NTN: Turn the medical system upside down for true health

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NTN: Turn the medical system upside down for true health

Tue, 27 Jun 2006 12:16:23 -0700

 

 

 

 

NewsTarget Insider Alert (www.NewsTarget.com)

HEALTH SOLUTIONS

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To be truly healthy, patients need to challenge the assumption that

we should have disease-oriented doctors at all. Suppose we had a

system of health consultants or " healers " to help people avoid and

prevent chronic disease. In today's NewsTarget feature, I explain why

we need to turn the medical system upside down, and what you can do to

help create a system that rewards health instead of disease.

 

full story at http://www.newstarget.com/019475.html

 

 

Health care economics: Diseases are too profitable to prevent or cure

 

Posted Tuesday, June 27, 2006 by Mike Adams, Key concepts: doctors,

health care and drug companies.

 

There's something seriously wrong with our modern system of healthcare

in the United States and in Western countries, but this article's not

what you might think -- it's not about the obvious things that are

wrong. This is about something much larger. Let's take a look from a

large, top-down view. In fact, I'm going to challenge the assumption

that we should have disease-oriented doctors at all. I think the whole

diseased-focused model of health care we have today is part of the

problem.

 

Let's take a look at it: The job of a doctor (a General Practitioner,

or GP) is primarily to diagnose disease, treat symptoms and make

referrals to other specialists for surgery, lab tests or other

procedures. (Good doctors also help educate patients, but that's the

exception, not the norm.) Patients don't go see a doctor unless

there's something wrong with them. When they do see the doctor, the

doctor's job is to patch them up, make the pain go away, make the

swelling go down, stitch up the cut, prescribe drugs or whatever is

immediately necessary.

 

Think about it... the doctor only makes money when people are sick.

Drug companies only make money when people need treatment for disease.

And most people are only really interested in their health when

something goes wrong. I think there's something terribly misguided

about this entire process, both in terms of what patients are doing

and what doctors are doing. So what could be a better system?

 

Imagine a world of health consultants

Suppose we had a system, in some imaginary society, where there

weren't doctors -- instead, there were health consultants or

" healers. " The job of the healer would be to keep you healthy, not to

patch you up when you've got a disease. In fact, in this imaginary

society, every person would see a healer on a regular basis, working

with them like a health coach to avoid and prevent chronic disease.

Most importantly, healers would only get paid when you stay healthy,

not when you are sick.

 

If you ever got a disease or experienced symptoms of disease, that

would be considered a failure on the part of both the healer and

yourself, and the healer would earn no money from your disease. But if

the healer was doing their job, and the patient was at least

marginally interested in their own health, then of course the vast

majority of chronic disease would be entirely avoided.

 

What if we had a system where you paid your healer a small monthly fee

to help keep you healthy? Under such a system, the healer is

financially punished when his or her patients aren't healthy. There's

actually a financial incentive for the healer to make sure that

everyone stays as healthy as possible. That would be an economic

incentive that turns the entire system of healthcare on its head,

because right now our current system financially rewards disease.

 

Diseases are too profitable to prevent or cure

If you think about the way the drug companies operate, they are

financially rewarded for inventing new diseases, or redefining old

diseases so that more people are now diagnosed with something. In

fact, the more diseases they can invent and the more people they can

convince of having some disease, the more money drug companies make.

 

But what if we turned that around, and we had a system where there was

an economic incentive to keep people healthy? What if there was

actually a penalty for having to use pharmaceuticals, because that

meant you failed to follow a healthy lifestyle? What if healing foods

such as fresh produce and raw nuts were offered virtually free of

charge, but junk foods were very, very expensive? How might that

change people's purchasing habits?

 

If you turn the whole system upside down, and you create rewards for

keeping people healthy, then entrepreneurs all throughout the country

will find new and interesting ways to keep people healthy. Business

people will always find ways to make money, and if disease is

financially rewarded, then disease is what they'll create. But if you

offer them a way to make money by keeping people healthy, pioneering

entrepreneurs will find all sorts of creative ways to improve patient

health and cash in on the profits.

 

Modern medicine rewards disease

Right now, we have a system that rewards disease. That's why we have

so much fraud in Medicare and Medicaid, so much corruption in the

medical industry and so much money and effort invested in inventing

disease. Yet we have virtually nothing invested whatsoever in

prevention.

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There's really no serious disease prevention program in this country.

The government is not working on preventing disease. Drug companies

certainly aren't doing anything to prevent disease, and even the

national cancer associations, diabetes associations and all these

health charities are doing virtually nothing to actually prevent

disease. Why is that? Because everybody's making money from disease,

including the doctors, hospitals, medical imaging specialists,

oncologists, radiologists, anesthesiologists and, of course,

psychiatrists, who are now making money by imagining that people have

all sorts of brain chemistry disorders like Road Rage Disorder that

they claim need to be treated with prescription drugs.

 

How healers would keep you healthy

What we need are healers, whose job is to keep you healthy, and who

can engage in education, nutritional therapies, detoxification

programs, physical therapy, stress reduction and other meaningful

health therapies. These healers would be able to assess your specific

nutritional needs and then prescribe foods to you. They may even

prescribe exercise programs, sunshine or more water so that you stay

hydrated.

 

Now, I'm not imagining that all of this would be easy to implement, or

that the government should be the one running such programs. I realize

this is a simplified description of economics, human decision

processes and complexities in health care today, so this is not a

serious proposal of reform. This is just an exploration of ideas of

how we might turn things around by altering the way incentives are

applied.

 

Modern medicine is an utter failure

What's very clear today is that the current system we have has utterly

failed. We have more people on drugs in this country than anywhere in

the world, we're spending more per capita on healthcare than any

country in the world, and yet we are the most diseased population in

the world (barring plagues and the like).

Healing Foods Revealed

Find a complete list of healing foods, nutritional medicine and

phytonutrients at the free HealingFoodReference.com website.

 

We have depression, cancer, diabetes, heart disease, and a long list

of other chronic diseases that are devastating our population, and not

just our adults and senior citizens, but now our children too. It's

very clear that the system of health care we have in our country does

not work.

 

Over 40 percent of our population has no health insurance.

Approximately 99 percent of our population (and the vast majority of

licensed physicians) remains completely and utterly ignorant of the

relationship between nutrition and health. In this country, we

continue to subsidize sugar and genetically-engineered corn on a grand

scale. We continue to allow the drug companies and junk food companies

to exploit consumers and brainwash people into thinking they need

chemicals or junk foods in order to be healthy, feel good or be

popular. We have a system that is dominated by evil industries that

really have no purpose other than to generate profits. These are the

food, drug, cosmetics and chemical industries, primarily.

 

Doctors are often trapped in the system, too

We also have a medical industry that is, in some ways, helpless to do

anything in response to all these problems. I know it's easy to blame

doctors, and certainly they are part of the problem, but doctors are

also caught in a system where they are often powerless to do much.

 

Many doctors start out wanting to be healers. They really want to help

people, but they soon find out that they can't stay in business if

they're spending 20 minutes per patient. A clinic or a hospital won't

hire them unless they can work faster and see more patients, spending

an average of only 3 minutes per patient. What started out as a

genuine desire to help people quickly degenerates into a

drug-dispensing factory operation.

Related article

The great direct-to-consumer prescription drug advertising con: how

patients and doctors alike are easily influenced to demand dangerous

drugs

Some of that responsibility, however, belongs with the patients. A

lot of patients don't want real health solutions -- they just want a

prescription. They just want a magic pill, and they're not interested

in changing their diet or engaging in exercise. Sometimes a doctor can

give patients excellent advice, and the patient will just ignore them.

 

Now, if this happens to you a thousand times, and you're a doctor,

pretty soon you get tired of preaching to people and you eventually

just leave it up to them. I think that's where too many doctors

ultimately end up. They've given up on trying to help people, and

they're just pushing drugs and surgery. Every treatment in

conventional medicine, it seems, comes down to pushing more drugs, and

the continuing education programs (CMEs) required for doctors to

maintain their licensure are, more often than not, sponsored by drug

companies. Doctors are flooded by pro-drug information through drug

reps, medical journals, continuing education and from patients

themselves (who request drugs by name because they saw an

advertisement on TV).

 

The bottom line is that if we're going to make some lasting changes in

this industry, and actually do something to qualitatively improve the

health of American citizens, we have to change the dynamics of this

system. We have to stop providing incentives for disease and start

finding new ways to create rewards for personal health improvements.

 

I think we can do that by starting at both the bottom and the top, the

bottom being grassroots education, which is part of what I do. At the

top, there would be reform of the FDA, and we would create a true

Department of Health that is actually interested in promoting health,

and not just promoting the financial interests of politically powerful

drug companies and food corporations.

 

We've got to sever the corrupt connection between government and

industry, and create some honest regulatory agencies that are actually

going to do something to protect the consumer. Today, we are far from

that. In fact, it's nowhere in sight. But that's where we have to

start if we're going to have a chance at improving the health

situation in this country.

 

Related article

Experiment shows medical doctors to be glorified drug dealers, easily

manipulated by drug companies

 

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We also have health news for you that's just hitting the media,

including:

 

FDA enforcement efforts against drug companies in freefall failure,

concludes inquiry

http://www.newstarget.com/019480.html

 

Coffee consumption linked with reduced diabetes risk (but watch out

for added fat and sugar)

http://www.newstarget.com/019479.html

 

Vioxx heart risk starts earlier than previously reported; New England

Journal of Medicine publishes corrections to previous Vioxx research

http://www.newstarget.com/019478.html

 

Mammograms, X-rays may boost breast cancer risk by 250%

http://www.newstarget.com/019477.html

 

 

To your health,

- Mike Adams, the Health Ranger

 

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