Imagine you are suffering from some sort of chronic pain. You have been to every doctor in town. The best you’ve gotten from any of them is a prescription for pain medication. Now you are sitting in yet another doctor’s office, listening to him explain that your only path to relief is surgery. You cannot help but wonder if there is anything else. There is, and it is called an individualized treatment plan.
Industrialization and America’s love for efficiency are both good when it comes to mass-producing tangible goods. They are not so good when applied to medicine. Human beings are not products manufactured on the assembly line. There is no repair manual that guarantees success just by pulling out a bad part and replacing it with another.
Unfortunately, Western medicine doesn’t lend itself well to individualized treatments unless healthcare providers go out of their way to create tailor-made plans for each patient. It is something that the pain doctors at Texas-based Lone Star Pain Medicine practice on a daily basis.
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No One-Size-Fits-All Treatment
The general rule in medicine, whether doctors actually follow it or not, is that there is no one-size-fits-all treatment for every patient. Patients respond differently to medications and procedures. What works for one patient may not work for another. But rather than simply trying one thing after another until hitting on something that finally works, it is better for doctors to develop individualized treatment plans right from the start.
An individualized plan accounts for many things. For example, it accounts for the patient’s:
- overall health
- medical history
- recovery goals
- tolerance for certain types of treatments.
An individual treatment plan is also one that tracks the patient’s progress, or lack thereof. Tracking allows healthcare providers to make adjustments as needed. Otherwise, patient and provider are left guessing.
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Other Treatment Options
Another significant benefit to individualized treatment plans is that they open up the possibility of seeking other types of treatments. Take osteoarthritis, for example. The standard course of treatment is to start with pain medication. From there, medication is continually adjusted until it no longer works at all. Then it is off to the hospital for surgery.
The thing is this: there are other options for treating osteoarthritis. Those options might never be discussed unless a healthcare provider develops an individualized treatment plan for the patient in question. With an individualized plan in place, the door is opened to discuss things like platelet-rich plasma (PRP) injections and stem cell therapy.
In some cases, the perfect treatment might be a combination of PRP injections, physical therapy, and an occasional dose of pain medication. But without exploring an individualized treatment, patient and provider will never get there. That is why the one-size-fits-all approach is so detrimental.
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Time and Effort Required
So why do more healthcare providers not offer individualized treatment plans? Because they require time and effort. Doctors are so overwhelmed by caseloads that finding the time is difficult. And if one doesn’t have time, how can one put forth the effort?
Western – or specifically America’s – medicine’s lack of individualized treatment plans is largely the result of how our insurance system is set up. Reform health insurance and you reform the way providers deliver medicine. Being able to offer individualized treatment plans is sufficient motivation to overhaul health insurance once and for all.
In Western medicine, we shy away from individualized treatment. That is a shame. If more providers were willing to work with patients on a more individualized basis, perhaps some of their patients would find more relief from their chronic pain. Here’s hoping that individualized treatments are eventually reality.
