What is Inclusive Care™: Addressing Gaps (2/3)
[← Read Part 1. What is Inclusive Care: Holistic Information]
Our life-experiences are typically an immersive set of conditions that create a particular memory. It’s usually not just that you were at the restaurant, OR with your best friend, OR that the music was playing, OR that you had great food, but rather a combination of things that lead to something that shapes you.
Why should our health be any different? It’s not, actually, but we pretend that it is. Doctors only have access to a small fraction of information that affects your health. They are adept at looking at your clinical records and making decisions from them. Sometimes they may have genetic information and family history, but they rarely do (gap #1). Doctors may ask you about certain behavioral details, like whether you smoke or not but there’s much more beyond their purview that isn’t accounted for (gap #2). Doctors almost never know about environmental exposures in your home, like water or air quality, or about socioeconomic conditions that may affect your outcomes, like living in medical deserts, not having adequate nutrition, or lacking reliable transportation to the clinic (gaps #3, #4…). And, yet, we expect doctors to play the part of our external observer in making life-decisions based on an incomplete 2-dimensional picture, and no tools to help them fill those gaps. What could go wrong?