On Patient Compliance

A Healthy Attitude

Attitudes change with the social trends that time and human innovation and emotion engender. The family practitioner doing the rounds with horse and carriage, or simply atop the equine, gave way to busy clinic and hospital. A small cornucopia of remedies metamorphosed into a more expansive one – and finally into the bewildering array of pharmaceuticals available today, and the advertising campaigns that promulgate their use. Their relative uselessness in terms of the panorama of degenerative illnesses afflicting ever greater numbers of sufferers has in turn sent people desperately searching for alternatives – and health practitioners delving deeper and deeper into both “folk” medicine cures and new paradigms. It has also begun to shift some responsibility back into the court of the patient. The practitioner is no longer, and never really was, the peerless authority figure who bears the magic pill. Sufferer and healthcare professional are a “team” working together. Alas that the term “patient compliance” is so often coupled in my mind with the phrase “you can bring a horse to water but you can’t make it drink.” Perhaps it works even better if worded, “You can give good advice to a patient but you can’t make him think.”

So think now, prospective patient. Who’s ultimately responsible for your health: you; the common mass of humanity; or your healthcare practitioner? Cannot any one of these three entities totally sabotage your health? If you will insist on drinking a bottle of vodka every night, if your dentist fills your mouth with mercury, or your landlord douses the property in organophosphates, or if your healthcare practitioner is less than meticulous in taking your case history, unpleasant consequences may follow. An ounce of prevention, as they say, is worth a pound of cure.

Consider your body as a kind of Balinesque temple: daily offerings of aesthetically pleasing assemblages of natural products – healthy activities, things that please the eye, healthy food – should be offered with good grace. Do not, under peril of excommunication, befoul the clean air and peaceful atmosphere of the temple of your soul! The maintenance men will attempt repairs from time to time, but you are in charge of the daily upkeep.

Let us say that one day you meet a maintenance man at the temple who informs you that he knows exactly why you are bent over in pain – the temple now houses rat poison by way of combating its rodent problem – but this, in turn, has poisoned you. This person believes they can remove the poison and eradicate the rats, but you must alter your dietary habits, purchase a series of remedies from them to neutralize the toxic substances lacing the temple grounds and hire a famed pied piper to charm the rats down to the river’s edge. Do you: (1) Deny the truth of his assertions? (2) Believe him in a vague sort of way before doing your utmost to push all thoughts of the temple’s dilemma out of your mind by keeping busy at all costs? (3) Firmly convince yourself that all you really need to do is to hire a new maintenance man – preferably one who minds his own business and keeps his mouth shut? Think about it. . . The paradigm is that toxins lodged in your body’s cells and tissues have led to metabolic dysfunction. The attitude you bring with you when you approach this problem will make all the difference in terms of the effort you are willing to devote to improving matters.

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