Do you want your doctor to treat the cause or symptom?
If you go to a hospital with a spike through your leg, you don’t expect the doctors to give some pain medication for the symptoms and send you home. No, you expect them to treat the cause, remove the spike in your leg, repair the injuries and send you home.
If you can’t breathe, you expect the doctor to find the cause and fix it. You don’t expect to be sent home with oxygen.
Emergency specialists directly treat the cause of the problem, and not just the symptoms.
Doctors treating chronic diseases do it differently. They tend to treat symptoms rather than the causes.
The reason seems to be because these doctors don’t know what the causes are. The best thing to do is to make the patient feel better and avoid complications through medicines.
Lobbyists treating the symptoms
Most lobbyists are like most doctors. They treat the symptoms rather the causes. It’s a good business model. It helps repeat business from the same client.
Unless you treat the cause of the regulatory or political malady, even if you successfully treat one symptom, another will appear.
There is often a reluctance to treat the cause.
First, you need to need to recognise there is a problem. Maybe you don’t accept it.
Second, you have become conditioned to react to a seemingly non-stop flow of challenges. You think it is normal and don’t believe others who don’t have to deal with the problems you do.
Third, you don’t want to deal with the causes. It’s going to force you to answer questions you don’t want the answer.
Too often, you keep going with the pain of added political and regulatory costs. Sometimes, you may wake up facing a ban, and seem surprised it came up. That you have been dealing with a chronic complaint for 10 years seems normal to you.
Some lobbyists do treat the causes. They are a minority. Look for a lobbyist who is like an emergency surgeon. One who fixes the problem and sends your home without the problem.
Lawmakers treating the symptoms
I have worked on legislation that treated the symptoms and not the causes. As I got older, it is clear that the solutions adopted were bound to fail. It’s useful if painful lesson.
When legislating, there is a built-in preference to accept a compromise. This leads to designing a system that lacks resilience, one that has core defects there from the beginning.
Other legislators have taken a tougher approach and looked to fix the cause of the problem in the system. They have looked to adopt a resilient system that performs robustness and delivers. These legislative frameworks deliver.
It’s more painful at first to fix the cause of the problem. It’s the best solution.