#192 Cut medical costs

By being an empowered patient you can dramatically cut your medical costs. Did you know that defensive medicine costs 60 Billion annually? According to a study in the June 28 Archives of Internal Medicine 9 in 10 physicians said doctors order more tests and procedures than patients need so they can protect themselves against lawsuits... but what about your time and money... as a patient??

According to Mind-Body Medicine specialists, high tech medicine is not even close to giving us good value for our money. In The Wrong Diagnosis -in Huffington Post Dr. Andrew Weill writes that Americans spent $8.4 billion on medicine in 1950, vs. an astonishing 2.3 trillion in 2007 - effectively using $30,000 annually for a family of four. And still the U.S. ranked near the very bottom of the top 40 nations - below Columbia, Chile, Costa Rica and the Dominican Republic - in a rating of health systems by the World Health Organization in 2000.

Learning about your condition and different treatment options, not trusting every doctor just because he or she has a white coat, and working on your own mind-body connection to create the best possible foundation for your own healing situation, will enable you to recognize and say no to unnecessary treatment and lower your own medical costs substantially.