Hundreds of times in my career I’ve had patients say to me after getting better, why didn’t my other doctors do this?  It’s the perfect question, but it’s a very complicated issue. I’ve spent over 25 years thinking about this issue and trying to come up with a good explanation. So let’s take a stab at it.

For over two decades we’ve had tremendous success helping people get better, even when they’ve been to lots of doctors and well-known big name medical facilities.

Why is that?  Well, one the primary reasons, and possibly the main reason, is that most people think they’re getting healthcare when they go to the doctor.

But most of the time, they’re not.

They're getting survival care.

Care designed to keep you alive — not to make you truly well.

There are two very different kinds of healthcare in the world:

✅ Health care for survival

✅ Health care for improvement

And the system we all know and use — insurance, hospitals, and highly trained doctors — is built almost entirely around the first one.

But the vast majority of the health problems that you experience and for which you seek health care are not about survival.

Let’s break down the difference.

Survival Care (the default system)

This is the care you get when:

• You break a bone

• You have a heart attack

• You need emergency surgery

• Your disease becomes life-threatening

It’s reactive. It’s crisis-management.

And we’re all really thankful for it — it saves lives.

But here’s the thing…

Just because it keeps you alive doesn’t mean it makes you healthy.

Health-Improvement Care (what most people actually want and need most of the time)

This is something very different.

It asks questions like:

• Why is your body struggling in the first place?

• Why do you have IBS, or fatigue, or chronic inflammation?

• What’s happening in your microbiome, your immune system, your digestion?

• And what needs to change so your body can actually heal?

This care helps you function better, not just survive.

It’s proactive.

It’s root-cause focused.

It’s about quality of life — not just staying alive.

And here's the important part:

Insurance often doesn’t pay for it. Not because it doesn’t work — but because that isn’t the system’s goal.

Why patients get stuck

If you're only inside the survival-care system, here's what usually happens:

• You get symptoms

• You get labs

• You get a prescription for the symptoms

• You get told “everything looks fine” even when you don’t feel fine

You survive.

But you don’t thrive.

And if you want to go from “not dying” to actually feeling well — you need a different approach.

Real healing starts when you shift the question from:

“How do I stop symptoms?” to “How do I rebuild health?”

That’s the work that changes lives.

That’s where real answers live — especially for chronic issues like IBS, Candida, gut problems, immune dysregulation, fatigue, and inflammation.

It’s also the area where most doctors fall short and don’t have answers, because they weren’t trained to focus on this.

Survival care keeps you here.

Health-improvement care helps you live your life to its fullest.

You deserve more than to survive.

You deserve to feel well in your body again.

Your health isn't just the absence of illness —

It's the presence of vitality, energy, comfort, clarity, and joy.

And that’s what real healthcare should include. And it’s what we do at the IBS Treatment Center.

Thank you for reading. I will continue to work on articulating what I think is an incredibly important issue regarding the state of our medical system so that you can be informed about how to best take care of your health.  

As always, remember to take good care of your body. It’s the only place that you have to live.

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