My client, Ramey, recently started her six-week Health Strategy program with me, and she’s ready to work on her wellness unlike any health visit she’s ever had before.

Her journey starts with the skills to become a systems thinker.

This mindset doesn’t just expand outside the box. Embracing the best of traditional and nontraditional medical models is both an art and skill you need to navigate today’s fragmented healthcare systems.

Have you ever wondered why the healthcare systems are so dysfunctional?

How Did We Get Here?

To understand your current state of health, you need to look back in time to the root causes. Roots are easier to find in the earth when you have the right tools to dig for them and know enough about the plant to avoid causing harm. You wouldn’t think to treat the leaves to nurture a tree back to health.

Why, then, would you just focus on your symptoms?

The answer is in the culture we live in where symptoms matter more than the root causes of illness. The healthcare system in the United States is failing you by remaining stagnant and holding tight to their biomedical model as the dominant narrative – specialist-driven care, mostly time-limited appointments, focusing on the symptoms.

This a big reason why you can’t afford to fail yourself.

More people are living with chronic illness and dying younger, and life expectancy in the United States is getting worse compared with other developed nations. Why? Some people and organizations suggest that more primary care physicians may help solve the problem.

But this plan won’t work. The primary care role, specifically in large US healthcare organizations, eroded over the last few decades to a demoralizing practice emotionally and financially.

Most people don’t want to be a doctor without the ability to act like one.

There will always be a shortage, despite adding nurses and physician assistants, because they lack the time and ability to guide you back into balance.

The Problem with Striving to Be Objective

Doctors train for many years to be objective. Doctors even have their own notes called a SOAP note – Subjective, Objective, Assessment, and Plan. The Subjective is what you say, the Objective is what doctors observe. The Assessment is what doctor thinks is going on. And the Plan is what you’re going to do and what the doctor will do moving forward.

That all comes from two centuries ago when modern medicine was about objectifying the situation because that was considered science.

But if you go too far extreme to be objective, it takes away you, the patient.

Your subjective experience is so critical to understand what’s going on with your health.

You don’t want a doctor to be biased. That’s not the same thing, but it’s about involving you, the patient as an autonomous, self-reliant, empowered being to take charge of your health. But these days, it’s just not in the culture to let you do that.

Transcending Paradigms

Right now, a lot of healthcare practitioners are isolated in their own specialties, both on the Western and Eastern medicine side. Most don’t communicate with each other, and that still leaves you in the passive role.

That really didn’t sit well with me as a second-generation physician with Board certification in traditional Family Medicine and in Medical Acupuncture.

To truly change a system in the most profound way, you must transcend medical systems in order to gain the most from them.

Blended medicine is good medicine. And I believe you deserve to have the best that multiple medical systems can offer. The dominant medical system won’t serve it to you. You need good strategy to access what you need.

Systems Thinking Improves Your Health

That’s why I created the Health Strategy Consult program. It’s almost like a boot camp to be the CEO of your health now and in the future.

Join Ramey and me in Season 3 of Third Opinion MD podcast to take the journey to become a systems thinker.

It’s never too late to get to a place of knowledge and power for your health. You can have all the best tools, but you need a good strategy to know which tools work best for you.

Resources

Follow Third Opinion MD podcast and leaving a review on Apple Podcasts

Sign up for the Third Opinion MD Newsletter to stay up to date on workshops, podcast news and more

Follow Third Opinion MD on Instagram

Book a Complimentary consult meeting with Barbara de la Torre

​

​