the inside of my head.  I want him to be that good.  But when it comes to health, general health -- when it comes to wellness -- specialization doesn't work.  Our body didn't read the textbook.  It didn't know to separate itself into neat little subcategories.  No, the body was formed from the millions of illiterate cells learning to work together in a perfect, infinitely complicated symphony.  As a result, when we have a special problem, it's much bigger and more complicated then we think.  We have a big picture problem, not a specialist problem.

We need to break down the barriers in human healing and stop treating the biological systems like automobiles, and start treating them more like a gardner would with his plants.  We need to realize that the foot bone really is connected to the knee bone, et cetera et cetera, and that a problem in any specialist part of the body most likely changes everything else in the body.  We need to treat whole human beings, not parts.