Rugged individualism

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The fundamental attitude towards a genuine Personalized healthcare

Ultimate sustainability is the state desired in almost every aspect of our lives. Still, it is not invariably achieved, given the circumstances that escort every scenario at a given point of time and place. The multitude of situations pertains to the rattling path towards an endurable state of rapport. However, one that needs close attention, too often overlooked, is the notion of upholding self and individual autonomy. Therefore we must avoid Rugged individualism at all costs.

Self-sustainability and self-sufficiency are two overlapping realms of existence where a person or institution requires limited or no assistance from others. Being Self-sufficient encompasses self-declaration sufficient enough to satisfy wants. Like what described for a person, a self-sustaining entity can preserve autonomy indefinitely. It should be representing types of the state, which can manifest as personal or collective freedom. Once self-sufficient, the economy will reach a point where it would require little or no trade with the outside world.

As called a state of “autarky,” still, essential to realize the fact that the collective emancipation is very much different from its counterpart in the individual domain. Thus, the former prevails at the expense of the individual self-sustenance.

What is Autonomy?

The definition of autonomy is subject to variation as disciplines such as developmental and moral psychology, political, as well as bioethical philosophy. In general, autonomy almost always points to the capacity of being able to make an independent, informed, and uncoerced judgment. Like the self-sustainable, Autonomous organizations are entirely self-governing. From the human resources perspective, autonomy denotes a relatively high level of discretion granted to an employee in a person’s function. In human resources, autonomy refers to improving job satisfaction. Under the same criterion, it is furthermore widely utilized in the arena of medicine, recognizing personal independence and accompanying values.

Metaphorically speaking- the slippery slope of self-sufficiency and autonomy develops when the latter snatches the shape of collectivism. Only then it becomes prone to political alternatives. Therefore, the political philosophy reckoned in response and differentiating self from the harms of the collective authoritarianism. Anarchism is one such philosophy that promotes the doctrines of individualism based on the ethical dogma of individual sovereignty and self-reliance. It primarily dismisses indispensable of hierarchical administrative authority by supporting the elimination of government in favor of ruling oneself to the exclusionary rule by others.

What is Rugged individualism

The individualism driven concept and a term indicating an ideal scenario whereby an individual is self-reliant. That usually pertains to the government assistance. Rugged individualism is Often, attributed to the theory of laissez-faire. Latter is primarily referred to as an economic system where transactions between private parties are absent from any government intervention such as regulation, privileges, imperialism, tariffs, and subsidies. 

Application of rugged individualism in personalized medicine 

Medicine is personal because its moral concept lies within the boundaries of a doctor-patient relationship. The modern medical practice ordinance, under its mission, only seems to benefit artificially valued or desired outcomes. It concomitantly should avoid the probability of harm or injury arising as a result of professional participation in the healing process. Hence, Both the likelihood and extent of possible damage may vary from minimal to significant from one individual to another. The latest may also be explained under the Risk-benefit ratio or solely of the actions relative risk to its potential benefits.

The risk-benefit analysis is the accepted solution to seek quantifying achievement. The significant emphasis weighing risks against benefits is on the fact that the latter would only realistically applicable within the confines of individual Self-governing. But to the contrary, the current trend is the overwhelming bureaucratic top-down authorizations.

Utilitarianism and the collective population health

The reality in support of such a trend is the outcome of the overemphasized Utilitarian population health criterion. And that it is one of the objectives to fault for such a course. Under collectivity, It’s the health outcomes of a group of people within a community population and the particular share profile that defines today’s healthcare expedition. 

The Modern millennial perception of personalized healthcare is a multifaceted one. As they speculate, technical refinement would be enough to ascertain bespoke healthcare. But, genuine, customized healthcare isn’t necessarily technology-dependent even though the technology is a great contributor to the modernization of personalized medical care.

Personalized healthcare has suffered a considerable semantic shift. There’s an overwhelming desire for customization of medical attention. Along with that, policymaker’s rhetoric guards patient engagement in their self-care. Nonetheless, currently, favoring convey otherwise. On the contrary, the state and large private entities support the conventional population protocol based on sheer social determinants. However, their focus is limited to individual compliance with a set of designated 3rd party defined policies.

How does it correlate to the rugged individualism? 

Staying healthy is an individual right, merely because it pertains to a person’s state of wellbeing and keeping away from disease. Health is a state of ultimate physical, social, psychological, and emotional wellbeing devoid of any illness or harm. A person by nature strives to live longer and thrive. 

Based on the type of traction, the human being will research, learn, and question every aspect of available information, science, and technology. It intends to ensure the best medical care service possible, given the current context. Therefore, assuming that the collective approach through population health would address personal determinants of health, to ensure delivering genuine, personalized medicine is nothing but hyperbole.

Healthcare is neither a political issue nor a journey about the particular countenance within the brinks of society. It is a problem of the most elemental component of the social grassroots, I.e.,” an individual.” It is an issue of impending ones’ life taken care of under the guidance of his or her treating doctor.

Why some Collectivists dislike individualism 

Ayn Rand was a Russian-American writer and philosopher who once said, “Notice how they’ll accept anything except a man who stands alone. They recognize him at once. There’s a special, insidious kind of hatred for him. They need ties. They’ve got to force their miserable little personalities on every single person they meet. The independent man kills them—because they don’t exist within him, and that’s the only form of existence they know. Notice the malignant kind of resentment against any idea that propounds independence. Notice the malice toward an independent man….”

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Collectivists hate self-confidence. An authentic person is confident and relies on the judgment of his reason. More so, they’ll despise the reality that you do not care whether they hate you. Their hatred cannot touch you, and it cannot do because they can’t have what a free thinker can; and can’t relate to sovereign individuals’ expressiveness.

Collective realm carries no individual value

The person in the collective realm claims no values of the individual self, but only the approval, pact, and commitment of others; they have no motive of their own needs except for seeking acceptance of their latest faction. Therefore, they have no sense of achievement other than whatever power they can wield on or by team members. Ayn’s description of the second-hander is of the drastic issue. It refers to the reality that one who has entirely relinquished his self-sufficiency.

Extensively populations are not so radical, and their views and practices display a variety of independence and collectivism. The ordinary person can be independent in some areas of his life but dangling in others’ decision making. Communalism is not absolute. Instead, it is pulverized by being fictitiously individualistic, more so collectivistic. The inspiration follows distinction exercising mental compartmentalization, thus avoiding the apparent paradoxes in their values and strategies.

Collectivists typically clench on contradiction. Because they create mixed feelings through disintegration, they succeed with consequent sporadic and unpredictable resentment for the authentic independent individualist.

Health is personal

Health is a person’s sacred asset. It does not require justification for anything we do to anyone. We do not have to explain or get others’ permission, just like eating and breathing air. If one is truly independent, he or she will never understand you, never approve of self; and others cannot without admitting to their second-handedness. For that reason, rugged individuality perfectly complements genuine, personalized healthcare.

What is the role of population healthcare and populism?

Over decades prevailing political systems have become a critical eliciting element for population health, often neglected in public health publications. Recent insights from political science have explored the apparent public health impacts of the rise of radical populist right (PRR) parties in many countries. More so among European nations. The welfare state policy is an agent to such a trend. According to a study published in the European Journal of public health relationship between the PRR and welfare state policy seems to be interceded by the contemporary political systems. The public health effects will differ by country, as an offshoot of the increased fashionableness of populist festivities and perhaps detrimental impacts for public health. 

Rhetorical Expansion of Populism

The growth of populist politics has exploited the use of certain words in a similar context. One such movement is particularly the term “enemy of the people,” with attention to public health. A study outlines tenet for public health professionals who commonly face these situations. Using epidemiological skills, scholars have provided an understanding of the reasons underlying the expansion of populist politics.

By utilizing their expertise, investigators have also been able to shed light on modeling, health impact assessment. They have clarified how we should anticipate the consequences of populist systems. Also, they have speculated on how to propagate the institutions not required for optimal public health. Experts have been able to outline the portrayal of hatred and division to promote social solidarity. They can support fact-checking and the use of evidence.

An observant person should be able to recall the lessons of history and the way public health has collaborated with totalitarian and genocidal regimes. Although the public health community’s ability and responsibility to furnish insights into how populist politicians have become so powerful. Yet, such an effort is amid becoming established in practice.

Identity Politics

There is the growth of identity politics, where general populations have utterly compelled to react against what perceived by them as the raid from other cultures. The thriving evidence is that this cycle is encouraged by accumulating unevenness in society. Within the process, with some communities feeling left behind in a world that they increasingly struggle to appreciate. The public health community must be able to recall the lessons of history. That, Physicians played a leading part in many of the most horrible actions of the Third Reich, not just in the notorious investigations of those such as Joseph Mengele, but in many other means, comprising furnishing the academic reinforcement of eugenic and racist programs.

According to publication cited in the International Journal of health policy and management, the authors identify two significant challenges on the rise of post-truth populism as pose for health policy. One, that the populist threat to inclusive healthcare policies and the populist hazard to properly designed health policies. They fail to attract professional expertise and research evidence. The notion suggests some ideational clarifications that might help in thinking through extra profoundly. The phenomenon consistently argues that we should approach right-wing populism as a combination of a populist people versus elite axis with an exclusionary nationalist member versus non-member axis. The essence of the notion is to raise suspicions regarding the equation between populism, demagogy, the repudiation of expertise, and scientific awareness. 

Populism is nationalist, socialist and beyond

Populist politics are not inevitably nationalist, and indeed not fundamentally xenophobic. Bolivia’s Evo Morales in Bolivia, US Presidential candidate Bernie Sanders, or Spain’s PODEMOS are certainly populist. But if anything, their politics have been about the inclusion of marginalized ethnic factions, rather than their exclusion. Moreover, in left-wing populism, the populist policy of alleging to represent ‘the people’ against ‘the elite’ is used to formulate desires for solidarity, for more equitable and universal access to welfare provisions.

The resistance of the system to implement rugged individualism in healthcare

Health care reform, particularly the united states in a variety of features, sometimes rises to the top of the domestic policy plan at the state and federal levels. In the last decades, there have been many proposals to establish national health insurance, all of which rejected during the presidencies of Truman, Nixon, Carter, and Clinton. Earlier, Theodore Roosevelt supported national health insurance as part of the platform of the Bull Moose Party in 1913. Still, he suffered defeat in his bid for the Presidency. Some of the most reasons to resist national healthcare are the firm belief in individualism, a distrust of government, and acceptance of market justice.

The strong emphasis is usually on personal commitment, little focus on government help to the poor. Individualism is an anti-regulation and pro-business sentiment. But with the transformation of the millennial mindset, expansion of the populist ideology, high prevalence of semantic shift, and societal engineering, the blindsided demand for universal government-run healthcare has grown out of proportion. Consequent to this, it has become the widespread belief that third-party intervention is the only way to support medical care. Hence lower cost was, therefore, became the spark behind the rise of pro-national health populist movement.

Additionally, the Utilitarian concept driven by the population health model became the best fit for populist rhetoric. 

The rise of pseudo-hybrid pinnacles is the upshot of the tug-of-war between collective population health and rugged individualist personalized healthcare system.  Despite its limited short-term success, it is somewhat hard to comprehend that one can ensure the individualism of healthcare in the face of the emphasis over the interest of the profile of a community.

Take home message 

Personalized healthcare, personalized medicine, and precision medicine are three of the many buzzwords commonly used interchangeably clattering the healthcare arena. They have suffered significant semantic shifts over the last decade. For over a century, administrative intuitions have redefined the healthcare system, and corporate overtake of the medical realm. In turn, those intuitions were unrealistically glamorized through the notion of healthcare is equal to healthcare coverage, health as a right. And population health being the most efficient solution for public health.

Today there is overwhelming knowledge-base and awareness of the average citizen. Their parallelly increasing expectations and the three centuries-old population health is defying a fresh set of challenges. That, in significant part, pertains to the particular need for addressing personal determinants of health and healthcare that can only function in virtue of a genuine, personalized healthcare system. To satisfy such public traction, the major public health organizations for decades have contemplated incorporating pseudo-personalized policies. They have indiscriminately used terms such as patient engagement and merit-based reimbursement in their vocabulary.

The current solution is pseudo-personalization

I use the prefix” pseudo” – because what the latter phenomena entail are solely about engaging individual patients in the context of a set of fictitious determinants. Pseudo-personalization refers to a set of factors established through collective 3rd party analytics. Latter is in contrast to what should be realistically determined between one patient and his or her treating physician. Therefore, collective populist philosophy will perpetually decline to deliver proper personalized care. That is due to its fundamental strategic leniency to profile and bundle.

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To implement an effective system of healthcare, one must be able to devise sustainable logistics ultimately. The kind of stature by which individual desires are about “me.” Still, hard to achieve, given the circumstances. Latter, orderly, serves as a prerequisite to establishing medical care protocols that respect such necessity, which is referred to as” Rugged individualism.”

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Adam Tabriz, MD Dr. Adam Tabriz is an Executive level physician, writer, personalized healthcare system advocate, and entrepreneur with 15+ years of success performing surgery, treating patients, and creating innovative solutions for independent healthcare providers. He provides critically needed remote care access to underserved populations in the Healthcare Beyond Borders initiative. His mission is to create a highly effective business model that alleviates the economic and legislative burden of independent practitioners, empowers patients, and creates ease of access to medical services for everyone. He believes in Achieving performance excellence by leveraging medical expertise and modern-day technology.

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