Ming’s Wisdom

This is an focused study of a recent event that reveals multiple failure points in our society and institutions. This case specifically studies recent activities in contemporary health care and the trauma it has brought to innocent victims. The modern health-care industry is an embarrassing failure to follow common sense in diagnosing patients, and a failure to systematically deduce what disorder afflicts a person. Instead, contemporary health care simply has a list of “approved” actions that can be taken, and any suggestion deviating from the list is immediately rejected.

A recent “miracle” of modern science and medicine was recently (enthusiastically) described to me by a friend in the medical industry. An elderly woman came to the hospital complaining of long term diarrhea, which was soon diagnosed to be Clostridium difficile, a bacteria that normally lives in the body but can be toxic if growth is no longer checked by the good bacteria in the body. The bacteria had grown to a large population and led to Pseudomembranous colitis, basically diarrhea caused by over-use of antibiotics. Doctors analyzed the situation and decided that the elderly woman would be given antibiotics to treat the Clostridium difficile. After a period of time, it was determined that the antibiotics were not working, at which point the doctors decided that the woman would need a colectomy (have her colon removed), otherwise, she would die. After the colectomy, the woman recovered, and although she needed to plug a bag into her anal cavity at all times so that digested food articles would drop into the bag where her large intestine would have been, she was grateful for modern science to have saved her where she would have certainly died otherwise.

Let’s analyze what went wrong and what some possible alternatives would have been. Ignoring the fundamental definition of the bacteria, “can be toxic if growth is no longer checked by the good bacteria in the body”, and the first line of the definition of Pseudomembranous colitis on Wikipedia which says, ”also known as antibiotic-associated diarrhoea (AAD)”, the doctors decided to use antibiotics to treat the condition. Intestinal health is the balance of good bacteria to bad bacteria to complete the intestinal flora, where if the good bacteria wins in population growth, the colon (intestine) is healthy. The doctors’ treatment fundamentally misses half of the equation, by only focussing on killing the bad bacteria, and completely overlooking that if any treatment is to sustain its effects, the good bacteria must grow and sustain its population. There was a good chance that prescribing probiotics (foods and supplements that contain good bacteria), such as two servings of yogurt a day, in addition to a diet that supports good bacteria (garlic, broccoli, etc), would have solved the woman’s problem completely. Even if it does not fully solve the problem, it should at least have been attempted as support. After twenty minutes of hearing this story and thinking about it, I asked the doctor/friend, did the doctors consider giving her probiotics to solve the problem? She said, “it probably would have solved the problem, but you know, probiotics aren’t FDA approved, so whatever quantity it says on the bottle, it’s not absolutely guaranteed to have that quantity”.

It’s sad to think that the elderly woman could have kept her colon if she only changed her diet, took some probiotics such as yogurt, and did not listen to the doctors. In fact her bacterial infection of the colon only developed as a result of earlier decisions made by doctors to give her antibiotics for long-term use, and kept spiraling into bigger and bigger problems. No doubt, the lack of a colon and risky surgery could give her further complications in the future as well. What’s even more sad is that the woman was grateful for all the treatment that these doctors have done to her, having never been educated on the truth of the medical industry. In addition, this is not an isolated incident. The treatment decisions were made were by experienced doctors, and my friend was simply a medical student put into position to learn from these doctors as part of medical school. Generations of doctors are being trained to think a certain way, a limited way, instead of trying to understand how the human body works as a system and as a living creature.

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This entry was posted on Sunday, September 26th, 2010 at 18:06 and is filed under Health. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.