Can we depend upon government-supported health care? As federal and state governments stagger under huge deficits and payments from entitlement programs such as Medicaid and Medicare are being cut back, what’s a hospital to do?

Put patients in charge.

Read full story in Becker’s Hospital Review.

Early in my career an elderly woman presented to establish care. When I discovered she was suffering from a urinary tract infection, I reviewed all her treatment options from natural remedies to antibiotics. When I stopped talking, she looked straight at me and said, “What’s the matter, Honey? Don’t you know what you are doing?”

The truth is I do not always know what I am doing. In that case I did, but I realized that patients back in the day preferred a patriarchal, just-take-this-pill approach to medicine. Today patients want to discuss their options.

Now, I believe, people want a real doctor.

What’s YOUR fantasy? More and more doctors are putting patients in charge of designing their ideal health-care experience. Share your wildest dreams and I’ll do my best to bring them to life. Promise!

While ideal clinics are opening all across America, some doctors accuse me of practicing “Alice-in-Wonderland” medicine.  When ridiculed, I often wonder: Why?

After all, who could be against ideal health care?

Even the Journal of Family Practice praises our innovative community-focused model. And now our clinic is featured in the newest edition of Harvard School of Public Health’s Renegotiating Health Care, a text that examines major trends with the potential to change the dynamics of health care. Yet some journals reject ideal care. Why? One editor responds” It’s “too utopian.” Uh. . . really?

Robert F. Kennedy acknowledged: “One-fiftth of all people are against everything all of the time.”

I think that means four out of five Americans are ready for utopian health care.  Are you?

I’ve been writing prescriptions for twenty years. Early in my career I realized what patients often need can’t be delivered by Pfizer or Merck. Here are some of the best prescriptions I’ve ever written:

• Have sex every day!
• Quit your job!
• Take a one-week vacation at the coast.
• Go on a seven-day silent retreat in the woods.
• Find a girlfriend.
• Reconnect with deceased relatives.
• Experience a month-long media fast.
• Fall in love with yourself.
• Drink kale smoothies (recipe provided).
• Practice twice-daily meditation.
• Speak your truth.
• Get a puppy.
• Publish a book.
• Come with me to a writer’s conference. I’ll pay.
• Get divorced!
• See an energy healer. I’ll go with you.
• Sell your car & commute by bike.
• Start a spring garden (seeds provided).
• Avoid your mother-in-law.

. . . and more!