This weeks newsletter is a contemplation on what has become of our healthcare system in this country. Fifty years ago American healthcare was second to none. We were the center of innovation and everything ‘cutting edge.’ Americans were healthier and more vigorous as a people. What has happened?
For many years now U.S. healthcare has ranked dead last among the top ten developed countries, and 37th in comparison to all countries in the world. The only thing we are tops in is spending on healthcare. We spend two to three times as much per person as any other nation
and yet our health outcomes are lower than many third world countries. What gives?
What prompted this article was a couple of quotes I came across recently that were written by the long time editors of the two most prestigious medical journals published in this country – the Lancet, and The New England Journal of Medicine.
“It is simply no longer possible to believe much of the clinical research that is published, or to rely on the judgment 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 of [The New] England Journal of Medicine.” – Dr. Marcia Angell editor-in-chief of the New England Journal of Medicine
“The case against science is straightforward: much of the scientific literature, perhaps half, may simply be untrue. Afflicted by studies with small sample sizes, tiny effects, invalid exploratory analyses, and flagrant conflicts of interest, together with an obsession for pursuing fashionable trends of dubious importance, science has taken a turn towards darkness,” – Dr. Richard Horton editor-in-chief of The Lancet
As I went on to research this concern, I found that this is just the tip of the iceberg. I have always depended on papers submitted by researchers to get a clue about what will help my patients. Now I learn that at least half of this information is bogus. What kind of impact do you
think this will have on the care I give as a doctor? If I were a traditional MD that had to rely on drugs and medical procedures to help my patients, this would totally disable my quality of care.
It is not as though these are simply mistakes that slip through the cracks, these are deliberate attempts to distort the truth in order to sell more drugs and medical procedures. I first became aware of this problem back when I was going to school at UC Davis (a long time ago). There was the “publish or perish” concern that all the professors had all the time. As a professor their main job was to do research and publish that research. Teaching was purely secondary. The problem was that research was expensive and not paid for by the university. As a researcher you had to find funding outside the university for your work. That meant you had to study stuff somebody was willing to shell out hard cash to pay for in order to get the results of your research. Who was willing to pay for health research? The pharmaceutical companies and big food manufacturers. Do you think they were willing to spend their hard cash on studies that didn’t support the increased sale of their products? Of course not. As a researcher in a university, you had to study what the big companies wanted and you had to get the results they wanted or else they cut off your funding. The situation has only gotten worse over the last 45 years.
Theoretically the scientific journal system is supposed to use peer review to weed out junk science, but this system has failed miserably. Several people have now demonstrated how easy it is to get papers published that make absolutely no sense at all; pure gibberish. One person has had over 120 papers published under a false name and he is listed as working for a university that does not exist. It’s all nonsense data and results. The system has become instead a way to prevent any new theories from being published that might upset the recognition of those that are currently accepted. Peer review has become a scam for acceptability to the existing status quo – very unfortunate.
How does this cause our quality of healthcare to cost so much and do so little? Simply put, everything has been
stacked on every level to ensure profitability for the pharmaceutical companies, and they have no interest in our health. They only make money when we are sick. Their ideal patient is the chronically ill patient that needs multiple expensive drugs to keep them alive. Interestingly this is exactly what our government health policies have created. This is what the status quo medical community has created. Get it? The healthcare field does not make money if you are healthy. It is not in their best interests to promote actual health. Researchers don’t get paid to research how to keep you healthy. They get paid to find new drugs to sell you. They get paid to discover new diseases that will need new drugs to keep you alive.
While this all sounds very evil and opportunistic, the truth is most of these people believe in what they are doing. Pharmaceutical based medicine has become a
religion with millions of converts giving their life savings to them for “the greater good.” I call it Pharmism – the belief that pharmacology will save you. And like any religion there is a huge amount of blindness to anything that does not fit their world view. When some crackpot discovers a cure for some disease that does not require drugs from the proper holy ordained pharmaceutical companies, he is laughed out of town. The automatic assumption is that he must be wrong, because everyone knows that healing and saving can only come from the right currently prescribed medication. This may sound silly when I put it this way, but I have seen this exact thing happen over and over.
A case in point: Fasting. I recently watched a documentary called “The Science of Fasting.” Link to documentary. It detailed vast amounts of Russian research and German research into fasting as a cure for dozens of diseases, including type 2 diabetes and heart disease. This research has been going on for 60 years and involved tens of thousands of patients. The results are absolutely incontrovertible. Yet even in those countries the government and normal researchers are not interested. No money is allocated for further research and no monies from the social welfare systems are spent to support people using this therapy, except in remote regions where typical health care is unavailable. Fasting does not support the Pharma doctrine of “only drugs will save you.”
I believe this corruption of the basic principles of healthcare in this country is why we spend so much money and get so little in return. Our current system is not selling health. It sells expensive maintenance. It does this because we have asked for this. We want the freedom to do whatever we want with our bodies and not have to pay the price. We want a pill to make it ok for us to abuse ourselves. Well that mindset has given us the bottom of the heap healthcare system we have. No one did this to us, this is our own creation.
Don’t get me wrong, I love my doctor. If I am ever in a horrible accident and end up bleeding all over the place, you bet I want to be rushed to the hospital. Emergency care for injuries is where our medical system still shines. Chronic disease – not so much.
Why did I write this article? Because when your doctor says research has proven that blah, blah, blah, a red flag should now jump up in your brain that says “Oh yeah, all that fake research published only to promote drug sales proves what exactly?” I am not saying to ignore your doctor’s advice, just to look further and consider other alternatives. Your doctor knows what he/she was taught by a system that has been biased and filled with lies for so long that now everybody believes them. There is more to your health story.