It used to worry me that Sports Medicine seemed to work so much better than main stream, ordinary, go-to-the-doctor medicine does. Then it occurred to me that of course it works better. In Sports Medicine the healthy athlete is the product; in main-stream, for-the-rest-of-us medicine, the treatment is the product.
Sports Medicine came out of… well… Sports. Big Money Sports. Therefore the athlete being treated really is the product. There’s a lot of money tied up in his being returned to maximum performance. In main-stream medicine (especially since the 1980’s when Hospitals were no longer required to be non-profit, could now be for-profit) the treatment is the product. Your actual health is, frankly, not all that relevant.
Some doctors will disagree with this statement, but from emotional reasons (and those are probably the doctors you want to go to, by the way, that ones that really do care and really are trying to be Doctors!), but if they stop to think it through, they’ll probably agree with the chain of reasoning. I have known several doctors who have changed tracks to alternative practices or even out right quit medicine because of the hypocrisy now built into the system.
Sports Medicine, like Physical Therapy (PT) tends to actually work. Yes, there is a version of Sports Medicine available to everyone, not just the high-value sports professionals, and it is a derivative of the High End Sports Medicine, and it tends to work better than main-stream, for those things it addresses, which is not everything. Some things are still for the mainstream medical system. (There are alternatives to everything, though, and some alternatives work quite a lot better, but that’s a whole book in itself, and a tricky one.)
[Disclaimer: Please make your own decisions on these matters; never mind what my choices may or may not have been, or what you think I was saying above. These are just thoughts and observations of my own. Your mileage may vary… I’m not a doctor… no user serviceable parts inside, may be hot after heating, and all that. ]