Problems with Medicine: Why It's Not Working
Medicine is not doing its job. By definition, medicine is "the science of diagnosing, treating, or preventing disease and other damage to the body or mind" (Dictionary.com). This routine, and in some cases emergency care that we expect to receive is becoming compromised in three significant ways. These include professional negligence, an imbalance in the availability of doctors to patients in different regional areas, and frivolous medical malpractice lawsuits.

Although America is a country blessed with some of the most advanced and highly developed healthcare available, it cannot provide for all of its citizens. Amazing advancements in technology and health care have taken place over the last few decades, improvements which have increased the ability to save lives, but only some Americans are able to reap the benefits of this growing science. The reasons behind this are that healthcare is supply-based and not need-based, doctors are wasting money by being irresponsible, and lawyers are exploiting every mistake. These detrimental trends are costing the healthcare industry millions of doctors, making the funds needed to provide healthcare to more people unavailable, thereby endangering the lives of millions of patients.

This first factor, professional negligence, encompasses more than just being careless or forgetful. It often includes unnecessary treatment that does nothing to improve the quality of life of a patient. Professional negligence can also include under medicating, or more often overmedicating, drug errors, negative drug interactions, and post-surgical infections, mistakes that are allowed to continue when doctors and nurses are not reprimanded, and are instead paid the same amount, regardless of the quality of their work.

Doctors are not always careless in their own will. The medical field is a challenging and often emotionally-charged battlefield in which nurses and doctors are active players who cannot recover from exhaustion and sickness themselves. They are charged with saving lives for twelve or thirteen hours at a time, one after the other, with few breaks to sorrow the losses. The result of this continual superhuman attempt to play God in continuous repetition is that doctors are tired and emotionally drained, which attributes to the possibility for mistakes, because the mind is not sharp under such harsh conditions.

Another aspect of professional negligence is the lack of communication

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