Over the last 100 years the pattern of medical education, research, and practice has shifted to a reductionist style of thinking--single causation, the symptoms, with great focus of diagnosis and treatment of these symptoms.

This has unfortunately led to superficial solutions, usually drugs and surgery, both of which have skyrocketed costs with less than stellar results, usually leading to many side effects and continual management of chronic disease. In addition, the current healthcare payment system of health insurance, pays vast amounts of monies on this endpoint treatment of symptom suppression, yet will pay little or nothing on the upstream pathway of underlying causes or prevention of diseases.

Endpoint symptoms are merely warning signals by the body of an ongoing dysfunctional process that has reached a threshold where the symptom is observed and the patient becomes aware of a problem. Disease, however, is not merely symptoms--i.e., the diagnosed medical description. The disease is in reality a long standing process of dysfunction that begins even before birth, as described in the Pathway of Disease.

Yet, standard medical care is focused on diagnosing and treating the endpoint symptoms, usually with drugs, surgery and/or radiation that fights or countermands the body's warning signals(symptoms), or the observable endpoint of disease.

If auto mechanics or engineers treated equipment problems with the process of thinking that our modern healthcare system does, they would look for the best way to cut the wire to the warning lights or disconnect the warning signal system. It would be like removing the battery from a screeching smoke detector while ignoring the cause--the fire in the burning house.

Even in our alternative or integrative medical systems, the focus is still on fighting the endpoint disease or reducing the symptoms by substituting herbs, nutrition or homeopathy for drugs, and substituting alternative therapy like acupuncture, body work, energy medicine, etc. for conventional treatment. The thought process is still the same.

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