{"id":1433,"date":"2023-07-10T05:08:58","date_gmt":"2023-07-10T05:08:58","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/revitalizemetabolichealth.com\/?p=1433"},"modified":"2023-07-10T13:34:00","modified_gmt":"2023-07-10T13:34:00","slug":"health-care-has-a-specialty-problem","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/revitalizemetabolichealth.com\/health-care-has-a-specialty-problem\/","title":{"rendered":"Health Care has a Specialty Problem"},"content":{"rendered":"

Health Care has a Specialty Problem<\/h1>\n

Ever heard someone bemoaning the fact that they have multiple doctors?\u00a0 It\u2019s the sad reality of the modern health care system, relying on multiple specialists to manage specialty-specific problems in parallel with other specialists. \u00a0Oftentimes, a busy primary physician or non-physician provider will happily accept a role as gatekeeper and coordinator of this team of specialists.\u00a0 The health care systems strongly promote this model of care through incentivizing (or mandating) internal referrals, to the detriment of patient care.<\/p>\n

The evolution of medical specialties<\/strong><\/h3>\n

Once upon a time, among physicians there were only generalists.\u00a0 Now, there are more than 120 medical specialties.\u00a0 Specialist physicians were rare in the 1700\u2019s, but became quite popular in the mid-1800\u2019s, prompting a German physician visiting Paris to remark:<\/p>\n

\u201cIncredible! Each organ now has its own priest\u2026and for some, they even have special clinics\u2026\u201d<\/em><\/p>\n

Physicians started organizing themselves around organs, likely due to a desire and recognized need to expand medical knowledge.\u00a0 This trend towards specialization was, no doubt, important for the advancement of the science of medicine.\u00a0 I would argue, however, that we\u2019ve let it go too far and are now suffering a problem of over-specialization.<\/p>\n

Too many cooks in the kitchen<\/strong><\/h3>\n

This problem of over-specialization is painfully evident in how modern medicine handles Insulin Resistance<\/a>.\u00a0 There are a plethora of manifestations of Insulin Resistance, all of which have been assigned to different (often multiple) medical specialties.\u00a0 In some cases, there is a specialist who manages the primary manifestation (e.g. diabetes) and multiple other specialists who manage downstream complications (e.g. kidney disease, heart disease, neuropathy, eye disease, etc.).<\/p>\n

For example, the most commonly recognized manifestations of Insulin Resistance are:<\/p>\n