"What the Amish Can Teach the Rest of Us About Modern Medicine"

"The biggest and most complicated cultural intersection is the modern healthcare system. Plain people often advocate for more freedom in deciding when to go to a hospital, how to get there, and what interventions will be used. In short, they want greater autonomy.

“Patient autonomy” is a relatively new concept in Western medicine, and its significance depends on your perspective. On the one hand, patients report feeling lost in the system—stripped down to a gown and underwear and pressured to follow doctors’ orders. On the other hand, doctors can face demands for unwarranted treatments. With their unique cultural traditions, Plain communities might point the way towards a better concept of autonomy, one that balances patient choice with patient responsibility. One that we might all learn from...

For Plain communities, autonomy in healthcare—and in life more broadly—is deeply tied to personal responsibility. This is perhaps best exemplified by their choice not to have insurance. Rather, when someone gets sick, the church collects alms to help the patient cover expenses. Marvin Wengerd estimates that, collectively, the 30,000 Amish in Holmes County spend $20–30 million a year on healthcare.

“Personal responsibility is still huge among us,” he says, adding that Plain people “think there’s a lot of harm in divorcing the cost from the patient”. He describes communities in which individuals are beholden to their brothers and sisters in the church to make wise healthcare decisions that don’t cost the community more money than necessary. As a result, Plain communities are highly interested in health education and disease prevention...

In his experience, autonomy to the general American public means, “I get whatever interventions I want or need, and I get however much I want or need, regardless of the cost.” Plain communities on the other hand “are very independent, which is part of their autonomy”. They want to know how diseases develop and what they can do themselves to prevent a disease or its progression...

For Americans with health insurance, it may come as a surprise that hospital costs are negotiable. Indeed, pricing is so murky that most of us don’t know the actual cost of our care. Prompt-pay discounts are rarely advertised, but according to Plain people, they’re quite common."

https://howwegettonext.com/what-the-amish-can-teach-the-rest-of-us-about-modern-medicine-83de75e7f5b6#.l8m1br2sx

FB: "Coming from an ethic of thriftiness, many Plain people distrust the motives of hospital administrators and even doctors themselves. They believe a profit motive can influence courses of treatment. They are also keenly attuned to unnecessary expenditures within the system. (One Plain woman I spoke with questioned the need for fancy carpets at a nearby clinic.)

“In the Amish world, healthcare is seen as a ministry,” says Wengerd, “which is exactly what healthcare in the [non-Plain] world used to be.” Remember apprenticeships and house calls? The doctor used to be viewed like a minister who sacrificed his life for the patient, but there has been a shift. “The patient now sacrifices his livelihood for the doctor’s wellbeing.”"