Health Care Reform: A History of How We Got Here

Our current health care system is a hell of a mess: It can radically alter and repair the human body, but spends little time assuring that the body has adequate nutrition and is free from major toxicity. The concept of 'promoting health' and assisting the natural regenerative powers of the human body is almost a foreign concept in modern Western medicine.

Health care is a good indicator of how far from reality our culture has drifted. So how did we get to this point?

Throughout most of human history, health care was very limited and out of simple necessity. Health care meant (at best) rest, good nutrition, simple bandaging and resetting of broken bones, and consumption of herbal remedies. Specialists in medicine may have had a broader knowledge of specific remedies and palliatives, but their knowledge was not fundamentally different than that of everyone else.

There are numerous examples of fossilized remains of humans (and non-human primates) who showed severe damage or deformities that had healed over. This is a strong indication that pre-civilized humans assisted one another in recovery when sick or injured; this would have promoted the overall strength and resiliency of each tribe.

Different cultures had different philosophical beliefs regarding how and why one became sick, but practical implementation of health care would have involved assisting the body in healing itself. This practice would be much more effective with the support of other humans providing mutual aid.

When humans began settling down in one place and interacting regularly with other animals, other health issues began to emerge. For one, the work was much harder and the level of nutrition was less diverse -- human health deteriorated, and lifespans became shorter. But a new malady also began to emerge in the form of disease epidemics, which were passed between species (due to close contact with humans) and spread quickly throughout densely populated settlements. As humans had no natural resistance to many of these diseases, the death toll would have been immense -- with morbidity rates approaching 100% in many cases.

These issues (poor nutrition and communicable disease) came to dominate human health over the next several millenia. They also influenced how cultures came to view disease and sickness -- as something external that affected an otherwise healthy person. Disease became something external and foreign, something to be conquered and driven from the body (much like human civilizations conquered nature to take down forests and plant rows of grain).

The other major change in medicine was the professionalization of the discipline. Like many other forms of specialization, medical knowledge became less accessible to the layman. And like other professionals before them, doctors worked to marginalize their competition (midwives and herbal remedies) ... sometimes with noble intentions. The status of the medical profession rose considerably when the germ theory of disease and its attendant protocols almost singlehandedly allowed large cities to expand and thrive. The net effect of these changes was to make make doctors more authoritative and essential.

New tools also helped to change medicine: antibiotics, x-rays, and drugs created through modern chemistry offered a number of new treatment options. Going into the hospital was no longer a death sentence (disease in hospitals has always been rampant), doctors could study the live human body in a much more detailed manner, and complex drugs offered a whole new avenue of treatment for chronic disease.

These three changes (a 'foreign' theory of disease, professionalization of medicine, and the introduction of modern tools) had a major effect on human health. During the past 40 years, in particular, these forces have combined to create an increasingly complex sector of the economy that shows no signs of slowing down.