Where healthcare meets healthscare, and ultimately lets us all down...

The last two months have been about as traumatic as I care to have, ever in my lifetime. I found out, in mid-August, that my mother, merely 56 years old, was diagnosed with a rare form of cancer, forming in her gallbladder. There's nothing more frightening than finding out a loved one has cancer, especially when you're on a rollercoaster ride of emotions with good, bad, positive, negative, and a LOT of "gray area" information coming your way.

But in general, this experience has left me wondering why it's not been apparent to us all that this nation's healthcare system just flat-out doesn't work - for anybody, really. Doctors come out of med schools knowing how to treat symptoms and knowing precious little about prevention, frankly. My mother's doctor, for example, has given us ALL the ways to "combat" or "delay" her cancer through surgical and medicinal methods; but when I TWICE asked him about nutritional methods - blank stares were followed by "nothing really."

REALLY? Hell, anybody can Google preventative nturitional measures thought (and some KNOWN) to fight cancer, and this educated cancer surgeon had nothing to tell my parents?

Oh, I shared what I found with my parents, but there's a certain "weight" that comes with hearing it from a man with a stethoscope around his neck and a white coat on. Folks, that's not "comprehensive" healthcare; thank goodness there are more options to exhaust, and I'm pressing my parents to seek them out.

I assure you, that doctor, and that hospital, will get paid by my family's insurance company for doing "as much as they could." Only they didn't, which is why I'm exploring other options; options of course, that the insurance industry might be more skeptical of, because they might not be part of "the system," which consists of the hospital industry, the pharmaceutical industry, and the insurance industry."

See if I give a damn; this is my mother's life, and I'm not out for their approval; just for what we paid them for all this time.

But for those who've made noise about the need for health insuracne and healthcare reform, this is just one of the many examples whree "the system" doesn't work, even when money isn't the issue all the time.