For those us of old enough to remember Marcus Welby, MD and Dr. Kildare, the beloved TV docs we grew up with, we also remember a time when physicians ran healthcare. They set policy, budgets, insurance coverage guidelines and pretty much, back then, “everything healthcare” was directed by the doctors.

The insurance carriers, growing tired of paying for unnecessary surgery, warned the physician groups who ran the show that if they did not clean up the medical abuses taking place, the insurance industry would take away their decision making by enforced second opinions and limit paying for procedures that were being unnecessarily performed. Back in the 1970’s, there were millions of hysterectomies. Of these, 66% were deemed “unnecessary” by what has become the Medical Review Board watchdog.

Now in the U.K., to quote an article from English.news.cn, “The new British coalition government revealed on Friday that it planned to put doctors in charge of funding for frontline services in England’s National Health Service (NHS), in a change hailed as the biggest in 60 years.”

This is big! If this were to be enacted in the U.S., we could see a return of physician driven healthcare that is provided, determined and distributed by the same medical type of physician groups that were unable to police themselves a mere 30 years after the establishment of the American Medical Association and the mainstreaming of the pharmaceutical industry.

Granted, we have in place excellent watchdogs peer review boards and medical review requirements, but this works because of the lack of conflict of interest with the way these structures have been put in place.

The healthcare reform bill has yet to flex its muscles and most of us feel pretty much in the dark about what we can expect. No surprise since an overwhelming majority of politicos who voted on the bill had little to no idea what the bill contained!

The issues we see with today’s healthcare delivery simply reinforce the Whole Health vision of taking control of your body, preventing disease with common sense health hygiene and limiting the use of acute care medicine we as Americans are blessed to have available to us. Every day the news contains articles identifying the long-term use of even over the counter medications and caution us to realize we cannot repeatedly put these chemicals into our bodies and not experience consequences.

Chronic disease, which is the bulk of what is treated in healthcare today, is preventable and cost effective. Let’s create our own healthcare reform with self-directed whole person care – that means taking care of ourselves with consideration to all 5 aspects of health. In advocating this type of care through patient education, we all move toward living well and living long.

For more whole health discussions, listen to Dr. Georgianna Donadio’s radio show Living Above The Drama.