The Low Cost of Healthcare

Health is not all, but without it, everything else soon becomes nothing. If we fail to take care of ourselves (low cost healthcare with proper diet, exercise and avoidance of negative habits), we need high cost medical care that focuses on the diagnosis and treatment of disease. True healthcare has an inverse relationship with medical care; and we tend to move toward one or the other.

Though medical care is costly, many doctors are altruistic and they also struggle with rising costs. Our high cost is not primarily due to greedy insurance companies, though greed is a factor in the denial of some claims. Surgery is a high ticket item, and many of its benefits are short-lived. But these are not the core of the problem. The real villain in this scenario is the pharmaceutical industry.

Why? Because drugs generally do not cure disease. They give us relief, and create an illusion of controlling the condition, but health is recovered in spite of the drug. And in most cases, the underlying cause is not addressed so the condition continues to progress while the person seems better with relief of symptoms. Tests don’t usually find a cause for headache, joint ache, stomach ache, insomnia or nervous disorders.

Let’s say we get a stomach ache, but instead of changing how we eat, we “ask the doctor” for a purple pill and it works fine—we can eat what we like. Everything is okay until we get a headache. After more tests that show no stroke or tumor, we get another prescription, and it works for the headaches. But, sooner or later, we get seriously ill. We could even die suddenly. How? Because the drug ad said, “headache, diarrhea or abdominal pain.” They don’t tell you the other 120 conditions listed in the Physician’s Desk Reference or package insert for the purple pill. Ask your pharmacist so you can watch for symptoms you may develop.  Most drugs have a long list of side effects.

When you got the headache, you needed to stop the first prescription, not add a second one to mask the signs of toxicity. Adverse Drug Reactions have become a leading cause of premature death in the U.S. (Journal of AMA, 4-15-1998; Archives of Internal Medicine, 9-10-2007).  This is from drugs “properly prescribed and administered.” And for every person who dies, there are more than 100 who are made ill by a prescription.

The  result is 116 million extra doctor visits, 17 million emergency department visits, 8 million hospital admissions, and 3 million long-term care admissions (these people are messed up for life).  And the $76.6 billion cost rivals the aggregate cost of diabetic patients in US. (Western Journal of Medicine, June, 2000)

All of this from something we call “healthcare.” We are becoming ill from TV commercials that tell us we have “generalized anxiety disorder,” “erectile dysfunction,” “PMDD,” or “GERD” as Dr.Marcia Angell, former editor of the New England Jour. of Med. says. (The Truth About the Drug Companies, subtitled, How They Deceive Us).

The frequency of death and serious adverse drug events went up 2.7 fold from 1998 to 2005 after congress allowed drug companies to advertise on TV. Congress likes drug money donations for their re-election campaigns.

A priest who killed someone while he was under the influences of alcohol said, “Tobacco is just a pimple on the rear end of a giant, alcohol.” For perspective in this discussion we could say, Alcohol is just a pimple on the rear end of a giant, the drug industry, and we are being drugged to death!

Medical textbooks are filled with conditions of “unknown etiology.” And if doctors don’t know the cause, they don’t know the cure, so how can the drug address the cure? Ask your doctor what he would do in your situation and if it wouldn’t be better to Google your symptoms for an alternative natural remedy rather than load your system with a chemical that becomes toxic in time. Pharmacology used to be called toxicology. Hippocrates, the Father of Medicine, said, “Nature cures, not the physician … let your food be your medicine.” What we put in our mouths affects our life and health more than anything else.  It seems elementary, but most people need motivational help.

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