THE NEW ERA OF AMERICAN HEALTH CARE
I started to see that one of the most important things Body Signals could do would be to help the reader function better within the complex world of a rapidly changing health care system. We’re years away from instituting an ideal model of health care reform, though in some areas it’s already here. When it makes its appearance in all facets of American medicine, it will affect every American. Midlife adults will be affected even more, since they are reaching the stage of life when they need to access the health care system a little more each year. As health care reform begins to take shape over the course of this decade, it’s a good idea to know why it has become so necessary. To understand that, you’ll need to know how the medical establishment progressed in its treatment of disease from leeches to X rays to sophisticated MRIs and CAT scans.
Therefore, the first thing you must do to understand the complexities of our current health care system is learn how medicine developed and expanded in the United States after World War II. For centuries before the war, the physician’s role in maintaining the health of a community was actually quite limited. In this country, medical training was almost nonexistent until the late 1700s. To make a diagnosis, doctors were mostly limited to the use of elementary medical tools like the stethoscope, neurological hammer, and tongue depressor. A physician’s role was first to diagnose an illness and then to prescribe various medications, many of which would be considered to be homeopathic today, like herbs. The diagnostic skills of a physician were limited to what his five senses were able to detect, and a diagnosis often required surgery that many times was more dangerous than the illness itself.
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