JUST TO SHARE (Lau Tai Onn): Doctors Over-prescribing & Unnecessary Tests

The blogger’s most-learned Great Sifu Dr. JB Lim wrote to his e-buddies the other day on the above subject.

From: Lim Juboo

Date: Sun, Oct 5, 2014 at 10:34 PM

Read this:

http://www.thestar.com.my/News/Nation/2014/10/05/Outcry-over-unnecessary-medical-tests-and-diagnosis/

Just a comment in a nut-shell:

All diseases have a cause, or multiple causes. Diseases do not suddenly drop down on your head from thin air or from outer space. Most chronic diseases are caused by our own body long sufferings and tolerance from our bad dietary lifestyles (examples too much meat, fats and sugars, etc), our bad habits (example alcohol, smoking, stress, laziness, etc) and unnecessary exposures (taking medicines, free radical, UV light, unnecessary X-rays, CT scans, etc) – all in a nutshell.

A first-class clinician is a good diagnostician who uses just his ears, eyes and hands to look, listen very carefully, to palpate and percuss, to ask a lot of analytical questions...and he comes out with 95 % diagnostic accuracy without all those blood, biochemical, haematological, serological, urine tests, PET scans, CAT scans, MRI, sonography (ultrasound) and this and that imaging... plus this scope and that scopes.. and more scopes and more imaging (all ghostly shadows).

A good and honest doctor is one who always, always counsels his patient and treats the root causes. He seldom wants to just give unnecessary drugs by the tons the easy way out to mask the root causes and symptoms, and then ask the patients to come back after three months in the next appointment for more of the same drugs and medicines – “till death and all those medicines do us part”.

Drugs do NOT cure; it is YOUR BODY that heals itself if only we know how to nourish, rest, stimulate, needle, massage, and nurture it when it is sick. This is NEVER taught in medical schools. All the reference textbooks on medicine are full of names of patented drugs on every page on "management", put there by the drug companies that sponsored the drug trials to brain-wash the doctors on how to treat. This is well-known, and has become a joke.

Drugs, and more drugs, that’s how ‘modern’ drug-dependent medicine is practiced today. Every patient who consults a doctor today MUST come out with several packets of medicines (or are they poisons?)

Doctors never learn from their Father of Medicine, Hippocrates who taught “Let Food be your Medicine” and this was reechoed by the Malaysian Medical Association president Dr H. Krishna Kumar who said about patients attitude: “Instead of eating a balanced diet and exercising regularly, most patients prefer pill-popping,”

How true, how true!

The drug industry capitalizes on this weakness, and aggressively promote their drugs to doctors who are at the mercy of drug companies because the doctors are at a loss how to treat without prescribing all these unnecessary agents churned out by the pharmaceutical industry when Mother Nature has already provided mankind with hundreds of thousands of natural medicines for hundreds of thousands of years to cure every illness on Earth.

I know of many cases of colleagues and doctors prescribing 6-7 drugs including antibiotics, antihistamines, NSAIDs (pain killers), barbiturates (to sedate) etc, for a self-limiting viral infections like a common cold or an infantile rotaviral diarrhea; when all that is needed is just bed rest, plenty of fluid like rice water or coconut water, and taking yourself off food (bowel rest) for 1 -2 days. On this natural therapeutic regimen itself, a patient will already be jumping up within 1-2 days without all these 6-7 antibiotics, analgesics, and anti-inflammatory (for a rhinoviruses causing common cold? What for?

It is a case of “I scratch your back, you scratch mine” for the mutual survival of the doctor and the pharmaceutical companies.