The Case of Confidence and Competence in Healthcare

As Sam Harris wrote in ‘Waking Up: Searching for Spirituality Without Religion’, ‘one of the first obstacles encountered along any contemplative path, is the basic uncertainty nature of spiritual authority.’ He argues that in other areas of services, such as golf training, for example, one could easily assess if the golf coach brings any value to one’s game. Whereas, in the spiritual development area, how could one evaluate one’s competency? Hence many so-called spiritual guides and gurus often turn out to be crooks and charlatans preying on gullible people.

Is this true only for the spiritual path or it also extends to other areas of self development, wellbeing and health-related services? How can one evaluate competence in this type of services? Does ‘confidence’ always equal to ‘competence’? Not exactly, according to Dr. Jordan Peterson. Machiavellians, narcissists and psychopaths plague many areas of life, including health related services.

How can one possibly see the wheat from the chaff when it comes to wellbeing and health related services?

In the past few years, the health and wellness industry witnessed unprecedented changes, challenges as well as opportunities. However, the simple word association of ‘health’, ‘wellness’ with ‘industry’ poses some questions. For perspective, ‘industry’ is defined as ‘an economic activity concerned with the processing of raw materials and manufacture of goods in factories.’ Hence the first question: What is the ‘raw material’ of this industry? Secondly, what ‘goods’ are ‘being manufactured’ out of this raw material and in which, whose and what kind of ‘factories’? If human beings became the raw material for an industry that seems to be very lucrative, just by the increasing numbersof new comers and diversifed services, how can one entrust and outsource his/ her self development, health and wellbeing to some entities whose raison d’etre is to produce ‘goods’ out of people’s health or lack of it? And lastly, who would the ‘goods’ be for, the manufacturer or client?

If choosing a shampoo is, for many people, ‘a project’ (aka complex and time consuming), how is then the process of choosing wellbeing and health related services? What are the selection criteria and outcomes’ evaluation?

Generally, people feel they have neither the competence, nor the confidence, time or energy to handle such complex decisions. Hence, they would continue to outsource ‘wellbeing’ to the specialized ‘authorities’. However, for many years, the ‘authorities’ from the alopathic medicine failed to deliver solutions, especially on the chonic conditions. Moreover, COVID ’19 and its ‘solutions’ brought unprecendented ‘ideopathic’ health condtions for which the reductionist western medicine does not have the answers.

What can one do these days to maintain or regain good health and wellbeing? Go back to school? If so, which schools? Those that educated the current cohorts of medical professionals who do not have answers to their chronic or idiopathic conditions? Or other newer or rather unknown schools? Read books? Yes, but whose books? Those of the ‘big’ overnight names that are written by ghost writters, or of the real authors who studied and worked all their lives in obscurity to eventually write and publish own work at a later career stage, many without marketing support and thus very hard to find out about them? Follow the overnight celebrity Drs and other promoters of miraculous transformative cures and courses on social media? One day these people are the absolute authority, the best next thing, unanimously idolatrised to only be questionned, cancelled and eventually disapear the next day, just like their diets, remedies and ‘healing’ modalities a few years later. The damage they created in the process? No one in the mainstream media talks about.

It is an absolute chaos one must navigate to select what works for his/ her health. Yet, in any chaos, many opportunities! The real opportunity in the healthcare chaos? Building own health competence through continuous relevant education that would eventually bring the confidence to make right choices for healthy nutrition, exercise, sleep, relationships and lifestyle in general. It is a life long and challenging process, for most people. The starting point? Taking the first step… of a walk, barefoot on the beach, in a park or forest, connecting and feeling the energy of Earth while looking up at the skies and imagining or remembering (as imagination and memory share the same neural pathway) how the first humans lived on Earth, 2.5 millions years ago!