I’ll admit it. I can be very blunt. I have to work at diplomacy, instead of just saying what I have to say. Sometimes people appreciate directness, other times it can get me in trouble.
Today I think I’ll get in trouble. I might as well have fun with it, so here goes.
I don’t like most doctors much as a professional group. They mean well, but for such educated people, they’re surprisingly ignorant. Most of what they know and apply on a daily basis has been literally brainwashed into them by drug company reps.
You think I’m exaggerating, don’t you? I’m not, and I have proof.
That article shows exactly how doctors are manipulated - including brainwashing. You may be surprised to know that the Chinese are the best at brainwashing in the world. What they’ll do is subtly reinforce views by having someone write or explain something that they don’t believe in. The brainwashing technique in the article is that of the drug rep playing dumb and having a doctor explain research to them.
I’ve talked to a doctor about other parts of the article. The drug companies buy and aggregate prescription data from pharmacies so they actually know exactly how many prescriptions each doctor is writing, and for what brand.
If they don’t like the doctor’s prescribing habits, they can have a talk with them.
One doctor told me she finds it “creepy”, and “can’t believe this isn’t illegal.”
Doctors also are required to have ongoing education. Guess who provides the education for free? The drug companies, of course.
So why am I mentioning all this? Simply because Western medicine and the drug companies have a monopoly on the minds of the public. Health care is OWNED by Western medicine.
Even worse, the drug companies have a monopoly on the minds of doctors. Drugs are the only solution. I’ve talked to several doctors about this, and they’re not really happy with their ability to treat people.
Acupuncturists, on the other hand are universally happy with their ability to treat people. Even so, you as an acupuncturist, are nearly a nobody when it comes to health care. The public thinks of you as a last resort.
This is beyond retarded.
As an acupuncturist, you work with the human body’s self-healing abilities, which have been developed over millions of years of evolution (or by God, if that’s your belief). However, the public trusts doctors, and by proxy, drug companies more than their own self-healing abilities, and your ability to promote healing.
I keep on having discussions with acupuncturists and other health professionals about the need to put Western Medicine in perspective. Dan Clements over at AlternativeHealthPractice.com compares it to negative campaigning. It’s building yourself up at the expense of someone else.
I see how he could think that way. About 2/3rds of the acupuncturists I’ve talked to agree with him. They would prefer not to mention Western medicine at all.
But the fact is, there’s a huge downside to drug-based Western medicine, that few know about. Patients don’t really understand that all healing has to come from within – their body’s self-healing abilities. They don’t understand that most drugs only treat the symptoms and don’t cure anything. They also don’t understand that all drugs have side effects.
So when you talk to patients about healthcare, remember, you’re actually fighting a monopoly. You do need to be able to explain what true healing is, why your technology works even when modern drug technology doesn’t. (You do use technology to help people. Read the definition.) It also helps when you talk about Oriental medical concepts in a way that doesn’t alienate patients. I cover all this extensively in my book, with a lot more diplomacy.
I’ve been talking with Chris Kresser, who writes articles for his site, The Healthy Skeptic. He’s a very interesting guy. Completed the pre-med requirements, then actually talked to doctors about what it’s like to be one. What he heard horrified him so much that becoming an acupuncturist instead!
Chris has made some good points lately about how it’s not doctors that are the problem, it’s drugs and the drug companies.
Obviously, it won’t work to go around telling doctors they’ve been had. Or telling them they don’t really know what they’re doing how to help people heal. So what’s your approach to working with doctors? How do you educate them about yourself without being threatening?
Also, how do you fit yourself in your patient’s minds so they consider you as a viable alternative to Western Medicine? A first resort instead of a last resort? I have my own ideas outlined in my book, but there’s more than one way to do things.
Thoughts?
16 responses so far ↓
1 Andy Rosenfarb, L.Ac., MTOM // Mar 26, 2009 at 9:09 am
Great article and so true… the economy has nothing to do with having a successful practice what so ever!!!
In 2008-2009 while 90% of the acu-profession has been freaking out about the recession, we increased our total patient volume and our gross income over 52% (with no insurance, all cash…no extra promotions) - using many of the same ideas that you present in Never Market Again (which is similar to my PM stuff).
Not bad for a so called “deep recession….”
The proof is in the pudding my friend… and it’s one thing to talk about success in theory and philosophy (in practice) and it’s another to demonstrate proficiency though applied action.
You bring up great point and these articles are very useful (for those who read them).
Hope all is well!
Andy Rosenfarb, L.Ac., MTOM
2 Chris Curley // Mar 26, 2009 at 3:34 pm
Kudos Burton,
3 Chris Kresser // Mar 26, 2009 at 5:03 pm
Hi Burton et al,
As you know, I completely agree that U.S. healthcare is a failure and that the influence of drug companies has gotten completely out of control. I’ve written about this on my blog and will continue to do so, because the consequences of these conflicts of interest are so serious. Medical care is the 3rd leading cause of death in the U.S., killing 225,000 people each year. That’s the equivalent of a fully-loaded 747 crashing every day.
Who’s to blame for this? We all are. The problems are systemic and deeply entrenched, and no single party is responsible.
Drug companies are obviously leading the charge. They are the second-most profitable industry in the world, behind only to the oil business. Certainly they’re chief concern is to make money, not help people get well.
Physicians are hugely influenced by drug companies. Big Pharma spends over $2 billion a year on special “education” events for doctors, i.e. Caribbean vacations and ski-trips to Whistler with dinners at 5-star restaurants and flashy Powerpoint presentations with the latest “research” about their drugs. Studies have shown that pharmaceutical marketing is the most important source of knowledge about new drugs for most physicians, and a major form of continuing education as well. I believe doctors have a moral obligation to stay current with the medical literature and to critically analyze the information they read. This rarely happens. So yes, doctors are also to blame.
Patients, or “medical consumers” as we’re known in the eyes of drug companies, are also responsible. We’re addicted to the idea of a quick fix. We want a pill to make our symptoms go away. We don’t want to have to inconvenience ourselves with lifestyle or diet changes. We don’t want to change the way we live. We just want to take a pill. These days patients go into their doctor demanding a certain kind of drug they’ve seen on TV or that their friend is making. They won’t be satisfied until they leave with it.
Researchers, too, are to blame. They take money from drug companies who then play inappropriate roles in study design and execution. They avoid research topics that would portray drug companies - who sponsor 70% of all medical research - in a negative fashion.
It’s easy to assign blame to groups. It’s not as easy to blame individuals. I’ve met a lot of doctors. Almost without exception they entered into medicine for all the right reasons. They want to help people. Yet they’re working against a corrupt system. They’re also working against their own training, which prepared them for little else other than running tests, prescribing drugs and performing surgery. And they are human beings, with long work hours, families, social commitments and every other feature of our crazy modern lives. Where do they find the time to critically analyze research, especially when most of it is so poorly designed?
Most of the researchers I’ve met also have their heart in the right place. Let’s face it, they didn’t go into medical research to get rich and famous! But when 70% of their work is funded by drug companies, and they have present any research proposal to a review board acutely aware of that fact, it can be difficult to go against the grain if they want to keep their job.
Admittedly, I have a harder time empathizing with this group. I find it difficult to get past the anger and outrage I feel towards the malicious and criminally irresponsible actions of Big Pharma. Nevertheless, I’m sure some folks who work for drug companies do it at least partly because they want to help people. (There, I said it.)
I guess my point is simply this: we’re all to blame for the healthcare system we have, and most of us - doctors, researchers, patients - are doing the best we can within that broken system. Am I excusing anyone from responsibility? Absolutely not. Is there room for improvement? You bet. But the whole thing needs to be overhauled, because every problem is connected directly to several others. The pharmaceutical industry is the spider spinning that web. If we don’t take action to seriously limit their influence, we’ll continue to be stuck like so many little flies…
4 Dan Clark // Mar 26, 2009 at 5:36 pm
I am happy to be an acupuncturist. I think it is a wonderful opportunity to treat others in a real way, improve their quality of life , and help them get off drugs.
Great article!!! I enjoyed it!!! You may get in trouble with some people but not from the ones that matter.
5 Jann Sumner // Mar 27, 2009 at 6:22 am
I am glad to see you putting out this article. None of it is news to me though, at all. Doctors have 2 tools. One is surgery and the other is drugs. Beyond these, they have nothing to offer save the odd piece of usually well meant but often ill gotten advice. They rarely look at ‘why’ something has gone wrong and just offer up a bandaid in the form of drugs. What really freaks me out though is how poisonous these drugs are! The side effects of Humera for arthritis for instance are staggering! Lymphoma being one of them! Do you know that the only drug that actually cures (and not always at that) are anti biotics? The rest, treat and mask symptoms. The really sad thing Burton is that probably 80% of people still think that Doctors are Gods. If their Doctor tells them to swallow something, they’ll do it without reservation and they accept the side effects and they accept being poisoned and they accept not being healed. And a HUGE part of this is that Doctors scare the crap out them making them think that if they don’t take those poisonous drugs they’ll die! The scare tactics are horrid. My Doctor doesn’t offer me much in the way of drugs because she knows that I probably won’t touch them with a 10 foot pole!
Doctors put out fires. If you have trauma and need emergency treatment, you need a Doctor. If your appendix bursts or a woman needs a c-section, you need a Doctor. There are times when they do save lives and we need them on the team, but if you need to be healed, you need to look outside that box. The biggest problem that I see is that people have become the medical model. They are so used to popping a frigging pill and taking what they think is the easy way out, that when they seek alternative care and are shown that their lifestyles etc have dragged them into this journey and the way out is to make the changes necessary, they often turn tail and run.
We are a threat to them Burton and to the drug companies because acupuncture works. We have tools Doctors don’t. We can’t change them or the drug companies and instead we need to get the word out there that there are alternatives that work; people will catch on eventually. Just an FYI: the biggest demographic I have, are nurses! They are sick of the medical model and see first hand that it doesn’t work!
Hope all is well! Jann
6 Susan Grodensky,L.Ac // Mar 27, 2009 at 6:24 am
Dear Burton,
You are right on. Acupuncturist are climbing an uphill battle. People, in general, are brainwashed and act like cattle. In California, New York, and Florida acupuncture is trendy. That is why some people flock to it. Some people do not want western drugs and are sick of the crap that is shoved down there throats.
I enjoyed your article and the healthy skeptic article. Thank you for being out there.
Sincerely,
Susan Grodensky,L.Ac
7 Jaclyn // Mar 27, 2009 at 2:32 pm
Generation Rx is a great documentary to recommend to the general public, especially parents. A very confronting expose on the corruption within Big Pharma, the FDA, and the medical society.
8 Christina Wolf // Mar 27, 2009 at 5:43 pm
Hey Burton,
Your line “this is beyond retarded” make me laugh out loud–I had to read it to my assistant so he could laugh out loud too! It’s all true! I’ve always said that if acupuncturists had enough money to put as many ads on TV as drug companies do and could tell people how much better they would feel if they had acupuncture, we’d really be on a roll. We’d have NO disclaimer at the end because what we do doesn’t harm people, so no need to warn them. Or maybe the small print might go like this “Side effects include improved sleep, a sense of well-being and better digestion. Acupuncture may cause excessive happiness.” I feel a blog post coming on….
Thanks for this, Burton!
Christina
9 Christina Wolf // Mar 27, 2009 at 6:22 pm
Ok, I was inspired, if anyone wants to read my drugs vs acupuncture blog post, it’s here http://nhacupuncture.com/warning-acupuncture-may-cause-excessive-happiness/
Have a great weekend!
Christina
10 gigi // Mar 27, 2009 at 9:47 pm
Hello Burton:
I can certainly appreciate your feelings, however, my experience with the biomedical community is somewhat mixed. I’ve had some terrible experiences and some wonderful ones. We need biomedicine but it’s not the only answer. It’s great for emergencies. An acupuncturist is not going to untangle a strangulated small intestine. A surgeon is going to take care of that. It is important to find way to communicate with medical doctors. As for pharmaceutical companies that is another story. It all comes down to EDUCATION. We need to continue to educate the public and educate our patients. The entire situation is about communication, not fighting. It is so easy to be angry and easy to fight but very difficult to think through an actual strategy to build something, grow something and teach people about it especially if we hope to build a bridge. Part of the issue is money. Large pharmaceutical giants have alot of it. They can “afford” to manipulate people’s minds. Sounds ugly, doesn’t it? It is fairly ugly. If acupuncturists were more united as an entity and put more money into lobbying efforts maybe we could effect more change.
11 Amy Galvan // Mar 28, 2009 at 8:20 pm
In my acupuncture class of 8 students, 3 were from pharmacology backgrounds making career changes. One was a drug rep who was horrified when Medicare/Medicaid quit supporting diabetic drugs which the elderly had become increasingly dependent on, because costs were rising. These patients were cut off cold.
Many of my patients are trying to stop their dependence on drugs before they can no longer afford them or before their insurance cuts them to cut costs.
Some critics of pharmaceutical companies have said Big Pharma does not manufacture drugs as much as manufactures people’s dependency on them, making people their machines to generate profits.
I am very leary of western “medicine.” I worked in an integrative health care setting as an alternative practioner, and thought it could work. Now I see us becoming reduced to technicians by doctors’ orders on what is permissible for patient care. Conflicts abound. But western medicine has some value.
In addition to surgery and moderate emergency use of antibiotics, I like to use western medicine for diagnostic testing—but only to measure progress Chinese medicine is making, not to initiate western standards of care treatment!
My mentor Leon Hammer wrote an article published this month on the pitfalls of integrating western and Chinese medicines. It’s called The Lion and the Lamb available at http://www.acupuncturetoday.com . You can guess who the lion and the lamb represent!
Thank you, Burton, for the post and the support.
12 Dennis Kinnane // Mar 30, 2009 at 7:30 pm
Actually the American/Western “health care” system is a construct of two very powerful men with a gargantuan amount of money. John D. Rockefeller and Andrew Carnegie founders of the two most successful monopolies the world has ever known, ( and STILL knows) the “oil cartel” and the steel trust spent millions of dollars setting up the modern health care system to use their products. All synthetic drugs are made from the chemicals refined from either crude oil or coal tar. These are broken down in refineries; chemicals extracted and sent to pharmaceutical companies to be turned into everything from Viagra to Vioxxl, from Antabuse to Zovirax and on and on. These men spent the last 20 years of their lives making certain that you and I would live their dream of absolute control when it comes to medicine in the West. It was a bit more easy for them in the United States because we have been trained to accept the “new” over the “old” ways of doing things through our “schooling” which, though it admittedly brought many groups together and has a positive influence, also succeeded in seducing and shaming us away from our natural “roots”…..both figuratively and literally.
13 Irina V. Zasimova L.Ac., M.D., Ph.D // Apr 2, 2009 at 1:07 pm
Yes, you are right in all your thoughts. An education of patients is more important in this situation because we are talking about Their health, for me it is much easier than “fight” with doctors or other western medical personnel. Some of them have very minimal understanding and knowledge about Oriental medicine, they even think we use needles which needed to be sterilized. And they don’t want to change their mind, they don’t want to grow up with medicine world changing and developing. From my patients I heard a lot of negative things about us. But, in the same time, some western doctors are very open for alternative medicine.
About drugs, I don’t know when we can change it because drug companies and pharm industry have huge money for all what they are doing with people.
14 Burton Kent // Apr 2, 2009 at 1:18 pm
@Jann - Chemotherapy drugs also work, in addition to antibiotics. I’ve also heard that rebamipide (which has the molecular structure of an antioxidant) helps treat hearing loss. But in all other cases, you’re right. Drugs do not cure.
@Jaclyn - thanks for the heads up about Generation Rx. I wonder if they went far enough though - studies show legal drugs are the 4th leading cause of death in the US. (Chris Kresser and I believe that this is underestimated).
@Amy - Wow, I’m surprised there were that many students with a pharma background. There’s a story there! Were they pharmacists, pharmaceutical reps or ???
@Dennis - That’s interesting about Rockefeller. I read a biography about him “Titan”. From what I read in the book, I believe at the time of his death, oil refining byproducts weren’t a big source of income just yet. Wikipedia shows that he liked homeopathy but sponsored drug research in New York.
@Christina - glad I inspired you - thanks for the post!
15 Amy Galvan // Apr 20, 2009 at 10:34 pm
In answer to your question, 1 Ph.D in pharmacy, 1 pharmacy assistant, and 1 drug rep—all with years of experience and insight that made them want to explore a more natural, less “influenced” means of healing.
16 Chris Mills // May 5, 2009 at 8:17 pm
I enjoy being an acupuncturist because we really can help people to improve their health, unlike western medicine.
I think it must be hard for some doctors, what alternative do they have now-a-days, but to prescribe pills. That, surgery and diagnostic testing is all they have to offer. Some went into medicine to help others, and for these people I almost feel sorry. The one’s who went into it to make money, what does it really matter to them if they only prescribe pills. It keeps ‘em coming back.
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