Health Care for Profit in a Nutshell: Updated

Update 1/30/23: I wrote this blog essay 3/28/12. Much of it remains true and relevant today. One issue is the replacement of Bisphenol A with similar xeno-estrogens. The awareness of sugar’s hazardous effects is much greater today than 11 years ago. “Keto” is a popular label on various foods, nutritional supplements, and diets, and like the Atkins Diet, focusses on minimal carbs and high protein. Legitimate ketogenic diets consist of 70% calories from fat, 20% from protein, and 10% from carbs. I know from experience the difficulty of following this. Still, Americans are hooked on carbs and don’t realize the basic facts of the glycemic index. I suggest Robert Lustig’s writings and videos for a primer on how to eat and what foods to avoid -> Professor Robert Lustig speaking at Emery Pharma January 13, 2023 – YouTube

As the Supreme Court gets ready to nix “Obamacare” (or at least some components of it) as unconstitutional, I want to lay out in simple terms the basic system of American “health care” for profit. It starts with the indulgent instant-gratification lifestyle of Americans, who eat mass-produced comfort, junk, and fast foods loaded not only with awful things like trans fats and refined carbohydrates such as high fructose corn syrup, but thousands of artificial additives, chemicals that may be detrimental to humans despite classification as “generally recognized as safe”.

The next lifestyle contributor is the digital revolution, being connected to the digital stream, living online, being glued to one’s personal digital device. Sitting in one place for 6 or more hours has been shown to be bad for cardiovascular health. The saddest aspect of this, to me, is seeing a whole generation of fat kids who rarely play outside anymore and in many cases are not required to have physical education. Very sad indeed.

The health care system, truly a misnomer, is shown to be failing, when we have epidemics of obesity, type II diabetes, heart disease, asthma, autism, chronic fatigue syndrome, fibromyalgia, lupus, celiac disease, other auto-immune disorders, etc. The writing has been on the wall for years and people refuse to acknowledge it. The system we have in place is to comfort ourselves with food and pills and a sedentary lifestyle. This is NOT “health care”. The United States lags behind other developed nations in lifespan, infant mortality, and other vital statistics assessing health. The United States also has a government that subordinates itself to the proft-motives of rapacious drug companies whose express goal is not merely to treat symptoms in a superficial manner but also to see that the underlying lifestyle causes remain unaddressed and untreated. For a person to engage in moderation at mealtime does not yield nearly as much profit as does excess followed by one or more pills. For example, Person A eats 2 chili dogs, fries covered with cheese, and a large Coke and takes a bunch of Rolaids afterwards or perhaps, better yet profitwise, a proton pump inhibitor drug to cut off stomach acid. Person B eats one chili dog, not so terrific, but with a green salad and some spring water. He does not get indigestion, but he does not generate nearly as much profits.

Now if the drug companies truly were motivated to provide health care, they would not encourage people to gorge themselves and take drugs that reduce or eliminate stomach acid which is essential for digestion, including the absorption of such minerals as calcium and magnesium, and the stomach acid does kill bacteria. Gorging on crappy food and taking acid blockers is a prescription for disaster because the food rots instead of being digested. As for acid reflux, that is typically caused by a hiatal hernia when overeating is not the cause. A hiatal hernia is easily treated by a chiropractic adjustment, far less profitable than decades of taking acid blockers. Another thing to consider is treatment of overeating with digestive enzymes. These are readily available in pill form and addresss the problem instead of making it worse.

Among the most hazardous practices in the food indulgence industry is the indiscriminant widespread use of antibiotics fed to factory farm animals whose mass production entails the diminution of health for each animal. Add to this abomination the indiscriminant overprescription of antibiotics and maybe we gain some understanding as to why digestive and immune disorders are increasing exponentially in this country.

As for drugs in general, go beyond side effects when examining what they do and how they do it. An antacid impairs digestion. An antibiotic kills essential bacteria required for immune functioning and consider if your doctor ever takes this into account and prescribes a probiotic along with your antibiotic. Bone density drugs, bisphosphonates, work by disrupting the body’s bone recycling process whereby old bone cells are broken down and recycled into new ones. Bone density is not the same thing as strength. Birds possess very strong bones that are not dense. Also consider the incidence of atypical femur fractures and jaw bone death that occur with bisphosphonates. These alarming things occur by virtue of the drugs interfering with the body’s essential homeostatic mechanisms.

Consider cholesterol-reducing drugs, the statins, lipitor, crestor, pravachol, etc. As http://www.3dchem.com/molecules.asp?ID=92 notes:

“Cholesterol is not a life-threatening toxin, but a medium-sized molecule that is really a building block for important parts of the body. In particular it is an essential component of cell membranes. Cholesterol also stabilizes a cell against temperature changes. It is a major part of the membranes of the nervous system, the brain, the spinal cord and the peripheral nerves. In particular it is incorporated into the myelin sheath that insulates the nerves from the surrounding tissue. Cholesterol is also the forerunner of important hormones such as the female sex hormone, oestradiol, and the male sex hormone, testosterone, and of vitamin D, which we need in order to utilize calcium and form bone. Nearly all body tissues are capable of making cholesterol, but the liver and intestines make the most. We require cholesterol to produce the bile we need to digest the fats in our food, and the name itself comes from the Greek words for ‘bile solids’.”

So consider what a drug actually does. Ask your doctor how a certain drug “cures” a given ailment. Then do your own research and ask more questions.

Now let’s get to food contamination. Remember the outcry against trans/hydrogenated fats? Well, it seems people have forgotten about these or, at least, the food companies have. More and more snack and dessert items contain (partially) hydrogenated fats than a few years ago. The label can list 0 grams trans fats if a serving has 0.5 gm per serving or less.

Most canned foods contain Bisphenol A, despite all the negative publicity that this xenoestrogen has received.

Wikipedia http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bisphenol_A notes:

Bisphenol A is an endocrine disruptor, which can mimic the body’s own hormones and may lead to negative health effects. BPA is controversial because it exerts weak, but detectable, hormone-like properties, raising concerns about its presence in consumer products and foods contained in such products. Starting in 2008, several governments questioned its safety, prompting some retailers to withdraw polycarbonate products. A 2010 report from the United States Food and Drug Administration (FDA) raised further concerns regarding exposure of fetuses, infants, and young children.^[1] In September 2010, Canada became the first country to declare BPA a toxic substance.^[2][3] In the European Union and Canada, BPA use is banned in baby bottles.^[4]“

Okay, we have explored some unhealthful indulgences and a few drugs. Then there’s fee-for-service profit-maximization.  Treatments are obviously supposed to cure, right? Problem is that a truly effective cure does not make much profit. Eating healthy and exercising are profit reducers. Gluttony and sedentary-web-surfing maximize profits, because they clog arteries and make heart attacks, and thereby make surgeries possible. Arterial stents have been shown to be ineffective. And surgeries do save lives, to be sure, but that’s after lives have been already been ruined by our profit-maximization system comprised of instant-gratification and the resulting maladies requiring hospitalization, surgery, chemo, radiation, along with super expensive pills.

The field of epigenetics has shown that heart disease and cancer can be prevented, that disease-causing genes can be turned off by the proper lifestyle. The fact remains that a healthy lifestyle is not profitable for Big Pharma, hospitals, and surgeons. So the temptation to impose the doom of “bad genes” on people is too much. Billions of dollars are made by keeping you on lipitor or any drug for life. Also consider, how often people with a 10% chance of 5-year-survival get the chemo and radiation to “hope against hope” for a miracle. Consider why the “effectiveness” of cancer treatments is 5-year survival rate. Hmmm, maybe because relapse is a fairly common occurence. The “cure” is not really a cure.

Just consider the recurring theme I have exposed in American “health care”. How healthy is this nation compared to what it should be? Compare us to Europe, Japan, Canada, civilized nations where health care is considered in terms of morality and not profit. Don’t take what I say for granted. Ask questions. do your own research.