Medical Malpractice

Energy therapies and energy psychologies are blowing the doors off conventional therapies and attracting more and more attention from both the media and the public. Look for things to get rough and tough as MDs, PhDs and highly specialized practitioners attempt to preserve their turf. The healing arts are being shaken from physical therapy to psychotherapy and the shocks are causing a restructuring of healing methods and products. In the last couple of hundred years there's never been a tougher time to be a doctor or a psychiatrist, and it won't get easier any time soon. What's happening?

First and easiest to notice is that the law and controlling professional bodies are creating more peril and paperwork for health practitioners every year. By adding thousands of new laws and professional requirements every year (from every state and federal legislators), regulators and legislators impose increasingly heavy legal burdens on the practice of healing. Litigation drives the cost of practice through the roof when insurance costs (including the cost of specialists in most practices to handle insurance claims) are based on the probability of malpractice suits. The two parts to that cost are a public who feel less and less personally important to their caregivers, and more and more just "cases", without individual worth and identity. There's a huge and widening lack of trust in medical systems that are managed by accounting principles rather than by medical ones.

The second part of the "peril and paperwork" problem is the increasing willingness of people to sue their caregivers. Lots of reasons are blamed for this and probably there are many real ones, but without assessing the why of it, it's still very clear that most medical doctors and many other types of therapists have to assume they will be sued by a patient at some time in their practice. The worst part of that for the professional is not just the skyrocketing costs of insurance, but that cases are almost always won on the basis of the quality of the attorney rather than the quality of care in question. That's very hard on a professional who is trying to stand on the moral high ground in his or her practice, and it's a big part of why many MDs are choosing to just give up and seek other careers. (Yes, this is happening.)

All that is just part of the back story. The story here is energy therapies, or energy psychology, or alternative therapies, where change is occurring with breathtaking speed. Most readily credible are those therapies that are based -- at least somewhat -- on Chinese medicine and acupuncture, which claims a history of at least 2,000 (some say 8,000) years. And there are quite a few of those. Lines get a little blurred, even here, because some of these energy therapies are attuned to physical issues while others are more directed to emotional or psychological issues, and some work with both. Moreover, the escalating popularity of them is partially related to speed; they all work faster than conventional psychotherapy, including Cognitive Behavioral Therapy and its two or three offshoots.

So what are we talking about here, medicine or psychotherapy? Well, both, but not so finely distinguished as we are accustomed to.

From early in the last century, medicine has recognized that some diseases are caused by the mind (they are referred to as psychosomatic) and it has been increasingly accepted that many physical conditions could be helped by mental therapies, or by energy medicines (acupuncture, chiropractic, osteopathy, homeopathy and others). Energy therapies and energy psychologies push the envelope even further by succeeding in healing some physical conditions by addressing the underlying emotional issues. The idea is that all (or certainly most) physical dysfunction rests on an emotional structure, and that if the emotional structure is taken down (released, resolved, collapsed) then the related physical issues will just go away. Of course, they are not one hundred percent successful, but neither is conventional medicine. And cost is a huge factor, considering that end of life healthcare (is that a misnomer?) exhausts most peoples' financial resources.

It's a bit messy to work your way through all the details, and we've only touched the surface here. Nonetheless, many people are doing it and their numbers are increasing. One interesting model is Emotional Freedom Techniques (EFT) developed by Stanford Engineer Gary Craig. His website, http://emofree.com is among the most popular alternative healthcare sites on the Internet; it's full of endorsements and success stories from around the world. His advisory board includes more thatn a dozen physiciansand PhDs, some very well known. He is clearly creating a bridge between energy practices and conventional medical practice. Maybe it's the beginning of a trend; maybe he's being instrumental in creating a direction for this big change in healthcare. One thing's certain: the practices of healthcare are changing and they will never again be what they were.