The second medical fallacy is our habit of looking at symptoms and labeling them as diseases. This approach ignores the real disease altogether.

Medical students aren’t trained to look beyond the immediate problem. If the patient has a cold, they are taught, deal with the cold. If the patient has cancer, provide the appropriate treatment. What’s wrong with this approach? Why wouldn’t you want to treat the cold or cancer?

Treating the obvious ailment is a good idea, but it’s only the first step. Most diseases, whether colds or cancers, are really symptoms of a deeper problem. If you treat the symptoms and gloss over the underlying crisis, the problem will come back again and again. Sure, we can try to radiate a cancer or remove it surgically. We might even be successful in the attempt. But what’s to prevent the cancer from reoccurring?

We patch people up, running from one problem to the next, until the entire system breaks down. When that happens, all our expensive surgeries and machines aren’t worth a hill of beans.

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