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.
212. double punishment
Our collective narrative — the stories passed down through generations to help the next succeed — has become lost amid a rapidly advancing world. No longer can we agree on a path forward, as a result, our health suffers. All this stems from a profiteering medical system that seeks to “better” humanity by further disconnecting us from our natural past, and what gave us the strength and vitality to thrive up to this point, instead creating greater discord within our body.
We’ve been misled in thinking that there is no knowledge to be drawn from our past that can improve our health, when everything in life, and especially science, has been built upon the foundation that came before it. What works sticks, what doesn’t sloughs off. Now we are led to believe that the best way to capture health is NOT to look back to what gave us strength and vitality in the past, but to look forward to what science can manifest. That medicine has the power to save us from ourselves, if only we take this or cut that out. All the while we casually walk down the path of double punishment, losing who we are, along with the health we are trying to reclaim.
152. conscious decisions
People have a tendency to want to stay unconscious. They enjoy living under the illusion that they don’t have to take responsibility for the problems they’re unwillingly creating because there will always be a “cure” for every symptom they present with, so eating junk food and watching Netflix becomes a mindless act. Yet, a cure can never be seen through the suppression of symptoms, as it is merely a deferral to a future date when their way of life can no longer be artificially sustained due to manifestations of ill health, in both body and mind, brought on by years of unconscious neglect.
The reality is that the cure for a faulty way of life can only be found through a conscious effort. In other words, taking ownership and responsibility for your actions. Awareness is the quickest way to create change in disease states of the body and mind because if you are conscious to the burdens you place on your body, but choose to do it anyhow, you have to carry the onus of what you’re doing. You can’t pawn off the responsibility to your doctor and ask them what pill you need to take to go back to your unconscious way of living.
The tragedy of it all is how pervasive the unconscious mentality has become. The majority of people have a fundamental understanding of what is necessary to create health, yet find themselves at McDonalds day after day. I’m convinced that it’s not a matter of presenting people with more information, but changing the way they think, see, and feel about themselves so that they can make a conscious decision for themselves.
the wrong goals
In the United States, healthcare consumes 17.5% of the gross domestic product. By comparison, residential and commercial construction combined makes up only 7.5%. From the pharmaceutical industry to insurance companies to hospitals to medical device manufacturers, it is a massive—and massively profitable—business. The health care industry is booming, and Americans are sicker than ever. The thing that most people don't understand is that industry is focused more on the bottom line than on patient care. It’s not that the people who work in these industries are evil. It’s that the companies involved have become very good at making decisions in service of a goal. And they have the wrong goals.
124. saving the wrong life
Let’s be honest, we’re not saving a life worth living by wearing masks and social distancing. At best we are trying to reduce the burden to a faulty lifestyle. Despite the numbers you hear on the news, very few people’s lives have been taken specifically by the corona virus. Instead, they have fallen to the detrimental effects of their poor lifestyle choices that led them to be susceptible to something slightly worse the the common cold. If we want to continue with the narrative of “saving lives” why don’t we define what life is? It surely isn’t dragging your stressed out and fatigued self through the day on stimulants and processed foods, seeking alleviation from the pain we feel in our body and soul with medications only to find refuge, not in the natural world, but in relaxation in front of the television. Is this the life we want to save? Surely, no one wants to live like this if given the choice, yet so many people do. And so many people choose to socially distance themselves away from the real problem, which is the way we are living.
The natural way of life is advanced by taking the last iteration and improving upon it. Call it evolution or some divine plan but it’s easy to see we consistently change over a period of time. We can always argue whether it’s for the better or worse but there is momentum in one direction nonetheless. Unfortunately, with our fervent denial of the health implications of the way we choose to live our lives, we are simply trying to extend the last iteration in this progression as long as possible. It’s obvious that it is a failed belief as all of the ardent followers of the Standard American Diet have been exponentially more affected than those who have chosen a different path, and therefore a different life.
The default in nature is health, so life should be defined as one of vibrancy, enjoyment, positivity, and growth. Anything that works against this is not serving you, which is probably why you’re frightened for your health during this pivotal time. The glaring systematic failure of our current approach toward capturing health is necessary to provide the opportunity to reflect, to learn, to grow, and to overcome. This whole “crisis” we face is based on living a lifestyle where inflammation, stress, depression, etc., has become normalized. Where “health” is relative. But that’s not how any of this works. It seems like we are missing the forest through the trees.
The very life we want to save is the fundamental reason we’ve become susceptible to this health crisis to begin with. It isn’t so much the matter that covid is bad, but that the lifestyle we’ve chosen is making our connection to this virus worse. At a very basic level a virus is information the body uses to become informed to shifts in the environment. There are millions of viruses floating around at any given time that find their way into us and “rewire” our genome to better match us to our environment. Through something called Horizontal Gene Transfer, the genetic information contained within any given virus provides the body with certain genomic information to make epigenetic changes to better prepare us for an ever changing world. If we’re not aligned with the natural world because of a continued insistence on medications, or antibiotics, or any vast array of technological advancements, we are not going to receive these viral “updates” very efficiently, and as a response, they can and will cause sickness.
We’re never going to be able to optimize our health by continuing to think within the same paradigm that led us to poor health to begin with. The “life” we are trying to save needs to die.
121. expectations of health
For two million years man was a success. His journey through time efficiently living as a hunter-gatherer might have seen him through another million-year anniversary. Yet, for us, the chances of our way of life seeing us through another passing century is diminished with each day’s activities.
During our transition to modernity from the hunter-gatherer life, those few thousand years have revealed to us that we can master our environment, but not without consequence. Our efforts to create a world based on desire has wreaked havoc upon the natural order of the world and managed to bring into disrepute the highly evolved good sense that guided our behavior throughout the entirety of our coevolution with this planet. Led by the subjective and uncomprehending gaze of scientific thought, our instinctual competence has seen an increasingly diminutive role over time. Our innate sense of what is best for us has been superseded by the scientific theory, letting intellect serve as the foundation to decipher what should be done — surgery, medication, suppression of symptoms — without taking our real needs into consideration — proper nutrition, lifestyle, aligning ourselves with nature.
We were not formed by the intellectual thought processes theorized and borne out of a lab setting, that sought to guide us toward a better tomorrow. Our successful march forward was only achievable through the adaptation of our environment, led by the expectations of the past. In a sense, we came out of the world, thus are adapted to thrive within it if given the permission to listen to our instinctual needs, instead of the loudest opinions on what should be done to capture health. Therefore, aligning ourselves in accordance to what the body expects by looking to the past to design programs and initiatives, versus the tragic narrative composed by the popular opinion of the day, will best serve us in our efforts to recapture our health.
In the Continuum Concept, author Jean Liedloff speaks to this very fact, in that “Expectation… is founded as deeply in man as his very design. His lungs not only have, but can be said to be, an expectation of air; his eyes are an expectation of light rays of the specific range of wavelengths sent out by what is useful for him to see at the hours appropriate for his species to see them; his ears are an expectation of vibrations caused by the events most likely to concern him, including the voices of other people; and his own voice is an expectation of ears functioning similarly in them.” She goes on to say that his list can be indefinitely extended; “waterproof skin and hair — expectation of rain; pigmentation in skin — expectation of sun; perspiratory mechanism — expectation of heat; coagulator mechanism — expectation of accidents to body surfaces; reflex mechanism — expectation of the need for speed of reaction in emergencies.”
It is this sense of expectation that led our body to its robustness and resiliency over millennia. The slow transition granted us the time to easily adapt to the environment we found ourselves within, living in good health and harmony with the natural environment. The sudden shift over the past few thousand years created significant changes to our environment as we pushed toward modernity. With it, we saw lifespan’s expand and at the same time healthspan’s reduce. Instead of understanding the reason behind our declines in health were due to a mismatch in our environment — one divorced from nature and all its wisdom — we used our intellect, guided by scientific thought to suppress our instinctual urges, further separating us from the health that was so easily found by those of past generations who’s success was afforded by succumbing to the natural way of doing things.
How is it that we got things so wrong? How is it that the forces of nature that put us together in good health to begin with knew what we would need? As with mastery of anything it comes down to experience. The lineage of experiences encountered from the first single-cell eukaryote to the multi-trillion cellular structure we recognize as human is vast enough to defy comprehension, and at the same time obvious in the sense that the only way to become proficient at anything is through repetition. In the millions of years preceding this pivotal point in our history, what you and I have become is the culmination of experiences ranging from environmental changes resulting in everything from temperature fluctuations to the availability of nourishment. All of which gave our body the data to inherently know what it needs to thrive, transmitted by means still unknown to science.
The intellect of scientific thought has largely suppressed the instinctual urges of what we inherently know is right. The epidemic rates of poor health, disease, and obesity have been brought upon us by differing consistently to the idea that what we read is better than what our body is telling us. Our continued reliance on a system that has constantly failed us is nothing less than insanity.
95. complex systems
Systems are complex. Just look at the body. How much do you really know about what goes on in there? Probably, very little. Within complex systems, such as the body, or larger systems like the “Healthcare” system, processes can be so tightly coupled together that they’re often hidden from us. Yet, given enough time, certain things will express themselves and therefore be seen as normal (e.g., disease processes and rising Healthcare costs). In other words, what looks like a sudden traumatic event like a heart attack, or a freak accident like the complete failure of the “Healthcare” system to bolster people’s health, is just a normal expression of a flawed system over time.
The acceleration of stressful inputs we’ve seen placed onto an already broken system has sped up the eventual outcome — we’re all dying by subscribing to the “Healthcare” system. For those who choose to see it, these events are allowing us to see where the cracks are, both in how we individually have the power to capture health, as well as the failures of the “Healthcare” system at large. The disproportionate amount of stress placed on our flawed system is quickly bringing to light the faulty processes that many were previously unaware of, and may have taken another decade or so before they would have arisen organically. Tragic, but true.
If we can look at these freak events — i.e., the failure of the “Healthcare” system to create healthy people, instead of the walking dead who scour the earth surviving on meds — not as outliers, but completely normal outcomes of a flawed system, then we can understand it’s just part of the process. Think… it’s not a bug, it’s a feature! What we do with our newfound awareness will dictate the system we use to capture health in the future. We can learn from this because after all hindsight is 2020.
Where once we thought freak accidents happen, we can now understand how small things over time can have a large impact on system small and large. So, looking at all the things you know you need to do to get healthy, yet are able only to complete a fraction, don’t think you’re a failure because you only checked off 2 of the 10 things that have been recommended to you. Instead, appreciate the fact that those 2 positive things you’ve completed today impact 10 different things positively, just in subtly different ways that are hidden away within the larger system. In time, you’ll find greater health and find value in checking off more boxes so you can steer clear of any freak events in the future.
76. salutogenesis
What are the origins of health? Aaron Antonovsky sought to answer that question in his 1979 book entitled Health, Stress and Coping. In it, he introduced the term salutogenesis, which places emphasis on the elements that promote health, rather than the factors that strip it away and cause disease (a.k.a. pathogenesis). It’s a radical departure from the “pill for every ill” ideology we’ve all become accustomed to in the traditional healthcare model. Much like myself, Antonovsky rejected the theories of the “traditional medical-model dichotomy separating health and illness” and instead figured that one can only exist in the absence of another.
Today, more than ever, the majority of people seem to only be worried about not getting sick, rather than taking actions to optimize health. Unfortunately, if you continue to think this way, it’s important to understand the fundamental truth that you’re never going to be able to get healthy by doing the same things that made you susceptible to poor health to begin with. Perhaps, it’s the hypnotic narrative of fear perpetuated by daily body counts on the “News” that keeps you holding on to the current medical model. Yet, it is not your savior and it was never designed to make you well to being with. It’s time to start to think differently. The origins of health aren’t rooted in medications or vaccinations, they come from making the right decisions that work for you and your biology.
To illustrate the fundamental difference between the current pathogenetic medical model and the idea of salutogenetic model, let me ask you this. Say, your friend entrusts you to take care of their plant while away on vacation. While they’re gone, you see the leaves starting to turn brown. What do you do? You can paint those leaves green, or you can give the plant what it needs? (Here’s a hint, it’s not electrolytes!) I’m assuming, that since it’s not 2505, your first thought is to give the plant water. The browning of the leaves is a symptom of something not right with the plants biology. Painting the leaves green is akin to taking medication to “solve” the problem, yet only serves to mask the symptom.
Taking the analogy further, think of yourself as the plant. Are you giving yourself the proper things you need to thrive? Do you know what they are? Or do you wait until things start to breakdown, and then search for medications to suppress they symptoms of your faulty lifestyle? This isn’t meant to be harsh so much as eye-opening. Remember, I can’t make you change unless you want to.
You came into this world with only one responsibility, and that was to take care of yourself. Somewhere along the line, most of us surrender our power to a system that seeks profit over health, that manipulates our understanding of what health is, how it’s achieved, and maintained. Staying within this mindset keeps us looking in the wrong direction. We are continuously looking forward in time for the latest medication or vaccination to save us. It’s a faulty and dangerous premise. Instead, we need to look backward to the past, to see what made us strong enough to prevail thousands of years to get to this point where our health is crumbling. I’m a firm believer in the salutogentic model of health as it seeks to define the origins of health. Those origins fall directly in line with the ancestral approach I have successfully applied with my clients in the past, and will continue to use it with anyone who wishes to break free from the tragic paradigm that is the modern “healthcare” system. It’s time to change the way we think. Sometimes a step backwards can be a step in the right direction.
73. wtfru waiting for
Most peoples health is so poor that they don’t have the energy to take care of themselves in order to meet the very basics of what it takes to achieve a foundational level of health. This is why the medical system is so profitable. They prey on the weak — both in mind and body. But, it’s more important than ever to understand that it’s not a medical system. It’s a disease maintenance system designed to make money through the suppression of symptoms, not the elimination of disease by an accumulation of health. It’s a system that doesn’t make money when people are getting better.
Why don’t you hear about the value of sleeping well, mitigating stress, improving digestion and detoxification pathways, optimizing nutrition, and finding activities you enjoy that influence you to move on a daily basis? Because their bottom line is more important. There is no cohesive message because if there were, people would start to develop a baseline level of health and profits would decline. It’s a fucking racket. Everyone needs to take responsibility for their health. Unfortunately, it takes energy for people to invest the time to change, as well as forcing them to acknowledge that most of the “information” they’ve been trained to see as truth is not serving them, but those they seek for service.
In the current climate, a strong foundation of health is more powerful than any intervention or government mandate — whether it be masks, closures, or social distancing. The latest CDC data — as of August 26, 2020 — shows that only 6% of people died FROM Covid-19, whereas 94% died WITH Covid-19. What that basically means, is that if you treat your body well and are a healthy individual, then you really don’t have much to worry about. That is an important distinction, and really illustrates the crux of what I am getting at with all my bluster. On the other hand, if you treat your body like a used condom like the majority of this country, then YES you are at risk, but hopefully you’re coming to the understanding that your risk isn’t due to me wearing a mask or not. It’s because you CHOSE to live a lifestyle that isn’t conducive to optimal health.
Fortunately, all hope is not lost. If anything this situation should serve as an awakening for people to take responsibility for their health, and not rely on the disease management system. If done right, it can take as little as 3 months to completely change the direction in someones life for the better. But it’s up to you to make that move. So, if you want more life, vibrancy, health, safety, strength and energy, then what the fuck are you waiting for?
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.
Health care should be preventative, not reactionary
The purveyor’s of health continue to promise one cure after another, yet they don’t even understand the disease. The real reason no progress has been or will ever be made in health care on a governmental or institutional level is because they have no awareness to the actually manifestations of disease (or perhaps they just don’t bother because there’s no money in it). Type 2 diabetes is not a disease of Metformin deficiency. Heart Disease doesn’t develop due to lack of statin drugs. Your poor sleep is not due to a Lunesta deficiency. Your adiposity didn’t advance because you waited too long to sign up for CoolSculpting… (you have to see the video)
This line of thinking completely misses the point of what primary health care should be.
Think of human physiological dysfunction as trying to repair a broken vase. You start with the big pieces and, finally, all that’s left are the tiny shards of the impact point. Those tiny shards will go together in the end, but you would never have started there.
The big pieces are akin to the different pieces of your lifestyle — how you eat, how you sleep, how much you move, how you think and ultimately the environment you find yourself in. All these play a role in constructing that vase so that it doesn’t break easily, and can possibly become antifragile.
You always see headlines with “cutting-edge discoveries” that ostensibly have the power to change the world, but in reality, never provide a single cure because they completely miss the point.
Health care should be preventative, not reactionary. Primary health care should be eating well, moving well, sleeping well, and spending time in the sun with people you enjoy. Secondary health care can be when you go to see your doctor because you had too much fun with your friends, decided to climb a tree, fell and broke your arm!
It all comes down to taking responsibility for your health. As I said yesterday, we have been taught that the system has our best interests in mind, however I think the epidemic rates of poor health should be considered cause for continuing to believe in a system that failed you long ago.