13 The Coming Revolution in Healthcare Man was created for the sake of choice. --Hebrew saying FROM EITHER/OR TO MULTIPLE OPTION 1 "All progress has to do with increasing choices and options. If you talk about one society being more progressive than another, you talk about a society in which citizens have a greater freedom and greater range of choices and possi- bilities," Nathaniel Brandon, author and psychologist, told his audience. He pointed out how biological and evolutionary development is founded on the increase of options and choices. If you talk about progress in the biological or evolutionary sense from an amoeba up to man, you're looking at organisms with increasing variability of response. They are able to do more and more things in response to the environment. The range of possibility keeps growing. If you think of people who do bodywork, any kind of opening of the body, working with blocks, whether it be Rolfing or any of the other types of work, it is always to make it possible for the body to do more things. . . . Think of psychotherapy, where a person we say is stuck or rigid. What do we call progress? It always has to do with increasing the ranges of choices and options. 2
Options and choices will be central to the health care system of tomorrow. Choice is essential, not only to the health of a democratic society but to the health of the person as a whole. Knowing that we have choice empowers us, -209- |