Mainstream medicine has become increasingly standardized over the past few decades.
Standardization has some benefits: reduced inequality, improved procedures for minimizing mistakes, and increased predictability. Those attributes are often easier to verify than health effects.
Standardization is not so great for promoting innovation (standardizing a few building blocks may promote innovation, but that’s not what medicine has done). Yet medicine is an area where we have a relatively high need for more innovation.
It would be nice if one system of medicine provided everything that I want from medicine. Just like it would be nice if one company could provide all my transportation needs, or every type of food that I want, or an operating system with all the software that I want to use.
Alas, none of those seem close to being feasible this decade. Yet I get the impression that many more people expect it of medicine than is the case for food or transportation.
I’ve reached an age when it’s valuable to ask a good deal from medicine. So in addition to a standard doctor, I’ve engaged with a competing “brand” of medicine.
Specifically, the functional medicine practitioners at Chris Kresser’s Adapt180.
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