Heathcare Costs & Offense!

You have heard for months about the rising cost of health care, well it should be clarified and given to us in realistic terms. My daughter had an ER visit that I was sent a $7500 bill and my wife had a 24 hour hospital stay and the tests she was put in to have done was canceled at the last minute and sent home told to take a medication which had nothing to do with her condition, so I know I won't get a refund on the day wasted and the most expensive hotel on the planet. Let me give you some real looks at where costs for us all can be saved.

In 2009, Russo, Weir, and Elixhauser in their peer reviewed article stated that people 55-64 years of age, 3.9 hospitalizations of every 1000 people was for lower back pain. It was actually ranked as #8 as the reason for hospital admissions for this age range. Number 2 is osteoarthritis which is treatable and preventable with the use of Chiropractic care and is only covered up with the use of medications.

In a similar study by Leoretta in 2004 compared 1.7 million insured patients looking for treatment for lower back pain. In the outcome it was revealed that when chiropractic care was pursued the treatment cost was reduced by 28%, hospitalizations were reduced 41%, back surgery reduced 32%, and diagnostic imaging such as MRI, CT scans, etc. were reduced by 37%. So how did it help? Well 95% of these people said they were satisfied with their treatment. When was the last time an MD or a hospital had that kind of success record? Putting this together in real money, if people would use chiropractic as their first option for back pain, it would save the US health care system $28 BILLION EVERY SINGLE YEAR!

So why isn't this the case? It is similar to the search for the cure for cancer, there isn't one, there is a search for more profitable and effective treatments for cancer, not a cure. When you look at insurance companies hiring more risk managers are working full-time to deny or limit care in Chiropractic, but spending Billions on care which is often unnecessary and more often ineffective.

As we look to improve our health in 2011, remember the definition of Insanity, doing the same thing you have always done and expect different results. We keep going to the drug & surgery pushing Medical and Osteopathic Doctors who's best treatment is only 38-45% effective, where Chiropractic has been documented to be over 70% effective and more commonly 86%. If a patient comes to our clinic and thousands like it across the country, they are evaluated to see if they are a Chiropractic case that if accepted can be helped. We also get lots of cases that I know soon into the consultation that this is a condition that medicine would be more effective, they are promptly referred to a competent MD for evaluation. This unfortunately is not the case in most medical clinics, they think they have a treatment for everything. So according to the a study by the Dean of Pharmacology at the University of Arizona concluded that 40-60% of all prescriptions are written off-label. This means that we have already tried Bottle "A, B, & C" with no results so lets try Bottle "D" which may not have even been tested for efficacy to the condition you have, but you demand a treatment even if it is the wrong one or the one that will kill you. This is since over 110,000 people die every year for taking the right drug for the right problem, these are all "on-label" prescriptions. A couple years ago it was reported that we spent $74 Billion dollars on primary use medication. We spent an additional $76 Billion dollars to treat the side-effects of the drugs used in the first $74 Billion. This is just another definition of insanity and it is disguised as normal in the world...

...Look to chiropractic care first, for nearly every problem you have, what you will find, that if the cause of the problem can be identified and removed the problem is gone. Opposed to the patients that tell me they don't have stomach problems anymore because they take the "purple pill." I say, well if it's cured, then stop taking it and see how your stomach problem comes back. We are just covering up the problems and not working to correct the cause and thus we are ranked dead last among the 37 industrialized nations. Let's be smart with our money, restore sanity to health care and schedule your evaluation today, waiting is just covering up the oil light on the dashboard of the car "hoping it will go away."

Until next time...