Disease economy destined to crash

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NTN: Disease economy destined to crash

Tue, 4 Apr 2006 09:30:18 -0700

 

 

 

NewsTarget Insider Alert (www.NewsTarget.com)

HEALTH WARNINGS / CRITICISM

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Creating and treating disease is a significant economic driver in the

United States. From junk food producers to drug manufactures to health

care workers, millions of people profit from promoting disease. Read

today's NewsTarget article to discover why this system relies on

corruption and how other countries manage to promote health and

economic viability.

 

- Mike Adams, the Health Range

 

 

 

 

 

 

story at http://www.newstarget.com/019337.html

 

 

 

published April 4 2006

 

Disease Economy: How the United States economy runs on " treating "

chronic disease

 

This is an article about the disease economy. That's a term I coined

because I could find no other existing term to describe what I'm

observing in our economy today. I call it the disease economy because

such a huge percentage of the economic activity and economic growth I

see in this country is based on the manufacturing, marketing and

selling of products and services based on disease. That is, products

and services that either cause diseases or " treat " those diseases.

 

How do I know we're in a disease economy today? You can see it for

yourself. Just drive around any city or town in the United States and

you can see what's happening. Take a look at the new construction.

What's going to be there? If it's an office complex, chances are it's

going to be a medical office building. If it's on a street corner,

it's probably going to be a pharmacy -- maybe a new Walgreens or CVS

Pharmacy or a new drive-through Wal-Mart pharmacy. You even see

pharmacies in grocery stores now, because they are so profitable. When

you go into grocery stores and look at what's being sold there, you're

getting a good look at the economic activity in this country. You

mostly see products that promote disease, thanks to their

disease-causing ingredients.

 

Of course, the disease economy promotes Big Pharma companies. These

are the pharmaceutical manufacturers in this country, and they are

huge global corporations. The selling of pharmaceuticals is a $1

trillion industry. It's an amazing statistic. Here in the United

States, some of our largest corporations are drug companies. In fact,

as I've stated before, the top 10 pharmaceutical companies in the

United States earn more money than the remaining 490 Fortune 500

companies. Just recently, I heard the Bush administration was very

excited about the news that we are experiencing economic growth in

this country. The economy is up, more money is changing hands, and

that's all that economists really look at when calculating gross

domestic product or gross national product. They're just looking at

the total number of dollars that changed hands.

 

An economy based on paying for disease treatment

However, if you look at the quality of the products and services that

are being exchanged for these dollars, you'll realize something is

amiss here, because what we're doing is basing our economic growth on

the growth of chronic and degenerative disease. We're basing our

economy on the idea that we can treat more and more people with drugs

and medical services and keep selling them soft drinks and fast food

while calling it economic growth.

 

This leads me to the most important point of this article, which is

that we cannot create abundance in the United States or in any country

by selling each other increasingly expensive products and services

that promote disease. In other words, we cannot create abundance by

poisoning ourselves. The very idea is absurd. The whole point of

economic growth is to create economic abundance, and if you look at

the classic definitions of economic growth, they are about providing

more goods and services to people in a more efficient manner. Those

goods and services are supposed to improve the quality of life for

those people.

 

In the old days, the arguments for the invisible hand in the economy

were that if you let entrepreneurs compete in a free market, they

would devise clever and efficient ways to create, produce and deliver

goods and services to consumers that would ultimately enhance their

quality of life. That part is absolutely true, and the United States

has done that very successfully. The free market does work in

accomplishing that, but what we're seeing now is something beyond what

those old-school economists could have ever conceived. We're seeing an

economy that is increasingly based on goods and services that do not

add to the quality of consumers' lives but rather take away from it.

We're seeing entrepreneurs and creative, clever people finding new

ways to market products that harm people and calling that

profitability or economic growth.

 

We see this quite blatantly in the drug industry, where creative

marketers keep coming up with new, absurd ways to sell drugs to people

through direct-to-consumer advertising on television. Some of these

ads are absolutely idiotic in what they are promising. Yet, they are

effective in creating demand. They sell products, but these products

do not help consumers.

 

We also see a lot of products being marketed and sold to consumers

that may give them very short-term benefits -- such as the taste of a

hamburger or the taste of french fries, which lasts about 10 seconds

-- but has long-term detrimental consequences, like obesity, heart

disease, brain disorders, cancer and diabetes. These diseases largely

come about as a result of long-term consumption of nutritionally

depleted foods.

 

Without question, the U.S. economy is heavily invested in disease.

Retailers like Walgreens have mastered the art of selling products on

both sides of the equation. At the front of the store, Walgreens sells

junk food products, soft drinks, candy and a lot of food that really

has no nutrition. At the back of the store, they sell prescription

drugs -- drugs that treat the symptoms of diseases that are ultimately

caused by people's poor dietary choices and their consumption of junk

food. Walgreens has really mastered this. They will sell you the

problem and the treatment, all in the same store. One reason Walgreens

is so incredibly successful as a business is because it has mastered

the art of selling products to consumers as part of the disease

economy. It is a flagship company of the disease economy, perhaps even

more so than pharmaceutical companies.

 

Illusions of wealth in the disease economy

One of the funniest things about the disease economy is that the

consumers who are diseased think they're doing well because they own

stocks in the companies selling the products that harm them. This

fascinates me. A guy dying of cancer or suffering from heart disease,

because of the products he has been consuming for years, believes he's

doing well because he owns stock in large food manufacturing companies

or large pharmaceutical companies. Maybe he owns stock in a new

medical technology, or maybe he's a partner in a local medical clinic.

His investments are doing great, but he's dying, and he's dying from

preventable degenerative disease.

 

This is what's happening across the country, not just to one person,

but to millions of people -- perhaps hundreds of millions -- who think

the economy is looking up and think that maybe they have a good job

because they work for a pharmaceutical company. They think they have

good investments now because they have stocks in the junk food

manufacturers. They think they're doing well financially, but guess

what? They're consuming the product themselves, and they are dying.

They're dying from a degenerative disease at a rate that has never

before been witnessed in human history. This demonstrates my entire

point: We cannot create abundance by selling each other increasingly

expensive products and services that harm each other.

 

By the way, I don't mean to leave out all those chemical companies

manufacturing pesticides, herbicides, fungicides, toxic household

cleaners and toxic personal care products. A lot of those skincare

companies are really just chemical manufacturers with sexy marketing

and lots of women in lab coats selling you products that actually harm

your health; that literally contain ingredients that cause cancer and

liver disease. People think our economy is booming, but we're all

dying of chronic disease. Why is it that 50 percent of our senior

citizens in the United States have high blood pressure? Why is it that

40 percent of our senior citizens are now clinically obese? I'm

willing to bet that a similar percentage may have nervous system

disorders or early stages of dementia or Alzheimer's disease. Most of

them are probably metabolizing some form of cancer right now, even

though it may not have been diagnosed yet.

 

We are a nation of diseased individuals, and that disease starts very

early. There are 12-year-old children who have atherosclerosis. There

are teenagers with osteoporosis, and teenage children with obesity are

now common. In fact, diabetes has gotten so bad in young people that

they had to change the name. That used to be the name. Now they just

have to call it diabesity, and that applies to children, teenagers and

adults alike.

 

Returning to health would bankrupt the economy

We have created so much disease in this country, and we have based our

economy on it to such a degree that, frankly, we cannot untangle this

situation without causing economic distress. If there were a cure for

cancer, diabetes or heart disease tomorrow, where a person could wave

a magic wand and instantly eliminate those diseases, and if every

person in the country did that tomorrow, the sobering truth is that

our national economy would collapse overnight. It would collapse

because there's so much money, so much real estate, so much education

and so much expertise and research invested in disease that we could

not financially survive in an economy based on health and abundance,

at least not the way things are configured right now.

 

We could not economically survive in an economy based on real health.

We are so invested in disease in this nation that we truly have a

disease economy, and in order for that economy to grow, you have to

expand the number of people with disease, expand the definition of

disease or expand the coverage of people who are treated with

high-profit disease-masking products. All three of those things are

happening right now.

 

Corruption in the Disease Economy

Drug companies have experts on their payroll who are part of the FDA's

drug safety decision panels, and who don't disclose their conflicts of

interest. They are making decisions that expand the definition of

disease. A classic case of this was when cholesterol numbers were

lowered from 130 to 100 to instantly make 10 million more Americans

diagnosable with high cholesterol so they could be treated with statin

drugs.

 

We have the ridiculous (and scientifically dishonest) expansion of

psychiatric disorders or so-called brain chemistry diseases, which

really have nothing to do with chemistry, but everything to do with

expanding the marketplace of psychiatric drugs. The way you expand the

marketplace is not to sit around and wait for people to become

mentally disturbed. What you do is change the definition of mental

disorders and make up new ones.

 

One of the biggest questions right now is the marketing of adult

attention deficit hyperactivity disorder, or adult ADHD. It is a

made-up disease. What are the symptoms of this disease? You have too

many things on your mind, you can't keep track of everything you need

to get done and you are easily distracted. What adult doesn't meet

those criteria? We all do, because modern society is a busy place.

According to the drug company definition, and even the definition

offered by the psychiatric community, we are all suffering from mental

illness and must be treated with drugs.

 

This is one way to expand the disease economy. This is one way you

keep those profits flowing and those shareholders happy that they've

invested in your company. Most of us here in America are invested in a

disease economy, one way or another. Take a look at your own

retirement portfolio, if you're fortunate enough to have one, and

you're likely to find that you own some percentage of some company

that's invested in disease. Interesting, isn't it?

 

Transforming the Disease Economy into a Health Economy

Enough about the problem; what about the solution? How do you solve

the disease economy, challenge it and turn it around into a health

economy, a healing economy or an abundant economy? To do that, you

first have to figure out a way to make health profitable. How do you

make healthy people profitable when there's so much money in treating

disease and chronic illness and so much money in addicting people to

lifetime requirements for prescription drugs? How do you generate

profits off of healthy people, as a nation?

 

Let's face it: If people are healthy, especially well into their old

age, they are no longer customers of those clinics being constructed

all over this country. They are no longer customers of Walgreens, CVS

or the Wal-Mart pharmacy. They are no longer customers of surgeons,

physicians, foot specialists or Alzheimer's doctors. This is why I

believe there is absolutely no genuine investment in disease

prevention in this country. There's really no investment at all,

because preventing disease is the last thing that this disease economy

wants.

 

How do you make it worthwhile to keep people healthy? The answer to

that comes down to education, and here's why: When a person is

educated, whether it be an education in the arts, the sciences or in

any other realm, they live longer and healthier. They maintain their

brain function, and they remain productive members of society, no

matter how long they live. They can be producing something that

benefits other members of society well into their 70s, 80s or even

90s. Healthy individuals can age gracefully and maintain healthy

cognitive function. They can directly produce things, such as writing

a book, or they can help teach others. They can even be mentors to

young entrepreneurs, who can benefit from experience in learning how

to manufacture, market or sell something useful.

 

An uneducated individual, on the other hand, tends to be more of a

consumer than a producer of things of value, because they don't have

the background, education or experience to be productive members of

society. If you don't educate the population, they all become

consumers and not producers. It is when people are stuck in the

consumer state that they can be profitable to the disease economy. But

when the public is educated, it becomes far more profitable to keep

people healthy. You could add 20 or 30 years of creative productivity

to an individual's life, which means you could boost the productivity

of the entire nation by perhaps 15 to 20 percent, which is a huge

number. You wouldn't have to base it on disease anymore. You could

base it on health. We need a health economy that's based on disease

prevention, tied with genuine education.

 

Think about what we produce in the United States versus other

countries. While we are toiling away in our disease economy and

inventing new super extreme nacho Doritos and coming up with new

prescription drugs that alter brain chemistry in children,

genius-level students in other countries are actually doing something

useful. In Japan, for example, they are inventing a whole new

industry, which I believe will dominate the world's economy. It will

be bigger than the computer industry and automobile industry ever was.

It's the robotics industry.

 

In the next 20 or 30 years, the robotics industry will be absolutely

huge. Japan is at least 10 years ahead of the United States in this

key industry. Why? It's because Japanese students are well educated.

They also tend to have a lot better health than students in the United

States. In India, they're inventing new computer technologies and new

customer service systems that are siphoning labor away from the United

States because they do it faster, cheaper and with similar quality but

for less money and far lower health-care costs.

 

Globally, our disease economy simply cannot compete with global

economies that actually produce something useful. You want proof of

it? Just look at what's happening to General Motors. General Motors is

shutting down. General Motors is probably headed for bankruptcy. One

of the largest corporations ever produced by the United States is

about to go bankrupt. Why? In my opinion, the answer is that General

Motors is spending more on health insurance than it is on steel.

They're operating in a disease economy, and in a disease economy, it

costs way too much for workers because workers are diseased, and you

have to cover the costs of treating all that disease so you can have

health insurance for all those workers. The United State's health

insurance costs are the highest of any nation in the world.

 

Not only do we have workers who are under-educated in the United

States, they are also over-diseased. We have a disease economy, so we

think we're creating abundance by selling each other expensive

treatments, products and services for disease. The real industries,

like automobile manufacturing, are disappearing. Toyota is smart.

Toyota is going to dominate the auto industry. Personally, I won't

drive anything other than the Toyota. Toyota is the best mainstream

vehicle in the world. Interestingly enough, Toyota is going to be

making robots soon, too. Japan does not have a disease economy. Japan

has an economy with a good dose of innovation. In fact, innovation is

thriving throughout Asia. They don't have a disease economy. They have

an innovation-based economy where they actually have to produce

something useful to get paid.

 

Smart nations will invest in prevention

Now, at some point these nations, as they adopt the Western lifestyle

and become richer and start to consume more beef animal products, as

well as junk food, may very well become disease economies. But some of

these nations will be smart about it and start investing in

prevention. For example, any nation right now in this world that

allows cigarettes to be sold to its population is committing a form of

self-destruction. It's like national suicide. What nation would want

its citizens to smoke cigarettes so that they would halve their own

lives, create huge health-care costs and at the same time reduce their

long-term productivity?

 

Then there are nations like Singapore. Singapore is doing some very

intelligent things, and education is one of them. Singapore has a very

smart population and a booming economy based on actual abundance and

not disease. Of course, people say, " Singapore is almost like a police

state. What about personal rights? " That's a huge argument. Should

people have the right to smoke themselves to death? Should they have

the right to drink soft drinks until they're so obese that they need a

knee replacement and demand to be covered by Medicare? Should people

be allowed to eat junk food all day, avoid exercise and then get heart

disease and need a heart transplant that's paid for by other taxpayers

or other participants in their insurance company? These are questions

I can't answer in this article. All I can say is that any nation that

bases its economy on " diseasification " of its citizens is ultimately

doomed to economic collapse. That's exactly where the United States

economy is currently headed, to certain economic collapse.

 

We are losing our health. We are losing our minds. We're losing our

genuine economic base. We're losing our manufacturing. We're losing

our scientific edge. We're losing our education, and we're losing the

inherent value of our money supply as the U.S. dollar continues to

slip. What do we have left? Well there's always the Wal-mart and the

Walgreens. Give me a Snickers bar. If you can't sleep, you can always

buy sleeping pills. If you can't wake up in the morning, you can

always drink some coffee. It's the disease economy.

 

The disease economy is all around you

You're probably participating in it, and if you think you're not,

check again, because almost everyone is. It takes an act of great

self-determination and courage to extricate oneself from the disease

economy and be a productive member of society. It is a rare thing to

witness. Very few people I've ever known, or know today, are actually

productive members of society doing something useful for the benefit

of other human beings.

 

Do you know who some of those people are? Organic farmers. These are

people I greatly respect who are actually doing something useful for

others. It is something difficult, something laborious, something a

lot of people wouldn't want to do. There are people in society that

are productive, and if we're going to succeed as an economy -- or even

as a nation -- into the future, we're going to have to expand the

number of people who are making a living doing something useful, not

something that is just based on disease.

 

You see, thinking that money spent on disease treatment is economic

productivity is actually an economic fallacy. Here's an example: If

you just want to create jobs in the country, I have a brilliant plan

for job creation. First, hire half the nation to be window breakers.

Give them all hammers. Their job is to go around the entire country

and break windows. Then you hire the other half of the nation to be

window replacers. Their job is to go around and replace all the

windows that were broken by the window breakers. You do that and you

will have full employment! Sounds insane, doesn't it? But that's

what's actually happening today with health.

 

We have people who are health breakers. They work for pharmaceutical

companies, and they work for junk food companies and medical

facilities. We have relatively few people who are healers. We've got

to change that ratio so that we have fewer health breakers and more

health healers in this nation. That's why I'm very happy to see the

rising popularity of massage therapists, herbalists, nutritionists,

acupuncturists and naturopathic physicians -- people who are true

healers. That's what we've got to do in this country to turn things

around. We've got to base the economy on healing, disease prevention

and the education of our population so that as people live longer they

can contribute to society in a meaningful way.

 

I realize this plan would require our national leaders to actually

have vision. We need leaders who have vision beyond this generation.

We need to be thinking about the next hundred years or beyond. I don't

think anybody in Washington is considering the next hundred years.

They're just looking at the next election.

 

Vote with your dollars

You can remove yourself from the disease economy. You know how you do

that? You vote with your dollars. You stop funding these drug

companies, junk food companies, toxic personal-care product

manufacturing companies, pesticide companies and petroleum companies.

You stop giving them your money. You starve them of economic growth by

voting with your dollars. You go somewhere else.

 

You buy food from organic farms at your local food co-op or farmer's

market. You buy honest personal care products made with natural

ingredients, like Dr. Bronner's soap. You reduce your dependence on

fuels. You start riding a bicycle rather than firing up your car all

the time. You can change your behavior, and you can change the effect

of your dollars. You can help reverse this disease economy and turn it

into a healing economy.

 

You, me and the hundreds of thousands of people who read this article

have got to change this world one buying decision at a time, because

money is the only way we're ever going to change it. By changing the

way we choose to spend our money, we reshape the corporate landscape.

We reshape this economy and move it away from a disease economy. Pay

attention to your actions when you're at a cash register. Look in your

grocery cart. Ask yourself, " What am I invested in here? What am I

supporting? " Commit yourself to making positive changes so that you

support the companies, organizations and individuals that are actually

doing something positive.

 

If you're currently working for a drug company, quit your job and find

something productive to do. Find something that actually benefits

humankind and isn't just based on scientific fraud and

over-exaggerated, hyped-up marketing.