And how are we feeling today?

The string of leaks damaging credibility of the establishment continues -- although I'm talking about newsflashes that show patients have as much impact on their own health as do, gasp, doctors or hospitals.  Just shocking. 

Fortunately,  most of these news flashes occur one at a time, so there is a chance for spin-control to counter-balance, neutralize, and finally remove all the punch entirely from them, so that the legacy model of doctors as small gods can continue sucking the nations coffers dry, without delivering much in the way of, you know, actual health improvement in the population.

And, again,  it is mostly at the institutional level that these myths are propagated.   Solo doctors,  the 60% who are not in the American Medical Association, and particularly those few who dare to practice primary care and family medicine, are as much suppressed and oppressed by hospitals and the Megamyth of high-tech care as patients.    Those are the ones as well who can't see the benefit to their patients or their own practice in making their patient records into e-records,  "machine readable",  visible to the universe.

Anyway, the latest news is that color and sound, untouched by doctors, can affect healing rates in hospitals.  I quote from a November 22 piece in  Advance for Nurses titled The Arts in Healthcare

Healthcare is connecting people with the power of the arts and their therapeutic effects. Painting a canvas with bright primary colors or listening to music while under medical treatment has a notable positive impact on patient outcomes.

The benefits are many, but art therapy is impacting physical, mental and emotional recovery, including relieving anxiety and decreasing the perception of pain. On the other side, research promoted by the Society for the Arts in Healthcare out of Washington, D.C. shows that the arts can reduce patients' use of medication and length of stay in the hospital, and improve compliance with recommended treatments-offering substantial savings in healthcare costs.

I didn't instantly find a description of the research papers themselves that describe said research, but I'm willing to believe it's true.

In fact,   even doctors officially recognize the fact that they may be able to set bones or prescribe drugs or cut out bad parts from people,  but the subsequent healing that takes place is a mysterious process that is simply unblocked by that "treatment", and the healing of the bones, say,  is the doing of the patient's human body itself.    So, the doctor takes an hour and sets a bone, and the patient takes 6 weeks and heals the bone, and the doctor gets all the credit for "fixing the arm."   Yeah, sounds familiar.

In point of fact, the "placebo effect" is well known to have a healing potency quite close to most prescription drugs.   Notice how the actor has been removed from the common description -- as if  this effect sort of comes out of thin air, as opposed to giving credit to the human body of the patient for being able to heal itself,  under the right conditions and correct thinking.

The narrative, the story, the Megamyth, is that Doctors And Hospitals do healing and curing of "patients", who are passive objects, like lawn mowers who complain,  coming in to the healing center to "be fixed".  This narrative is important because it makes it really hard to see or believe anything contrary to it that is going on.

So, let's actually take it as given for a few moments that the most powerful medicine, or most powerful healing force or actor in the hospital, or at work, or at home is, in fact the patient's own body.   (A few moments is all you get, until the Megamyth will come along, see such improper thinking, and erase it, by the way.)

While we have a minute to ponder before that happens,  let's leap to an observation: If your body is in fact a powerful healer, then it stands to reason that your body can tell how it is doing with the healing process.

That is,  the most powerful diagnostic tool, or vital-signs capture device on the scene is something you already own and carry with you -- your own body.

You don't need to purchase it, or rent it from a medical-services company.  You already have one.

This fact is contrary to the Megamyth  - that only what doctors or hospitals or high-tech equipment or drugs do, in the way of "billable events"  matters.  Therefore, it is not taken advantage of in a hospital or health-care setting, which, in my mind, is not only stupid, it's criminally negligent.

Here's an example -- one of the the largest and best carried out "longitudinal studies" (over the lifetime) ever done is something called the Framingham Heart Study.  People were followed for 50 years to see what happened in their lives in the way of heart attacks, etc., and what factors in their lives might have been responsible or led to seeing what was coming.

One of the principal investigators of that study came to talk to us when I worked at Parke-Davis pharmaceutical research,  and he discussed some less well-known results of the study. One was this: among all the lab tests, doctor's examinations,  and other methods of predicting what was going on with a patient, there was a single factor that stood head-and-shoulders above the rest.   There was one way to predict, with very high accuracy, the future trajectory of the patient's health.

That one way was to ask the patient:  "How much longer do you expect to live?"

Yes - campers,  amazingly,  people knew the answer to this question. Better than every lab test and doctor's examination in the world, people already knew the answer.

This makes perfect sense, if you are in that brief period of sanity,  briefly out of the grips of the MegaMyth, in which you can accept that the patient's body is the best and most competent healing agent on the scene. Of course, in that framework, it would also be the most competent predictive observer of how things are going and how much longer it can hold out and hold on and compensate for everything else that's going wrong.

So, again, in this brief moment of sanity unpolluted by the Megamyth,   you could immediately see two things:

• 1)  Even in a hospital setting, surrounded by high-tech equipment,  "vital signs monitors", and laboratory tests,  the best observer of "how the patient is doing" or "current status" and "prognosis" would be, ta da,  the patient's own body.    The body can, of course, put all the current signs into context,  and know what these signs mean FOR THIS PATIENT,   versus what they might mean for a generalized average patient, on average. The body has decades of experience with this patient.   
• 2)  At a home or work setting, outside the hospital,  even in the total absence of high-tech "telemetry" equipment and expensive "tele-health" fancy gadgets,   the best observer of the same person's health and vital signs and status would be, ta da,  their own body.

If the Megamyth hasn't blanked out your mental screen for improper thoughts,  you might then ask yourself, well, if that is true, how come no one is USING these facts to inform health care?  How come doctors and nurses sort of worship lab tests and vital signs traces and EEG's and EKG's and put their best decade of medical experience to bear on taking all those data points and synthesizing a single construct of what all that means, for this particular patient?

How come the doctors and nurses at the same time  more or less ignore the patient's and don't just ask "How are you doing?" with any deep degree of attention to the answer?

How come, when a 65 year old woman calls from home and says "I think somethings wrong" or "This drug isn't helping me" their comments are mostly considered "anecdotal" and totally ignored?

This is not a small question. This is a BIG QUESTION.

As a nation, as a health care system, we have some evidence (Framingham study, etc.) that patients are capable of being more in touch with their own medical status and prognosis than the best the high-tech health care system can do.  Yet we basically demean, dismiss, and ignore this as "anecdotal".

Maybe we need a cool sounding name for it, like "deep sensing patient analytics" for it to be taken seriously.

Or, given the de facto and unpleasant fact that only things that make a lot of money for someone (else) are taken seriously,    (e.g., we totally ignore the "placebo effect" since it cannot be patented or sold),   then, in all cynical honesty,   maybe what we need is not only a cool sounding name, but a piece of technology that captures, amplifies and cleans up the presentation of this "deep body internal sensing" so that is becomes as credible as the stupid so-called "vital signs monitor" next to it.

I suspect the reason anecdotal evidence is so bad, aside from the tremendous bias and skewing caused by the Megamyth,   is that patients themselves have not learned how to listen to their own bodies.  They (we) have been persuaded by the Megamyth that we are not competent observers of ourselves.

And here, we get to what at first looks like a picky nuance of language, but is a critically profound distinction.  There are TWO OF US in here.   For the purpose of this discussion, I'm assuming that our internal BODY control system is astoundingly good, far far better than doctors or hospitals or high-tech equipment, capable not only of diagnosis and predictions, but of actually managing the healing process itself.  That's one "agent" on the scene. That agent, however, is 100% NON-VERBAL.     This agent is highly competent, or we'd all be dead already.   You have no idea how much work it is just to keep you alive on a day to day basis. This agent is far more powerful and far less visible in the megamyth than even NURSES!

The OTHER agent on the scene is our conscious self, our internal dialog and voice, which IS VERBAL, and which is very heavily skewed and biased by the Megamyth, by what we just saw on television,  and by a billion other things.    This self is quite prone to error, and generally very out of touch with the BODY.  For the last two thousand years, it was more or less assumed there wasn't even ANY connection between this spirit / conscious self and the BODY -- the body was just sort a kind of vehicle the spirit rode around in. The spirit was lucky to understand where the ignition key and light switch was, let alone have any grasp of how the internal combustion engine's carburetor was functioning.   Perhaps as very intentional design, or perhaps as the result of seeing when it was NOT true,    the BODY and the SPIRIT are pretty much isolated from each other. The mind can go off on imagining itself in Tahiti while the body is sitting in New York.  It would be best if the BODY did not react to the mind's imagining, in general -- or you get a bad LSD trip or sleepwalking.

So, to the point.  Improving health care significantly on a national scale at an affordable cost.

We are not taking advantage of the best resource available,the body's own diagnostic system, let alone the body's healing-management system.   Even skipping the healing management part, for now,  let's just focus on the diagnostic system.

QUESTION:  Is it conceivable that a device or process or system MIGHT be developed so that people COULD let their body have a voice that was as credible, even to doctors,  as the typical vital-signs monitor? Maybe, even, so that they themselves, the "patients" could hear, first hand, the BODY's response to eating this versus that, or doing this versus that,  or taking this drug versus that drug, or this dosage of that drug versu the other dosage,  and use this at least as much as we use "Better HERE? or HERE?" in getting a new prescription for eye-glasses?

I'd say, yes, it's conceivable.  It's even likely.   The system is not totally submerged, if it can lead to a highly-accurate clinical impression and prognosis in the Framingham Heart study.   It it's even partly visible,  there are clever ways to amplify it and isolate it and clean up the signal and make it control colored lights or a strip-chart recorder or sound an alarm when things are "heading out of control". For most care a simple "better HERE?" or "Warmer or colder?" or "Yes/no" functionality would be sufficient to get this non-verbal entity to communicate with the totally verbal health-care systems.

OK,  I've presented an argument that a cost-effective highly-available diagnostic and prognostic system could be developed to assist both patient self-care and doctor-guided care and hospital care.    We simply need to shove the damn megamyth out of the way long enough to say -- no, there IS a signal right here, already, that we just need to tap into, and do it.

My God -- imagine the value of a simple device that could reveal the body's inner response and tell us whether any given intervention was actually helping or not.  NOW we're talking "evidence-based medicine" and "patient-centered care". 

Let me stress that the whole concept here is not yet some new way of instrumenting the body in order to "measure it".    The body is capable of measuring the ten thousand complex things it has to manage already on its own, as proven by the fact that it manages to keep us alive day after day. 

The concept here is learning how to simply ASK the body, in non-language that it understand (being non-verbal) to REVEAL  the answer to the question "how are you doing?" or "better here?" And generate (gasp) an answer translated into verbal words that WE are used to that is a "yes" or "no" or "down to about 2 hours left before I run out of ability to compensate." or "getting better at last" or "getting worse now." or "getting really unstable, call someone fast."

We are not talking about measuring. We are talking about communication. We are talking about learning how to listen, or, perhaps, how to give a non-verbal but extremely bright agent inside our body a channel, a pathway, a pencil or crayon or anything it can control so that it can find its voice and talk to us in terms we understand -- and then, we are talking about changing our captivity to the Megamyth enough that we are willing to listen to the answer and take it seriously.

For any given person, there would be a training curve, a period in which this feedback pathway would need to be tuned, calibrated, and validated.   OK, we can pay someone for the device and services to do that.  Now it's valid "medicine".  

But then,  everything else doctors or self-care or food-choices or activity-choices or hospitals or nurses did could reveal immediately the impact on our internal health, and if we also learn to listen to our own bodies,  how could this NOT improve the outcomes?

Doctors lord it over nurses, at least the AMA does,  jumping up and down over the "years" of training and thousands of hours with patients.    Well, dudes,  the human body internal control system can play that game too, by your rules.  It has a million years demonstrated experience keeping bodies functioning under all sorts of conditions, and an entire lifetime experience with this particular patient, this particular body, as opposed to "bodies in general".


If nurses are supposed to yield to doctor's superior judgment due to these kinds of numbers, then, by the AMA's own arguments,  doctors should yield to the Body's judgment.


We just need to solve some very straight-forward communication problems here, not deep theoretical problems.   There is a signal, it's non-verbal, get over it.   How do we communicate with a silent non-verbal agent, trapped inside our body and say "Hey, we're ready to listen to you now!" and give it a non-verbal Quija board or whatever it needs to "talk to us" and find its voice?


I'm affirming that THAT problem is WAY more approachable and amenable to research than trying to figure out the massive tangle of health-care-insurance-policies or electronic-health-record-systems we are turning to in our desperation for reducing costs and improving the visibly deteriorating health of the American public and work-force.

Again, because I know this is a sticking point. This is not something we can "measure".  There is no signal for us to measure, in that sense. If we go looking we will not find it.   The signal will not "come" until we build a receiver capable of  responding to such a signal,  and start listening hard, and start responding to what we hear.    After a while, hopefully not too long,  the body will realize that we are listening, and THEN start broadcasting on that channel, as we are now something control-ABLE that it can seek to take control OF, which it's good at because it is a "control system".

It is, in other words, something you have to believe to see.

It is something that requires humility, because we are asking, which is a submissive pose, not strapping to a chair and "measuring", which is a dominating pose.

It is, in that sense, I suppose, a lot like the process of prayer and "listening to God's voice" at least as described in serious practical religious literature -- until you are ready to respond to what you hear, don't expect to hear much. 

We are JUST on the verge of getting to wifi systems for our laptops that won't waste any energy at all broadcasting UNTIL we indicate we are present and ready to listen, and then they will wake up and start a communication link.    This is finally a concept we can relate to.    There is no signal to measure until we are ready to listen to it, and then there is a signal.  We must have an active-receiver that closes the communication AND CONTROL loop, before the contents of the signal will be broadcast.

So don't go sticking probes in people looking for "the signal" so you can "study" it.  It is probably not interested in being studied.  It is interested in taking control.  That's what it does.  That's the language it speaks.   This is an important distinction.  This is how come you can report in good faith that "we went to look for it but didn't see it."  Nope. You wouldn't. Not that way.

Oh yeah, one last note. If this thing strikes you as "true" or "important" -- take an action right now to do something about it.  Tomorrow will be too late. By tomorrow, the Megamyth will have detected this improper thinking, and erased it from your mind. It will be at best a note that no longer seems important.