Modern Medicine and The Fiscal Trap

Just a minute there, isn't science the basis of modern medicine? Sneering at medicine is abusing the very basis of scientific approaches to learning about the body, isn't it?

Pardon me but the last time I went to a doctor he didn't exactly wave a magic wand and tell me I was cured. He did try to get me to take drugs, statins, to cure my high blood pressure without discussing the causes of my problem with me except to summon up the demon of cholesterol. So I found a doctor to work with who actually believes the body can heal itself using proper nutrition and supplemental support and my blood pressure is down by forty points on both measures. My cholesterol borders on too low and I don't need no stinking drugs! Especially not if my risk of heart attack rises if I go off of them once I start taking them. That smells like a trap not a method for reaching wellness.

I have a Stint that I let my doctor put in because I was under a rush and a lot of stress. That operation was the first and last time I will use that type of mechanistic approach to my body. The truth is that event started Gigi, my wife, and me on the journey we have only begun. We have spent the last fifteen years seeking wellness through nutrition and other methods of self healing like exercise. I'm sixty eight and pretty healthy, no thanks to modern food, medicine or the people who drive and control the two and a half trillion dollar a year medical establishment we are all saddled with today. By 2020 the cost will have increased to the point where one dollar in five your family spends will be spent on health care. This is beyond nonviable and has exceeded absurdity a long time ago.

If you invested that money it would provide a retirement much better than the one most of us can look forward to these days. Instead your doctor and the executives of insurance, drug and other companies involved in the medical care cartel are going to invest them in their retirement. Maybe they will take you with them to the Bahama's in the wintertime, or maybe not! You see there is a massive transfer of wealth taking place from the rest of us to the card carrying members of the medical establishment. The moment you recognize that illness does not have to be your fate as you age you begin the process of escaping this trap. Once again I must admit there is no great grand conspiracy among them, just market forces at work.

Free markets are not all you need to know about buying and selling goods and services, you need to know how to be a good consumer. Of course the tendency is to just say, I paid for my insurance and now it is their turn to pay my bills. That is one of the less subtle elements in how insurance has caused a lot of the rise in the price we pay for medical care. Another way the system is broken is that it so far encourages you not to think about your health until you are ill and then to depend on the experts to make you all better. That is an inherently foolish choice but I fell into that trap in spite of the fact that my mother taught me better. My mother lived to ninety by not going to doctors. She saw one physician one time between the time I was born when she was forty three and the day she died.

Not bad for a woman who bore eight children to term, most of them in the days when the last real depression was running its course. Her grandfather was the town doctor so you cannot say that she was afraid of doctors, she just didn't trust the modern kind who are often little more than drug pushers for the pharmaceutical companies. She also was primarily a believer in personal responsibility where your personal life was concerned. She believed in good food and exercise, plenty of praying and not abusing your body in any way that is unnecessary like drinking smoking or other drains on your body's resources.

The older I get the smarter she looks. My wife and I have paid medical bills of around five thousand dollars over and above the cost of our medical insurance every year for the last fifteen years. Along with that we have paid, through the company we operated, over one hundred thousand in health insurance costs in the last ten years. There has been and will be, no return on that investment. We paid our own medical bills during that whole ten years because the deductible was high enough and the disallowed costs were very substantial.

During that decade we had some health crises. My blood pressure started to rise because I got careless about eating and drinking too much. I changed my diet and started back on my supplements and it went down again. My wife has Rhumatoid Arthritis but takes no medication for it just good food and supplements. She had what seemed like an attack of arthritis on a trip to Mexico but when we got home the pain continued until we went to see a physician we trusted. He told us that she probably had an infection from some insect bites she had suffered down there. So she treated that with antibiotics and cortisol to relieve the pain. The problem went away for about six months then returned with a vengeance.

The next diagnosis was fibromyalgia, a catch-all type of disease with no known cause and no known cure. Accepting that would have doomed her to bouts of drugs that seldom help much with the pain and a life of reduced mobility and function. So she went to see an alternative specialist who is both a herbalist and accupuncture practitioner. He told her that the Chinese medicine term for what she had was called "Wandering B". She took the nasty tasting herbs he gave her, went to twenty treatments and the symptoms totally disappeared, They have stayed gone for the last three years. Believe what you like but not one dollar of any of those treatments was covered by our health insurance.

Now we have paid the cost of a house for medical coverage and besides that during that ten years paid another fifty thousand dollars in medical bills. The hundred thousand dollars was a waste of our resources but it no doubt looks good on the insurance company's bottom line. The fifty thousand was an investment that paid off and we do not begrudge a dime of that money. We are well and healthy, active and live good if quiet lives and are greatful that we have the time and mental resources to see to our own health and not leave it to the experts. May your Gods, whatever they are, keep you safe in these trying times.