Everything Is Broken – Tablet Magazine
In the summer of 2014, I gave birth to a baby boy. He was born with a perfect Apgar score, after a very easy delivery. But my labor had not been smooth in fact, throughout the day and a half of contractions, I believed there was something decidedly wrong. I also felt that way as I held him for the first time, and he writhed violently under my hands. In a video taken about 10 minutes after he was born, he can be seen lifting his head up off my chest. Ooooh, look at how advanced he is! someone can be heard trilling in the background, before her voice is overtaken by my own. Don t do that, love, I say. Then, to the camera: Does he seem like he s in pain to you?
It took my husband and me three years to understand that in fact I was right that day in the delivery room. Our son was hurt. And it will take him years to heal longer than it should have, and that is on top of the injustice of the original wound though I thank God every day that we figured it out.
The first breakthrough came when my husband David remembered a book about brain science he had read a decade earlier, by a doctor named Norman Doidge. It changed our lives, by allowing us to properly understand our son s injury (and to understand why we couldn t manage to get a straight answer about it from any of the experts we had seen). It s been a tough road, but from that moment on, we at least knew what to do and why.
A year or so later, we met Doidge and his wife, Karen, for dinner, and it is here that the story may become pertinent for you.
After we ordered, I told Norman I had a question I d been wanting to ask and that I wanted his honest answer to it, even if it meant that I had done something wrong. I proceeded to relay to him the entire tale, from the very beginning to that very moment, of what felt to me like our Kafkaesque medical mystery journey.
How was it, I then asked, that it took my husband and me both children of doctors, both people with reporting and researching backgrounds, among the lucky who have health insurance, and with access through family and friends to what is billed as the best medical care in the country years to figure this out, and that in the end we only did so basically by accident?
Norman looked at us sympathetically. I don t know how else to tell you this but bluntly, he said. There are still many good individuals involved in medicine, but the American medical system is profoundly broken. When you look at the rate of medical error it s now the third leading cause of death in the U.S. the overmedication, creation of addiction, the quick-fix mentality, not funding the poor, quotas to admit from ERs, needless operations, the monetization of illness vs. health, the monetization of side effects, a peer review system run by journals paid for by Big Pharma, the destruction of the health of doctors and nurses themselves by administrators, who demand that they rush through 10-minute patient visits, when so often an hour or more is required, and which means that in order to be successful, doctors must overlook complexity rather than search for it … Alana, the unique thing here isn t that you fell down so many rabbit holes. What s unique is that you found your way out at all.
I had barely started processing this when Norman moved to change the subject: Now, can I ask you two something? How come so much of the journalism I read
Alana Newhouse. ICYMI.