With the opioid crisis looming on the horizon always, the question comes as to how to treat pain. So many medicines have side effects an are overall dangerous. Some work about as much as placebo. We'll talk about medicines, but then discuss better ways to deal with pain, from mindfulness to exercises to other non-medical modalities. Pain is real, but pain should not be an invitation to be smothers by medicines and the medical system. We will help you through this!

We have always known about basic cancer screening tests, like mammography and colonoscopy. But we have expanded the universe of cancer screening, relying on scans, blood tests, and genetic testing. As we screen more, we find more, we treat more, but are we saving lives? Much of the screening we do has not been shown to save as many lives as advertised, if any at all once the complications of the screening are taken into consideration. A new study in JAMA questions some newer screening tests, and past studies in Archives of Internal Medicine have found that overall most screening is not life saving. The new screens are even more perilous, introducing increased uncertainty to an already uncertain field. It's interesting to read Malcom Gladwell's take on screening in the New Yorker, helping us to learn about the promise and perils of basic screening. Alan and Andy will tackle this issue through the lens of their experience and a whole lot of data!

Many books and studies have pointed to the fact that we are a nation swimming in mental health diagnoses and drugs. The DSM--the bible of mental health diagnoses--has exploded the numbers of mental health sicknesses you may have, and for every sickness there is a drug. Both the DSM and the American College of Psychiatry are heavily funded by the drug industry, and their recommendations have led to a skyrocketing of drugs for the brain, without any reduction in depression, anxiety, hyperactivity, or any other common ailment; in fact, they are all on the rise. We are exposing kids and elders to these drugs which are outright dangerous. We'll talk about this disturbing trend and highlight some books and articles that may be helpful.

The American Heart Association (AHA) has devised new blood pressure guidelines. In this iteration, the AHA tell us that any blood pressure over 120 is dangerous and must be treated, with pressures over 180 requiring immediate hospitalization. There is no age cut off, and no accounting for individual variability. That the AHA is highly dependent on Big Pharma for its financial coffers, and has on its leadership many ex executives of Big Pharma, likely helped trigger there anti-scientific and dangerous recommendations. In fact, only one flawed study supports their recommendations, while dozens of others refute them. We will discuss this through the lens of science and common sense, and we'll demonstrate why guidelines are often worrisome, and how these recommendations demonstrate the power of Big Pharma over medical care.

New studies show that as we are drugging our senior more, they are falling more and dying more from their falls. We may think that dramatically lowering blood pressure and sugars, fixing cholesterol with statins, using blood thinners to prevent stroke, and medicating sadness are beneficial, but the pile of drugs we're tossing into elderly bodies to "fix" aberrant numbers is leading to more deadly falls. We must turn our back on specialists who demand we must take so many drugs, and return to common sense and healing as a guide to treatment.

In Return to Healing we lay out a very simple fix to the medical mess we are in. We spend the first half the book explaining why it is a mess, and then the second half talking about who is profiting from the mess. Then we give the fix.

It's really very easy to repair a system that is simply off the tracks. We lay it out simply. This is one you don't want to miss!

Alan and Andy talk about how medical school does not prepare students to be whole-person doctors, focused on numbers and multiple choice answers and slices of the body. William Osler devised an ideal medical school at Hopkins before the Flexner Revolt took it down. In the Osler model students work with community primary care doctors from day one and throughout their entire medical school curriculum. They see patients and then learn the science behind the diseases and aspects of health they present with. We can easily fix medical school to produce doctors and not technicians, but it requires a knowledge that it is now very broken.

As two primary care doctors with a collective 75 years of experience, we understand the benefits of having a primary care doctor who develops strong relationships built on trust, who customizes care to each patient, who takes a patient-centric and whole-person view of care, and who is critical thinker looking beyond the protocols and drug-company dictated "truths." Multiple studies have shown that in areas with more primary care providers outcomes are better, people live longer, costs are lower, and patients are happier. That is because we're not paid for doing things to you--tests, procedures, drugs--but rather are paid to take care of you. We talk about how a primary care system would work.