Personal Responsibility. Your health is your problem.

So let's get started.
     I would like for people to address me on this forum, and in turn, I will do my best to address concerns, answer questions, or give my opinion on matters relating to health care.  I will not support any efforts to make this a political page as there are plenty of those already. My main concern is to help people use the healthcare system which we currently have in place to the best possible outcomes.  My goal here is to help people educate themselves on healthcare matters and make wise choices while taking control and responsibility for their own health.
    I'll  start out with this short discussion on health and responsibility.  There are different types of healthcare consumers.  There are those who would prefer to have someone else in control and make their decisions for them, usually a healthcare professional of some sort, and these people generally tend to have an external locus of control.  They do not want the responsibility of making their decisions, and they do not want the work involved in researching and addressing issues on their own. Bless them, and I hope things go well for them, but this page will be of little use to them so i will not address that segment in particular.  There are those people who want to take responsibility for their health because they understand that they need to. No one else will. As for the first group, they are deluding themselves if they think that someone else will regard their health as a primary priority, but they have that right. As to the second group, responsibility for your health is your responsibility, and it is good that you accept it.  Just as an investment broker manages someones assets, your healthcare professional manages your health. But your health is not necessarily the top priority.  An investment broker needs to make money, so does a doctor. An investment broker needs to protect himself from adverse risk, so does a doctor.  An investment broker sells a product or service, so does a doctor. As a result, you may find that your better interests may be deferred to lowering malpractice risk.  Your best interest may come behind profit.  Your best interest may be deferred to the need to keep business "in house".  A doctor or other health care worker will never use your best interest as the primary principle in guiding your healthcare because the risks of today's market dictate that certain measures be taken to protect against fraud and malpractice and to protect the positions of healthcare givers in court.  Therefore, oftentimes, healthcare will be administered from a defensive position.  You may find that you are subjected to extraneous testing, you may find that you have been over medicated or even redundantly medicated, you may be referred out to other specialists unnecessarily in order to cover risk. You may even find that all of these tings are done solely for the sake of profit in some circumstances.  In fact, sometimes the worst thing to be is well insured. If you have excellent coverage, you may find that every possible step is taken to "insure" your safety and proper treatment, but that treatment may not be the best for you, it may be the best to cover the interests of the treating facility. It may also make you a target for profit.

    Now that I've stirred up the hornets, lets take a step back.  I am not trying to scare you or insinuate that you can't trust your healthcare workers in our system. I am only trying to bring things up that need to be taken into consideration.  In truth, by far, most people pursue careers in healthcare with the best intentions.  By far, most people become practitioners because they want to serve others and do good.  The industry is not perfect however. There exists a population of people who make their living by suing for malpractice and accidents and whatever they can get out of the healthcare system.  These actions have led to a robust population of hungry malpractice lawyers who are motivated to find and take advantage of every possible thing they can find. Law school is expensive.  As a result the healthcare industry has had to develop "immune responses" with built in mandatory excesses.  You may not need an MRI with a particular injury, but you'll probably get one. You may be able to treat your high blood pressure with diet alone and no prescription, but you'll probably get one.  The reason these excesses are in place is because previous legal proceedings have established that these are reasonable and prudent measures in general, so in order to defend themselves in court, should the need arise, these things are done in order to establish that "everything possible" was done to assure a good outcome and in good faith. It's a legal recipe.  Sort of like statins for everyone who has had a heart attack, regardless of whether or not they have high cholesterol.  The statins don't protect the patient from another heart attack, they protect the doctor from a lawsuit. Just like the free flow of anti-biotics protects individual caregivers from being charged with not taking prudent measures even while we create masses of "superbugs" that are ever more anti-biotic resistant, leading to more and worse infections than the previously given drugs prevented.

    The point here is not how bad are our system is. The point is that it is prudent to take responsibility for your own health because no one will ever be more invested in your personal welfare than are you.  With information availability as ubiquitous as it is today, there is no reason, other than laziness or fear, not to research your own health concerns and educate yourself on your own personal risks.  If you don't want to, that's fine, that's your right. You won't get the best outcomes.  So here's my point after all this: The most important thing you can do for your own personal health is to take control of it yourself, that's step number one.  If you're still reading at this point, you probably knew that already.