A New Year, A Changing Health System

The health care landscape is changing in America.

Recent financial strain that many health systems are now experiencing has in many cases resulted in more restrictions of services covered by insurance companies, whom field many competing priorities. While the type of care offered and covered is determined by health insurance companies, these decisions are often made from financial rather than scientific considerations.

Let’s not pretend that our health system is root-cause based: it is not biologically nor environmentally-rooted. Rather, it is primed to meet you at the peak of your symptoms to suppress expressions of imbalance, leaving the bulk of dysfunction untouched. This is by design, but not always a nefarious fact, as population medicine also provides lifesaving care that prevents and treats many infections and improves health.

However, in my personal and professional experience, conventional care fails to meet many people in their needs for chronic care, digestive conditions, prevention, optimization, and autoimmunity where a medication does not resolve a symptom or bring a person back into balance. 

It seems like whether you are living urban or rural, are well-resourced or under-served, available health services miss the mark of what people want AND need to maintain the best physical and mental health. How I hear about this from patients (who are getting care) is often feeling unheard or blamed for their symptoms and health, a patient-provider misalignment trend as old as western medicine — and a cultural trait of our medical system rather than one that is based on the full scope of scientific analysis.

Providers are expertly trained in a specialty that is considered separately from the interconnectedness of the human body and how it works together, and often this translates into the fragmented uncoordinated care that has become far too common. An image from the Terry Gilliam movie Brazil comes to mind, of individual bureaucratic workers in tiny offices tug-of-warring over their desk lengths that wane under piles of paperwork shared with their adjacent neighbor— an invisible enemy separated by a wall.

I was personally diagnosed with an autoimmune condition in my 20's, when I first experienced the shortcomings of the health system as an adult. It was impactful enough to alter the path of my life into one of health care — and specifically into the clinical system that had depersonalized me enough to consider my problems made up (or whatever). I did this because I knew I wasn't alone, and I understood that science was also on my side (shout out to my extremely stubborn and well-researched mother, who struggled with autoimmunity, however I take all the credit for my own persistence).

In some areas of health care, the tightening rigidity of coverage is dictated by dollars. It perpetuates the blame and isolation of personal health imbalance, which in reality cannot be simply reduced to relevant or irrelevant — and most certainly is never a personal failing.

This is a time of change, restructuring, and re-centering the person as well as the group. It is a time for increased communication and atypical collaboration, of recognizing the vast world of evidential medicine and the layered mechanisms of the body and mind. 

Different angles of health, including diverse provider perspectives, should always have a seat at the table. It's all important, all relevant, all valid. In this attention economy, we must always remember that the choice is ours.

Starting in 2026, I will be offering more group classes that will provide a resource-sharing and community-based aspect to health topics in addition to provider support and guidance. This is intended to attend to the connective aspect of healing (we need each other, and to know we're not alone) while bringing down the costs for individual care (without insurance).

Here is to a new year — and to the beginning of something truly healing.