Prescribe or Prevent?

Western medicine  pays a lot of lip service to prevention, but my experience tells me it embraces early diagnosis, not true prevention.  Also, I see that our doctors are

prescription-happy and it seems that they allow patients to drift into chronic diseases because it is easier to prescribe than to prevent.

It's hard to manage chronic ailments, even at their early stages.  With doctors seeing 2 - 3 times as many patients per day as is beneficial to either of them, it's no wonder the patient gets no attention.  

I have learned that the patient has to be her own advocate and while this is a worthy pursuit, the patient has not gone to medical school and consequently does not know how to advocate properly.  By the time she figures out what's going on, things have progressed, health issues are more complicated, and frustration is pretty high.  Alternative medicine works for some, but why must people be thrust into solutions that health insurance won't cover?

There has to be a better way.  Wish I knew what it was.