Healthy Thoughts

My Heartfelt wishes
Political Chassé

After all these heavy discussions (onetwothreefour – five and six),  I have to ask: where do we stand? Where do I stand? What did I learn and what did you? Where is the world going? What should YOU take away from it all? Let me sum it up

Me

I really want to move on to other subjects, but it is not easy. Just today, as I write this on 2018-04-11, I came across this fascinating TED talk: What is the best diet for humans- – Eran Segal. Watch it! It was not a revelation, but a confirmation of what I always suspected. My health depends on a number of different factors that are very much individual. The point of bringing this up is to show why I feel as if I was running down a hill and trying to stop. I am carried by the momentum of new discoveries.

The important question to me is how I could possibly pass some of that momentum to my doctors. I started writing this series as an explanation to them of my scepticism toward their advice. I don’t know how much they are part of the system, how ossified they are into the knowledge they left medical school with, but I know that a great number of doctors would not deviate from the official positions and recommendations.

A friend told me just a few days ago that at some point, after she was told to take statins, another doctor pulled out a plain paper pad to write down the names of the two supplements she should IMMEDIATELY start taking. “Don’t tell anyone,” he said, “I could lose my license for recommending natural cures.” He told her to take Omega 3 and CoQ10 supplements. Fancy that! Those were the two things I figured out on my own to take.
I don’t want to believe that a doctor would lose its license over that, but neither of my doctors recommended the supplements either.
I hope I did not alienate my doctors. I need them. I would also need them to listen to me, to consider the evidence I found, to support the decisions I made.
I don’t expect them to agree with me or to stand up to the orthodoxy, but I hope they will help me on the prescription drug-free path. I still need the system, I cannot just walk into a lab to ask for a test.  I still need to rely on and to have trust in my doctors.

The world

As Thomas Kuhn pointed out in his book, new scientific ideas do not win over old ones by the power of their logic or the evidence behind them. New ideas emerge, they are dismissed, attacked and ridiculed, but eventually the people holding onto the old ideas die out and the new paradigm becomes the generally accepted truth.

We are on the cusp of such paradigm shift in the way we are thinking about human health in general and about metabolic syndrome in particular. It is increasingly obvious that the one size fits all, top down, interventionist approach is not working. The new paradigm is personalized, self directed healing.
No chronic drug dependence. This change may be very good for people, but not for the businesses living off the status quo.

The Pharmocracy will not go down without a fight. Neither will the subsidized agrobusiness. Government control of health care? The unions that depend on it? Can any of that change without a revolution? Some things could make it better, but the general direction is not that good.

In this whole mess, I still have the highest hopes for doctors. This paradigm shift is led by doctors who are rebelling against the consensus. Just dive into the references. As I said, I don’t know how break myself away from the deluge of new information, all pointing in the same direction, away from the orthodoxy.

The other encouraging development is in technology. Two months ago, at a blockchain meet-up I was sitting next to a guy who is working for a company developing software for wearable devices monitoring blood glucose/insulin and cholesterol/triglyceride levels. Since this technology is not controlled (yet) by the entrenched stakeholders, we can expect the quality of the testers to go up and their price to come down. You can already buy some on Amazon today.  What this means is that you can measure the effect of every activity, every meal, every day of your life. Once you have the data, you can compare it to the results of thousands of others. You can provide the data to AI algorithms to find patterns that are far beyond what your doctor can find out about you today. These are disruptive technologies, and they are still gathering momentum.

The world is changing. I don’t know what will happen to the Pharmocracy – Medical establishment – socialized medicine power structures. They all have the same problems: money, poor performance and competition. They all run the risk of collapsing under their own weight. Fighting them does not make much sense. That does not mean that we cannot hasten their demise.

You

What can you do? Having read this whole series you are already a step ahead of the crowd.

You know that the system is corrupt.
You know that you cannot trust your doctor, big pharma, the socialised systems or the heavily regulated insurance companies.
You understand, that if you are not paying for it, you are the product.
You know that the top-down regulations cannot solve your problems, that the food pyramid is a political sham and that Ansel Keys was a fraud.
You understand that the main goal of both Big Pharma and Big Food is to get you hooked on their products. To get dependent, to get addicted. …And you know that they aren’t entirely honest about the ways they are trying to achieve that.
You understand that you are on your own.

So ACT ON IT!

Live a healthy life. Learn everything about what it means to live a healthy life.
Do not trust your doctors and do not trust the pills they give you without understanding completely what they are doing and how.
You should especially distrust any drug that you are supposed to take forever. Find out how to fix the root cause.
Whenever you can, pay for your health yourself. Have your personal health savings account.
Whatever your problem is, find peer support.
Eat real food! Reduce your stress! Exercise!

You get the idea. Take care of yourself and educate others.

Healthy information

Let me leave you with a list of essential links to watch and share with others.

Books

  • The big fat surprise – By Nina Teicholz
  • Fat Chance – by Robert H. Lustig

Videos

  • Sugar- The Bitter Truth – YouTube
    A passionate presentation Robert Lustig. It has a bit of over the top theatrics, but it also has the most detailed description of the metabolization process of glucose and fructose.

The above is just a door opener.  You can find many more references in post #3 and hundreds more on the net.
This is the last piece of this series.
You can find the rest here:

A heartfelt story
Some heartfelt discoveries
A hearty bibliography
A heartfelt analysis
My heartfelt wishes
A heartfelt letter
Healthy thoughts

3 replies on “Healthy Thoughts”

  1. David Strutt says:

    My cardiologist and my physiotherapist both recommended Omega 3 and CoQ10 supplements. If either of those two said to me they would lose their licence for recommending them, I would immediately find other doctors. The drugs I have been taking for the past 25 years have saved my life three times since my first heart attack. Without them, I would most likely have been fertilizer years ago. Doctors are business people and the pharmaceutical companies are businesses. They have invested time and money into their businesses and must maximize returns on those investments. Otherwise, why bother. There are some good doctors and some lousy doctors. In Canada, we have an abundance of lousy doctors because we chase all the good ones to the USA, and suffer the bad ones thanks to socialist government policies and stupid immigration policies. Regardless, it is up to the patient to find the best one and be his/her own advocate. I have become very good and self-advocacy in this rotten system. I’m glad “big pharma” is there to provide the chemical wizardry I need to spend four or maybe even five more decades enjoying life with my wife. Aside from all of that, some people live long and others don’t, but nobody gets out of here alive. Something is going to get you. I concentrate on the good things and good people around me—to hell with the rest. Trying to eke out another few years of life by being obsessed with food intake and vitamin supplements can be very annoying to others, and a complete waste of time. You are going to die. Simple as that …

    • zgh says:

      I (sort of) agreee with every one of your points, but:

      The target of my whole series was ‘the system’ and the bad incentives it creates. I have no problem with the drug industry, only with the enormous political power it wields and with the corruption that it creates.

      The point for me is not longevity as much as it is quality of life. I met a guy at Oliphant, over 80, still kiting at every opportunity he gets. I want to be out there when I’m 90. 

      Even more important than exposing the failings of the system are the positive suggestions of better ideas. 

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