I recently read the book, Start with Why by Simon Sinek.  I am always looking for ways to help me inspire my patients to make positive changes in their lives and this book was an inspiration to me. Simon tells many stories throughout the book, but one really stood out for me. He tells about an American car executive who visited a Japanese assembly line. At the end of the line, he noticed something different from the lines in the U.S.  In the U.S., there is a person at the end of each line who taps on the vehicle doors to make sure that they fit properly. This position does not exist in the Japanese assembly line. When the American executive asked the Japanese automakers how they ensure that the doors fit properly, they replied, “We make sure it fits when we design it”. They do not find a problem and then design an elaborate plan to fix it. If a problem exists, they understand that it that it began at the start of the process.

This really reminded me of the way our healthcare system works in our country.  We diagnose a health problem and then we use medications to fix it without looking back to the beginning of how the problem started.  A new problem occurs and we do the same thing.  We keep adding more and more medications and do more and more testing and never really address why the problem existed in the first place.

This is why I love alternative models of healthcare.  You can call it functional, holistic, integrative, etc., but we are all trying to do the same thing.  We are trying to find the root of the problem, fix it at the design phase, if you will.  For example, if someone has irritable bowel syndrome (IBS) and a sensitivity to dairy, no amount of medication is going to cure this person if he/she continues to eat dairy.  Or, if someone is struggling with daily fatigue after a long bout of stress and B vitamins are not replenished, he/she may continue to be tired despite adequate sleep and rest.  It is often more complicated than this, but you get the point.

I am definitely not anti-medication and I do prescribe medications in my practice.  But, I use them sparingly and usually only while we are figuring out and fixing when and why the problem started. To the Japanese automakers, figuring out how to avoid the problem at the beginning only made sense to them.  They understood that fixing the root of the problem would save time, money, and frustration down the line.  We can really learn from this.  We must live our lives as healthy as we can to avoid getting illnesses at all, but if an issue does present, taking the time to determine the underlying cause can avoid dependence on medications, a multitude of other health issues down the road, and actually save us a whole lot of time and money.

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