Time conflicts in health and wealth

One of the biggest conflicts in the "market" of health care is the problem of time. There is an old saying that time heals all wounds. While this is not a quality control statement, as in time heals the loss of a loved one much more cleanly than time heals an untreated broken bone, there is still an element of reality about this statement to the healing process. In most cases the body, that which is being treated for health care, is a living, changing thing that has a plan for its own recovery over time. One of the reasons health care is progressive is that it can speed up the healing process with treatments. One of the biggest examples of this is orthopaedic practice in sports. Athletes whose knee injuries used to end their careers are now back in the game in weeks. The big motivation for speeding up such healing is obviously money. That athlete is a multi-million dollar player and healing the money makers keeps the market going. Being able to contribute a money saving procedure into a big money business like sports also keeps the economy going. But not all injury occurs in an environment where such vast amounts of money are on the line. At a certain point, the costs of speeding up healing have to be weighed against the available money for doing so. In the past, antibiotics became over used because they were taken when the real answer for the flu was rest. But we have an unforgiving society that perceives stopping to rest as a character flaw, so almost no one will actually rest for the amount of time needed to recover from a cold or flu or other small setback. Staying home for a week to recover from the flu is now seen as too much loss in job time to be considered a legitimate choice for health care. The answer now is to get the flu pill and not miss any days. These social changes indicate a serious change of philosophy about the purpose of living. The person whose life can stop to get well is a person who has self respect and individuality. A person who doesn't dare get sick because money will be lost to someone whether it is an employer or his own household is a slave to money. I am talking about attitude here, not literal slavery. Much of the American citizen's disgust with health care in the year 2010 is because since the year 1980 no one has been willing to wait to heal. The whole concept that healing is a process that requires diagnosis, treatment, adjustment to individual aspects of healing and time has been replaced by the demand, " Where is the pill to fix this?" People rail against the drug companies for eating up most of the money for health care, but just like our dependence on oil, the providers are only marketing to the demand. Whether legal or illegal, prescribed or self medicated, we have a generation of health care users who do not want to change their lives, their diets, their work habits or their expectations, they just want a pill to make it so they can keep doing whatever it is they wanted to do without the pain, stress, or work. Thus, making money became a big part of health care. If you are the kind of person who is willing to drop out of the fast paced world of high expectations and choose a slower method of healing, you do not have to buy anything. If you are a person who needs to keep up with the world of fast, hard work no matter what, you will buy anything you feel is needed to do that. (This is the primary reason Cocaine is so popular in the USA, but that is another story.) But even after the fall out of the great pill age, where the next generation is reacting with narrow minded attachments to all things natural in a way that would make the average Amish man think them obsessive, the element of time has still been ignored. In markets, time is money, money is time. It is very simple to understand the world that says the less time you spend the more money you make. That world prints out in black and white, the numbers add up and the computer understands it. The worker does not really have to understand it, because the machine does, and the worker can function as the machine instructs him or her. The problem is that that world is not an exhaustive enough picture for health care. The classic word for knowledge that included a sense of the necessary timing of change, recovery, and development was wisdom. Wisdom takes time, and wisdom uses time. And wisdom is not really programmable. A decision maker who knows how to seek out useful information that is not already available and then apply it to the individual for optimum benefit of both healing and economic pragmatics is an artist. The medical artist chooses which people he or she will spend time with and which ones will not be given time according to their healing needs. Science applied with only financial principles will fail to heal. Healing requires a priority be given to time and financial principles demand that time be limited regardless of other issues. This truism is chasing doctors out of medical practice and chasing patients away from health care that is based in modern science. Time to treat and time to heal are not cost effective in the modern philosophy of health care. The person is not valued more than the economy (making the person a slave) and the physician is ever conscious of not giving away too much time (making the physician a robot instead of an artist). This is a primary part of our loss of spirit in health care. We have a society wide lack of respect for those in need. They are no longer looked at as the weak, deserving protection and attention, they are looked at as the demanding, who need to be fixed to do their part like the rest of us: the quicker the better. But the demand is really our own expectation. Many people who would be willing to stay home and heal, quit their jobs to care for a loved one, or otherwise make a personal choice that would disrupt economic expectations are driven away from such choices by the voices of those around them who tell them how such things would ruin their lives and or reputations. The caretaker, who used to be the heart of human interaction, and the reason everyone else bothered to make money, has been eliminated as a factor in productivity. "No one cares" is said truly of our health care system, not because the professionals have lost feeling for the people they seek to heal, but because the professional system has eliminated the time for care taking due to an inability to value health over wealth.

From my Grandmother's refrigerator

TAKE TIME
Take time to think; it is the source of power.
Take time to read, it is the fountain of wisdom.
Take time to play, it is the secret of staying young.
Take time to be quiet; it is the opportunity to seek God.
Take time to be aware; it is the opportunity to help others.
Take time to love and to be loved, it is God's greatest gift.
Take time to laugh, it is music of the soul,
Take time to be friendly; it is the road to happiness.
Take time to dream; it is what the future is made of.
Take time to pray; it is the greatest power on earth.