unpopular opinion: your health experts know nothing
What we know as the classical “healthcare” system has devolved into little more than disease management, where the suppression of symptoms leads to the best health outcomes, but nothing could be further from the truth. If anyone actually took the time to “follow the science” instead of blindly repeating it, they would realize recommendations from the trusted mainstream sources have not made us any healthier over the last 50 years.
Don’t believe me? Look at the skyrocket rates of obesity, diabetes, coronary issues, cancer, etc. — all of which are comorbidities associated with the increased severity of complications with covid. The surprising part is that “healthcare” system isn’t broken, it’s a very successful and effective venue for disease management, generating billions of dollars, and that’s the problem.
Healthy people don’t need medications, surgery, or hospital care. Allowing people to fuckabout, making lifestyle decisions that are in complete contradiction to our evolutionary biology has failed to serve us, but has served the bottom line of those who enable our poor lifestyle choices, that lead to our poor health outcomes, that lead to us seeking assistance from the “experts” whose only advice comes by way of offering this or that medication to mask the fact that we aren’t living in accordance to our natural way of life.
I work with a lot of people who have issues — like high blood sugar, high cholesterol, poor sleep, obesity — that their “healthcare” practitioner could very easily have helped with if they could simple step out of the false paradigm that allopathic medicine is the best way to solve a health issue. Instead of complex pathways and medications, we need to start thinking about simple recommendations revolving around eating better, going outside to get some sun, getting enough sleep. These things are rarely addressed, yet are the very foundations of health.
Don’t believe me? Did you ever hear anyone on the News over the last 2 years recommend any of these very simple, free, and effective things? Likely not. What is recommended, are medications or pharmaceutical interventions, which — as any student of history can see — has proven to be a very poor path to achieving or recapturing any semblance of real health.
Personally, I think the future of health, both how to recapture and how to optimize it, lies not with the recommendations of those who are deeply entrenched within the “healthcare” industry, but those who understand the natural world and how we evolved from it. Not one time in human history have we ever been deficient in a pharmaceutical drug, yet just about everyone in the Western world is deficient in something because they lack a natural connection to their environment — real food, natural sunlight, restful sleep, and meaningful relationships are the way to health. None of these foundational things are espoused by the establish “healthcare” experts, so when do we start listening to someone else? In my opinion, the future of achieving health and optimizing longevity lies literally outside the walls of modern medicine and within the natural environment we can all stand to benefit from returning to.
Be careful who you listen to. Sick people make great customers.
an inconvenient truth
The inconvenient truth within the healthcare industry is that the majority of doctors have been trained to match drugs with symptoms, instead of searching for cures. Worse yet, the legality of pharmaceutical commercials has led to people asking for medications, instead of cures. Tragic.
This pill-for-every-ill approach dates back to the early 19th century where the earliest medical schools were being built with funding from, the OG business man himself, John D. Rockefeller. His financial interests along with the Flexner Report, published in 1910, which sought to delegitimize medical schools that did not advocate for a drug-based treatment methodology in their curriculum, gave way to a new model. That new model is what we now know today as allopathic medicine — a form of medicine that focuses on suppressing symptoms of disease with drugs or surgery, without address the root cause.
But, doctors read research all the time, so shouldn’t they be well-informed?
Yes, in theory. The research they’re reading and utilizing in practice is well-designed and well-conducted. And, UNFORTUNATELY, also fraught with controversy. Dr. Marcia Angell, the former editor in chief of the prestigious New England Journal of Medicine wrote in 2009 that: “it is simply no longer possible to believe much of the clinical research that is published, or to rely on the judgement of trusted physicians or authoritative medical guidelines. I take no pleasure in this conclusion, which I reached slowly and reluctantly over my two decades as an editor.”*
Why would she say such a thing?
Because the pharmaceutical industry has lead a majority of the research, which is obviously an impediment to unbiased results. Just like you know you shouldn’t leave a fat kid to guard the cookies, you shouldn’t put people in charge who have a vested interest in the outcome. If you look into industry-sponsored trials, you’ll see significantly more positive outcomes in comparison to governmental, nonprofit, or nonpartisan sponsored trails.**
To make matters worse, there is also deliberate manipulation of data to achieve desirable results. One observational study revealed that 50% of journal editors accept payments from industry sources, with an average payment of over $28k, with some payments reaching half a million.*** This means that editors of the most influential medical and scientific journals, the people who steer the scientific and “evidence-based” health directives are effectively in someones pocket.
Where does that leave us?
It leaves us with the fact that we need to take better care of ourselves. Stop outsourcing your health to people that do not care. Primary healthcare shouldn’t be going to the doctor once a year for a check-up to see if our poor lifestyle choices have caught up to us yet, and if they have, all you need is a pill to keep you going down the same path. That’s bullshit. Primary health care should be taking ownership of your body and your lifestyle, incorporating the best nutrition, movement, sleep, and community that you can. You’re not going to find that insight in a 5 minute doctor visit though, so if you feel that is sufficient to garnering your health so be it. If you want to optimize your life. Stay tuned.
References:
* Gyles, “Skeptical of Medical Science Reports?,”1011–1012.
** Florence T. Bourgeois, Srinivas Murthy, and Kenneth D. Mandl,“Outcome Reporting among Drug Trials Registered in ClinicalTrials.gov,” Annals of Internal Medicine 153, no. 3 (2010): 158–66, https://doi.org/10.7326/0003-4819-153-3-201008030-00006.
*** Jessica J. Liu et al., “Payments by US Pharmaceutical and Medical Device Manufacturers to US Medical Journal Editors: Retrospective Observational Study,” BMJ 359 (October 26, 2017): j4619, https://doi.org/10.1136/bmj.j4619.