The Privatized, Corporatized, Medicalized and Deregulated Way of Life in The United States
In my book, “Thinking and Eating for Two,” I described the evolutionary diet of eating whole plant foods that feed both self, and our symbionts (the beneficial microorganisms on us and in us). Man evolved to eat plants, and this has been the diet of humans until modern times. Even the Roman Gladiators feasted on a plant-based diet. Plants provide all of the nutrients we need, doing so in a healthy manner without excesses in fat and protein, both of which are harmful when too much is consumed in keto diets, for instance. Keto diets cause heart disease, and about 75% of stents placed in US hospitals from 2015-2017 were for stable heart disease, where stenting is useless, but where changing from a keto diet to a plant-based diet would reverse the disease. Thus, physicians are performing useless, costly, and potentially damaging stent procedures on heart disease patients when a simple diet change would reverse the disease. Hospitals and physicians performing these unnecessary procedures may be found liable. Eating meat, as an example of one component in our contemporary diet, taste horrible unless you do something drastic to it, such as cure it with gobs of unhealthy salt, fry it or barbecue it so that it is loaded with inflammatory molecules known as advanced glycation end products and cancer causing nitrosamines, or as Donald Trump does, smear it with salty and sugary ketchup. And now we know that fatty and sweet foods create an addiction for these unhealthy foods by modifying brain function. That meat being consumed in copious quantities in the US is also causing urinary tract infections, which are becoming harder to treat because of antibiotic resistance. Eating meat and other animal products may also be causing Multiple Sclerosis (MS). This happens because meat contains a bacterium, Clostridium perfringens, that produces a toxin, bacterial epsilon toxin, and targets cells (CNS endothelial cells) in the blood brain barrier (BBB). Once the BBB is damaged by epsilon, toxins can flood the nervous system and and cause neural dysfunction. These bacteria are resistant to heat, so cooked animal products may contain the bacterium and transfer it to the meat-eater.
Taking care of ourselves, especially through diet, is the primary means to a long and healthy life. “Medicine is not health care, food is health care. Medicine is sick care,” mostly treatment. “The Medicalization of America,” describes the so-called healthcare system in the US that was not designed to, and does not, keep one healthy. Physicians have described modern medicine as a threat to public health. Rather, the current system is about treatment and profits for the corporations and physicians who control US healthcare, and benefit from the system they created that accounts directly for over 18% of the GDP. As Dr. Elisabeth Rosenthal, M.D. has written, “the American medical system has stopped focusing on health or even science. Instead it attends more or less single-mindedly to its own profits.” I’ve got news for you Dr. Rosenthal, the US medical system never did focus on health and science. An ice pick in the eye socket of thousands of victims is one example. Those profits in the medical system include those of drug companies, such as McKesson, a drug distributor in Texas, who kept shipping opioids to two pharmacies six years after learning that they had been filling prescriptions from physicians who were likely engaging in crimes. The shipments of life-destroying opioids from McKesson to physicians stopped many years later, after the physicians were indicted. McKesson was rewarded for it’s bad behavior by Texas, which spent millions of dollars to have McKesson move its HQ to the state. Texas is a state that will protect corporations and physicians for the sake of money, even when they are killing people. The drug companies and their salespeople, physicians, want your money, even if it means robbing you of your health. While adding nutrients through a plant dominant diet is critical to health, not taking a bunch of drugs and removing these toxins in your diet is equally important. PFAS are a group of such chemicals. A number of PFAS have been linked to serious health problems, including cancer, fertility issues, high cholesterol, hormone disruption, liver damage, thyroid disease, and obesity. Yes, PFAS, along with plastics, both of which are in our drugs and in our water supply, can help to induce obesity. Instead of drugs, try a healthy diet. And using a proper water filter can largely eliminate these dangerous chemicals from your diet. There are a number of filters available. I use the Clearly Filtered. Eating a good diet will be beneficial to all aspects of health, including colonic health. Avoiding duodenoscopy and colonoscopies where pieces of the single-use device lodge in your colon or duodenum and cause harm, or poorly cleaned colonoscopes infect you, can be avoided by good diet, and if needed later in life, a stool sample test that is as effective as a colonoscopy but without the side effects is easily and inexpensively done. The big drawback is that physicians don’t make money, about $2,000.
Thinking about the GDP and obesity, we can read this from STAT, a newsletter about drugs: “The condition has long been framed as a result of poor lifestyle decisions and a failure of willpower — eating too much and exercising too little. But a new generation of highly effective obesity medications, and the overt and subtle messaging from the pharmaceutical companies making them, are starting to change the narrative.” Further, ““This is really changing the conversation, changing the understanding of the fact that this is an actual disease and not something that’s just a matter of a moral failing on the individual patient’s part,” and “This is really changing the conversation, changing the understanding of the fact that this is an actual disease and not something that’s just a matter of a moral failing on the individual patient’s part,” said Fatima Cody Stanford, an obesity medicine physician at Massachusetts General Hospital who also consults for companies making the new medicines, an obesity medicine physician at Massachusetts General Hospital who also consults for companies making the new drugs.” In other words, physicians who work for drug companies are changing the narrative on obesity from one of lifestyle modification, to one of taking drugs instead. As stated in the article, “For drug companies, this represents one of the biggest financial opportunities ever.” The same is true for physicians. In this way of thinking, health will diminish given this focus on pills, with direct effects due to the drugs, but also because of the continued negative effects of a poor diet, on which we loose focus as attention is turned toward the drugs. As Brittany Burgunder, a certified professional life coach and eating disorder specialist, has said in reference to eating disorders, “Drugs like this clearly do not treat the root cause of eating disorders, instead, it places a temporary bandage on internal woes until it no longer works, resulting in a recipe for relapse.” And, yes, GDP will go up thanks to more medicalization and continued consumption of excess food. As Dr. Arnold Relman, M.D. called it in the New England Journal of Medicine back in 1980, The Medical-Industrial Complex, prospers as health suffers.
The US has the most expensive healthcare system in the world, with the worst outcomes. Writing in 2023 about medicine’s Salve Lucrum in the Journal of the American Medical Association, Dr. Donald Berwick, M.D. writes, “Unchecked greed is not the only driver of that failure, but it is a major one.” Another problem is incompetence. “The problem is that physicians don’t know what they’re doing, and they’re overpaid to perform what they don’t know” David Eddy, M.D, Ph.D., Member of Institute Of Medicine. One in four patients who have been hospitalized will be harmed at the hospital. Women who have had both ovaries surgically removed for a benign condition such as endometriosis have an increased risk of developing Parkinson’s disease or parkinsonism. Physicians make money, patient develops tremor. Then other physicians have the money-making opportunity to treat the surgical-Parkinson’s. Medics like Ashok Jain in Houston, TX, who has a 5 year undergraduate medical degree from India, which has highly corrupt medical schools, will unnecessarily create magnetic fields in your brain for money. Mona Gosh, another medic trained in India with one of those 5 year undergraduate degrees and (mal)practicing in Illinois, will unnecessarily remove part of your uterus for profit. The US medical system allows these people to slap the term “M.D.” behind their names once they’ve passed their medical board tests, even though they didn’t earn an M.D. degree. This also allows them to be called “doctor” even though they are just physicians without a doctorate. Parade them around in a white coat, and their newly found authority figure status can sell the gullible just about anything, including an unneeded procedure. When they ask you, “Where does it hurt,” be very careful how you reply. In our system, so called opinion leaders, such as the physician David Agus, M.D., a prominent medical school professor, will write, or put his name on (called ghostwritten) books that highly plagarize other people’s work. All of his books contain plagarism, and apparently all were written by another person. This medic just sticks his name and a big smiley photo on the book cover and pretends he had something to do with what’s inside the book. Another physician, Howard Maibach, M.D., has attached his name to over 3,000 research publications, some of which were unethical. Unprofessional behavior, a form of sophistry, such as this is a predictor of poor performance in the physician’s practice. And ghostwriting is a huge problem in the medical field. Ghostwriting, to be clear, is: “Some of the authors who appear prominently on the articles have neither worked on them nor are they often aware of the details of the study.” Further, 55% of all meta-analysis publications in the medical field had conclusions altered by publications with falsified data, and 41% of all the analyses had a considerable change in the outcome of the treatment. Former BMJ editor, Richard Smith says the “prevalence of fraudulent studies has reached a point where one can now assume health research is fraudulent until proven otherwise.” Do you really want to take drugs that are sold by physicians that were approved by drug company-paid physicians based on fraudulent data? Physicians, such as Steven Haffner, M.D., at Baylor College of Medicine in Texas who have put their names on papers written by pharma companies, continue to practice. “Universities kick students out for putting their names on papers they didn’t write. But, doctors [sic] are often financially rewarded for it.” The Lancet’s chief editor Richard Horton lamented that “journals have devolved into information laundering operations for the pharmaceutical industry.” And “physician whores,” as they’re called in the pharma industry, do the laundering. When I consulted to the drug industry, I heard this term repeatedly. Altruistic physicians use the term too. Again, ghostwriting and like behavior among physicians is a predictor of the poor treatment you will receive from the medical industry. Bad behavior by physicians, includes psychiatrists. Mark Schiller, M.D., president of the American Association of Physicians and Surgeons, admitted: “I have frequently seen psychiatrists diagnose patients with a range of psychiatric diagnoses that aren’t justified, to obtain [insurance] reimbursements.” This often means prescribing drugs that only do harm. Physician whore means corruption other than ghostwriting too. Sadly, many physicians are on the take from pharma companies. Drug companies make a big return on their investments with physicians. More than $2 billion a year was paid by pharma companies to physicians, “fueling an increase in prescriptions, according to a new report published in the Annals of Internal Medicine.” All of this is so that the physicians sell more drugs, both legal and illegal. While pharma spent $20 billion advertising directly to their sales people, physicians, pharma companies also spent $6 billion on TV drug ads in 2016 to the physician’s consumers. Corruption, high paid salespeople in white coats, and gobs of advertising in our capitalistic healthcare system leads to the most expensive in the world, and the worst outcomes and declining life expectancy. It’s the food, stupid. Along with all those ads on TV for drugs, are the ads for fast food. Ads for foods that are brown from deep frying with nothing green on the plate are the norm. One group of ads promotes the food to make you sick, then the other group of ads promote pills to treat the symptoms, which often cause additional disease, such as Lupus. In the US, 42% of adults are obese. “The average American diet consists of excess salt, saturated fat, refined grains, calories from solid fats and added sugars.” Only 6.8% of adults have optimal cardiometabolic health, meaning 93.2% of US citizens are unhealthy. If you think these data reflect poor health conditions among the poor, and that wealthy US citizens are doing just fine- think again. Wealthy US citizens have poor health compared to the wealthy in other countries. Across lifespan, and across every demographic group, US citizens die at younger ages than their counterparts in other wealthy nations. Instead of relying on drug companies and their physician salespeople who are peddling too many pills, read the book by Dr. Colin Campbell, Ph.D., “Whole,” to learn how to bring about health and reduce your chances of cancer, diabetes, heart disease, stroke, dementia and many other ailments. The Medical Industrial Complex won’t promote the books by Dr. Campbell, because it greatly reduces their customer base – sick people who have been erroneously taught their health is beyond their own control and that they must rely on physicians and the drugs that they peddle to regain their health.
As Robert Whitaker writes: “In my book Anatomy of an Epidemic, I investigated this storytelling process [the psychiatric narrative on the value of drugs]. In the first sections of the book, I reported on a number of studies funded by the National Institute of Mental Health, the World Health Organization, and other governmental agencies that told of unmedicated psychiatric patients doing better over the long-term than those who stayed on the drugs. In the latter part of the book, I investigated whether these studies were ever written about in psychiatric texts. Here’s what I found: None of the studies was discussed at any length, and in the few instances when one of the studies was mentioned in a textbook, the authors spun the results to protect the image of the drugs.” Some of the psychiatric patients develop serotonin syndrome, a “potentially life-threatening” disease. Instead, the narrative should be about diet and exercise for psychological problems, not the deadly drugs brought to the market by a fraudulent medical scheme. If you think the better answer is the latest and greatest new drug, think again. “New prescription drugs have a 1 in 5 chance of causing serious reactions after they have been approved. That is why expert physicians recommend not taking new drugs for at least five years [after initial marketing of the drug] unless patients have first tried better-established options, and have the need to do so.” And as we hasten the approval of drugs, the drugs become less effective and less safe. Accelerated approval of drugs has been brought about by intense lobbying of the pharma industry, and now we have drugs on the market with no evidence that they work. As Dr. Steven-Huy Han, M.D., a UCLA liver specialist, has said about these drugs, “I have no idea if the drug will make them better.” But it is good for the medical and drug business, where FDA-regulated products account for about a fifth of every dollar spent by U.S. consumers. In our current business model of medicine and drugs, Janet Woodcook, M.D., then (2016) director of the FDA’s Center for Drug Evaluation and Research, would approve a drug because if she didn’t, the company making the drug, “would see its stock price crash and probably go out of business.” In other words, the FDA was acting to promote a drug company and its drug, not doing its job to protect US citizens from ineffective and dangerous drugs. Physicians sell more than 4 billion prescription drugs per year in the US. Many of these drugs don’t work, and when they do, often it’s because of the placebo effect. For example, published in the British Medical Journal (BMJ), “less than five per cent of patients receiving long-term treatment with statins are likely to obtain any benefit whatsoever.” Cheap “sugar pills” sold by someone in white jacket would often yield better results without the adverse side-effects. What works better than drugs to lower cholesterol and prevent heart disease? A plant forward diet.
In our capitalist healthcare system, billionaires, such as Mark Cuban, create companies with hype, stating that they’ll lower the cost of prescription drugs. In reality, in many cases, the price quotes that patients see on the Cuban’s website are higher than they’d get at their local pharmacy, and the only drugs they sell are the cheaper generic drugs. And many of the drugs in the US have been manufactured overseas, particularly India and China, where quality control is lacking. Many pharmaceutical companies, such as Eli Lilly, GlaxoSmithKline, Merck, and Pfizer, often use contract manufacturers. This means the company distributing the medication is not the one that manufactured it. Drug companies purposely make it difficult to know where their drugs are made, but it is possible to find out. Although I don’t use any drugs (none, no aspirin, no Ibuprofen, no acetaminophen, nothing), I always encourage family and friends to check the country of origin for the drugs they consume. BTW, acetaminophen toxicity is the second most common cause of liver transplantation worldwide and the most common cause of liver transplantation in the US. If the country of origin for your drug is India, I suggest they look for an alternative drug. If you’re using eye drops, for example, you may want to know where the product was manufactured. Vision loss from eye drops manufactured in India is yet another example of profits over health. People are dying, others are having their eyes surgically removed because of these eye drops. While the eye drops made in India may blind you, the cough syrup from India may kill you. With a lack of proper manufacturing processes and regulatory oversight, India can manufacture drugs cheaply and enable higher profits for US drug companies. Part of the Reagan Revolution, the medical industrial complex uses the trickle down business model where manufacturing is done overseas using child labor, cheap wages, and deregulation to keep costs low and profits high. In this business model no one wins other than the wealthy. The US middle class is gutted, and poor people overseas are exploited, and those taking these drugs are often diseased from the drug itself. , termed an iatrogenic disorder in the medical business. In one example of iatrogenic disease, “about 7% of people with parkinsonism have developed their symptoms following treatment with particular medications. This form of Parkinsonism is called ‘drug-induced Parkinsonism’.” And if you land in the hospital after being harmed by a prescription drug, watch out for the rapidly spreading Candida auris, a drug resistant fungus spreading in hospitals that may be killing between 30-60% of those infected. My point here is not to scare you, rather to bring about a realization that lifestyle factors, including diet and exercise, can prevent these deadly scenarios involving drugs, physicians, and hospitals. Prevention is key, and diseases such as colorectal cancer, the incidence of which is rising quickly in the US among young people, and is obviously due to lifestyle factors, such as binge drinking and the consumption of sugary drinks and processed foods, can likely be brought under control by diet.
And now, thanks to the privatization of Medicare, insurance companies are using artificial intelligence to deny healthcare to their customers. Medicare Advantage plans, which are neither Medicare nor an advantage, are another means by which industry uses tax dollars to rip-off people. The privatization of Medicare through the Advantage plans is driving up the cost of Medicare, a winner for big corporations and a loser for tax payers. Corporations selling you Medicare Advantage programs are using artificial intelligence (AI) to determine whether to fund drugs and procedures. And guess what, the bean counters (aka Libertarians) who wrote the algorithms for the AI programs biased them to cut care for seniors. After the corporate AI rejects the insurance claim, a physician working for the corporation signs the reject document without ever having analyzed the patient or their medical data. Just as Medicare Advantage is neither Medicare nor an advantage, in this case, AI is neither Artificial nor intelligent. Rather, it is real and it is stupidly robbing people of healthcare that they paid for in their social security taxes. Further, thanks to corporatized search algorithms, if you Google the term Medicare Advantage, about 90% of what you see extolls the virtues of enrolling in an Advantage plan. And, private equity is moving into to healthcare to profit by hurting your health. Noble Health, a private equity group in Utah, was also among the 2022 winners of the Shkreli Awards. It bought two rural hospitals in Missouri, leading to shortages of drugs and supplies, and stopped paying employees’ health insurance despite deducting money for that purpose from their pay. Dentistry is no different. One drill-and-filler was purposely breaking his patient’s teeth so that he could then fix them for profit. Another has been accused of child abuse for performing seven root canals on a 3 year old who didn’t require the procedures. Has your dentist ever told you about using toothpaste with hydroxyapatite to prevent cavities and re-mineralize the enamel of your teeth? Probably not, because prevention of dental caries does not fit the privatized dental business model and means no more drill-and-fill for profit. Like physicians, the more procedures done by a dentist, means a higher price will be paid for their practice when they sell their practices to private equity firms. This is big business. As the Journal of Insurance Fraud in America has said, “Medicaid fraud is the most lucrative business model in U.S. dentistry today.” However, if you find the right dentist, such as Dr. Peter Rechmann, DMD, Ph.D, at UCSF, health can be restored such as in this case: “Rechmann forewent an easily billable procedure [crowns] and instead, advised his patient to use a high-concentration fluoride toothpaste, anti-bacterial rinse, and xylitol chewing gum. When she returned a few months later, her teeth enamel had remineralized so much that she was no longer a candidate for crowns.”
Did you know that eating soy and walnuts that contain D-serine, can prevent aging of the hypothalamus and help maintain our cognitive abilities? It’s important to point out that there is much misinformation about soy and the estrogen-like compounds found in soy. These compounds are called isoflavones and even though they are structurally similar to estrogen, they don’t have the negative effects associated with estrogen replacement treatment. Soy isoflavones bind to different receptors (ER-Beta) than estrogen and reduces the risk of breast and other types of cancer. Soy is safe and does not cause cancer, but actually prevents it, and doesn’t cause early onset of puberty in girls, it doesn’t cause fibroids or thyroid disease and it does not affect male hormones. Soy and soy products such as Tofu are excellent sources of protein, fiber and many other healthful nutrients. But, as Dr. Eric Reinhart, M.D., Ph.D. says, “The American medical profession has been part of a cartel, more or less. It’s been a trade union that has sought to protect its own economic interest, very often at the cost of patient well-being.” Healthy diets are a loser for physician income, but drugs make money. As I’ve written in The Medicalization of America, the AMA is largely responsible for our greedy and dangerous healthcare system. Dr. Reinhart goes on to say, “From the 1930s onwards, doctors [physicians] have been part of political organizing to prevent what was regarded a little bit later as socialized medicine — the idea that medical care might become a matter of rights rather than something governed by a revenue interest. The AMA [American Medical Association] was largely formed to do this, to advocate for doctor’s [physician’s] interests, their financial interests, and also their desire for autonomy to not have any kind of interference from government.” When the US government brought about Medicare and Medicaid, the AMA helped to setup the programs realizing that government funding, the people’s tax dollars, could be used to fund their privatized medical treatment system. This meant more income for procedures and drugs that more frequently than not, don’t work. Their mantra was and is, “let practicing physicians decide what works for their patients.” Who cares if most medical procedures don’t work, so long as I make money. In other words, good food is for health so we’re mum on that and actually promulgate bad information on diet, such as the keto diet, medical treatment is about money.
Thinking about nature and all of the miraculous molecules that plants provide us, I’m often asked, if natural ingredients work so well, why aren’t drug companies using natural ingredients to develop their therapeutics? The simple answer: natural ingredients cannot be patented. Here’s why this matters to drug companies, and to physicians. Only ingredients that are man made, not natural, can be patented. Once a patent is attained for a novel ingredient, then that ingredient can be sold by only the patent holder for about the next 20 years. Drug development is hugely expensive, so no company will develop a drug unless a big return on investment can be realized with great certainty, and the patent affords that high level of certainty. If a drug company were to develop a natural ingredient as a drug, no significant patents could be attained, and other companies could quickly copy the success of the original drug developer, leading to little or no return on the big investment to bring that product through the drug development process. As for physicians, their business model is to sell prescription drugs – that is, drugs that can only be attained if a physician prescribes it. Physicians therefore are the salespeople for the drug company’s patented drugs. If physicians were to emphasize prevention, and the use of natural ingredients, then the current business model for medics would cause them to lose income because natural ingredients can be easily purchased and at low cost. Both groups, physicians and drug companies, make much money using this business model of treatment with prescription drugs. Only they can sell these products. And sell drugs, they do. In copious quantities. In a description of one physician arrested and sentenced for overprescribing opioids, the DOJ said, the physician “practiced as a drug dealer, not a doctor.” In Florida, physicians can overprescribe opioids, make lots of money, be caught overprescribing, then use the money they made overprescribing to pay a small fine, and continue to practice. Another physician in Miami Beach, who attained a truncated medical degree in Mexico, will give you cocaine and then rape you. As my mother says, “they have a license to steal.” The business model of physicians and drug companies is therefore treatment, and nowhere is the incentive for prevention. Even vaccines, which can sometimes prevent disease or the severity of a disease, are money-making treatments. As I’ve published in peer-reviewed PubMed listed scientific journals, some of the vaccines don’t work well and are repeatedly given at yearly intervals as a means to maintain revenue, but could be better made to better prevent the disease. And some poorly made vaccines continue to cause disease, such as polio. One of the latest Covid-19 vaccines, the so-called bivalent booster, begins to loose its efficacy for preventing bad outcomes (it doesn’t prevent transmission) in about 2 months following dosing. Transient vaccines are big money-makers. Although “vaccines are holding up against admission to hospital and mortality,” says Dr. Linda Bauld, Ph.D., professor of public health at the University of Edinburgh, “but not so much against transmission,” I have to ask, what is the point of a Covid-19 vaccine mandate? If the vaccine is not preventing or significantly reducing transmission, allow people to choose whether to vaccinate or not. But mandates make money for corporations and physicians (they have many schemes, many, many thanks to privatization of healthcare, and you’re paying billions of dollars for physicians and their conspirators to do little or nothing to improve health). On the other hand, a vaccine that is safe (I’ve discussed the safety issues of mRNA vaccines) and works well, keeping people out of the clinic, and that doesn’t have to be dosed on a yearly basis, is a money loser for physicians and drug companies alike. In contradistinction to many of our current vaccines, a mask mandate does make sense because masks reduce the probability of transmission, and if infected, reduce the viral load and may therefore reduce the severity of the symptoms. Masks are also easy to use, inexpensive, and have no adverse side effects. But they don’t make money for drug companies or physicians, and therefore were not recommended by Fauci early-on in the pandemic. I detail in my book, The Medicalization of America, how Fauci’s public health policies allowed the virus to spread and how his mentality is vaccine-focused. Part of Fauci’s vaccine-focus was to fund gain-of-function experiments in coronaviruses, performed in China and with one goal to better develop coronavirus vaccines, something that may have led to the Covid-19 pandemic. We still don’t know with certainty whether the pandemic started through a lab leak or a natural (if we define natural as animals held in captivity in close quarters where they continuously share their urine, feces, and sputum) spillover from animals because health care officials in the US and China have covered-up relevant data, including Fauci and Collins at the NIH. If Covid-19 was lab created, then this one heck of a medical business model- have tax payers fund the very studies that created the disease (thank you Fauci), and then have tax payers pay for development of poor vaccines that don’t stop the spread of the disease so that the money keeps rolling into the drug companies, the NIH, and to Fauci himself. Privatization of healthcare sure is great. Under Francis Collins, even the NIH would become privatized, with drug and soda companies funding disastrous “NIH” studies, as well as funding other national health organizations. As part of the Reagan Revolution, with the NIH funded by corporations and about half of the FDA budget funded by companies (funding 75% of its drug division), physicians on the review panels of the FDA paid by drug companies, little wonder is required to understand why we live in the treatment paradigm of healthcare in the US. Regardless, given a more than $32 billion public money investment in these mRNA vaccines for Covid-19, and while the CEO of Moderna, who manufactured one of the mRNA vaccines, made (I won’t say earned) $398 million in 2022, the public should demand better vaccines and reduced compensation for those who made these sub-par vaccines. But with the world’s largest lobby controlling the narrative, few know how inadequate is our current business model of medicine and healthcare.
If you want to drastically limit your chances of having heart disease, diabetes, dementia, autoimmune disease, osteoporosis, cancer, and so many more illnesses, you need to take control of your diet. The healthcare system won’t do it for you. It’s up to you. Not eating well, for example, can lead to the use of laxatives and the consequences of an increased risk of dementia. If you’ve heard these health conditions are hereditary, sometimes confused with genetics (genetics is only one factor in heredity), you’ve been led astray. For example, transgenerational epigenetic inheritance, something that doesn’t involve changes in the DNA sequence, has profound effects on heredity. Rather, chemical changes to the same DNA sequence can turn on or off DNA expression, and those chemical changes can sometimes be passed on to one’s progeny. This means some of the unhealthy behaviors in which you indulge, such as eating processed foods, may be passed on to your children, biasing the child to act unhealthy. Epigenetic changes, such as DNA methylation, can have major consequences to health. DNA methylation is an important marker of aging and health status, and is profoundly affected by our exposome and social conditions. In other words, genetics doesn’t matter much for most diseases, but what you are exposed to in life matters to your health, and likely to your children’s health. This is true for diseases such as amyotrophic lateral sclerosis (ALS). As I’ve written in a peer-reviewed, PubMed listed study, ALS is largely a disease due to toxic exposure, not genetics. Yet our focus is on drugs to treat the disease, instead of regulations to prevent toxic exposure and subsequent disease causation. I’ve also published studies laying out additional means, a new approach to therapeutic development using systems therapeutics, to better prevent and treat neurodegenerative diseases such as ALS using non-toxic supplements. Because my therapeutic methods utilize natural ingredients, my patent portfolio is relatively weak, and therefore investors and partners avoid such methods in preference to money-making, patented, toxic drugs that can be sold by physicians.
The absurdity of the genetics fashionistas has led to every gene that has been sequenced to be categorized as linked to cancer. Yes, absurdly, every gene in the body has been claimed to be linked to cancer. This genomics fashionistism was brought forth by a physician, Francis Collins, the former head of the National Institutes of Health, who believed all diseases could be understood by knowing a person’s full genetic sequence. A religious man, genetics was one of his religions. Collins was so devoted to his preconceived notion of genetics as the cause of all disease that he was caught authoring five fraudulent scientific papers on genetics. Disseminating misinformation on behalf of his inane genomics revolution included fraudulent studies. Blaming the problem on a junior worker in his lab, Mr. Collins obviously had little to do with the papers if indeed the blame was with his junior partner. If we are to believe the blame lies elsewhere, did Collins even read the papers to which his name is attached? Someone else read the papers, and found the fraud. All one had to do was read the papers. Apparently, Collins had not. Yet, this man, Collins, who appears not to even read the genomics papers to which he attaches his name, ushered in the ridiculous notion that all disease can be understood be genomic sequences, a huge and expensive failure. His was profoundly superficial thought. Even Type 1 Diabetes, often said to be a genetic disease, is on the rise and is thought to be caused by a number of factors, including environmental risks. Our genetics haven’t changed much over time, but our environment, including diet, has. Healthcare, and specifically genomics is a big business, and many people will do almost anything for money and deliver bad healthcare. The global genomics market was about $23 billion in 2020. If physicians can convince you that all diseases are genetic, then that means there’s nothing you can do about your disease, other than go to see the physician for overprescribed drugs and overprescribed procedures, including surgery. Physician hubris and greed is nothing new. George Bernard Shaw, besides bringing us Pygmalion and My Fair Lady, described some of the problems in a play he wrote in 1906 called The Doctor’s Dilemma. The genius of Shaw was made into a movie in the 1950s and an updated version is sorely (literally) needed.
And most of the drugs don’t work, as is the case for medical procedures too. Here’s the latest discovery of unneeded medical procedures: surgery or radiotherapy for prostate cancer when doing nothing yields an equivalent life expectancy. Doing unneeded medical procedures for profit not only does no good for the patient, but causes harm, including increasing the patient’s risk of developing cancer. The healthcare lobby, composed of physicians and physician groups, drug companies, health insurance companies, and hospital/clinic organizations is the largest lobby in the world. Larger than the defense lobby. Physicians are a big part of this lobbying effort. They’re all in together to drive home the false narrative that there is little you can do to better your health other than to take prescription drugs and have procedures. “Rampant surgical overuse” is part of their greed. This is nothing new. In the 1950s, Paul Hawley, M.D., the Director of the American College of Surgeons, stated that “the public would be shocked if it knew the amount of unnecessary surgery performed.” Similarly, radiation treatment, something that increases your chances of cancer, is overused and keeps radiation oncologists as one of the highest paid physician categories at $544,000 annually. Unnecessary medical care, sometimes violent, in the US has been described as an epidemic by a prominent physician. Violence can be insidious, such as “A healthy adult is sent for a ‘regular medical check-up’, considered a business venture in medical circles, and walks out a depressed, harried patient.” On the other hand, Dr. Death, a surgeon in Texas, was infamous and his story was made into a miniseries. But most cases go unreported, as do most medical errors – about 90 percent of all hospital mistakes go unreported, and medical errors are the third leading cause of death in the US. Sadly, when medical errors occur, the medical institution and their physicians entrench into a defensive mode, such as happened to a young woman when part of her lung was mistakenly removed at the Cleveland Clinic. Cover-ups such as this perpetuate the problems and tend to prevent corrective actions.
However, violent behavior by physicians in their practice does sometimes lead to a revocation of their license to practice by the state medical board, such as happened to John Sanderson, a physician who trained in Canada, receiving a Bachelor’s Degree in Medicine (a five year undergraduate degree, MBBS, not an MD) and then practiced in California. Having lost his license for sexual misconduct and incompetence, he would then go on to start a cosmetic company named AnteAge, a company using technology (bone marrow mesenchymal stem cell cytokines) that is potentially harmful, including oncogenic, i.e. cancer causing, to consumers. Scientific studies have repeatedly found that the technology AnteAge uses promotes tumor growth. Sanderson’s scientific advisor, Jonathan Lakey, another Canadian, would leave his country in disgrace after he was fired from his university in Canada for fraud, as well as at a Canadian non-profit, and would later be charged with conspiracy and racketeering in a company where he was the director. They would recruit other physicians to use these harmful ingredients and procedures, using their authority figure stature to potentially harm unwitting clients. I’ve reviewed in the peer-reviewed journal, Journal of the Royal Society of Medicine, why bone marrow mesenchymal stem cells can be dangerous, inducing cancer in recipients of bone marrow transplants, and why physicians must be careful in using these cells or the molecules they produce in therapeutic and consumer products.
The use of medical products and personal care products with harmful chemicals is widespread in the US, and is especially problematic in children who are highly vulnerable to these chemicals in their developmental stage of life. Why does this happen? Short answer, money: “A panel appointed by the national Cancer Advisory Board, USA, has found that highly reputed scientists could deviate from accepted standards of integrity when tempted to bolster their theorems and prejudices with huge sums of the public’s money, and an American scientist has advised other scientists: ‘Stay out of cancer research because it’s full of money and just about out of science.'” And when other countries, such as the UK, emulate the privatized healthcare system of the US, what happens? As a cardiologist in the UK has said, physicians who “treat patients privately [the private healthcare system, not the socialized medicine system in the UK] are like the ‘greedy preying on the needy.'” A commonly used chemical, trichloroethylene, may cause Parkinson’s Disease and has been found in many consumer products (used to decaffeinate coffee, degrease metal, and dry clean clothes) and, more to the point, medical products, including in the past (banned in 1977) as an anesthetic. Endocrine disrupting chemicals (EDC) are commonly found in medical devices and equipment, along with the prescribed drugs. As stated by endocrinologists, “Providing ethically competent care requires an open acknowledgment of endocrine risks imposed by the medical community that have heretofore been ignored.” The pathogenesis of various reproductive, neuropsychiatric, and metabolic disorders are linked to EDCs, and exposures occurring during sensitive developmental period early in life are now thought to confer long-term disease risk.
But most diseases are a result of our exposome, not genetics. This means diseases are under the control of what you do, all of that to which you are exposed, including all the various factors in your diet. Want sarcopenia? Then eat lots of protein, “Load up on eggs, tofu, Greek yoghurt, fish and lean meat,” just as your physician recommended. Scientists have found that eating higher amounts of protein are associated with sarcopenia, muscle degeneration. One physician has said, “Most cancers are, essentially, bad luck.” Never mind how diet is critical to cancer development, or that the gas stove you use to cook is emitting cancer-causing chemicals such as benzene, something the hydrocarbon industry doesn’t want you to know about. Don’t worry, be happy. And when what you do in life causes your cancer, you’ll have a chance for physicians to irradiate you to kill the cancer cells, but to also induce more cancer due to the radiation treatment. All of these X-ray procedures that physicians and dentists do for added income may also induce heart disease. Heart disease can also be caused by breathing high levels of oxygen during medical procedures, including hyperbaric oxygen, leading to protein damage that decreases mitochondrial function, and results in pulmonary dysfunction. This means the use of antioxidants, which can mitigate reactive oxygen species to some degree, is unlikely to be sufficient to prevent oxygen toxicity. As an example, this knucklehead physician will even use protein- and mitochondrial-destroying hyperbaric oxygen as an antiaging treatment. He’s an emergency room physician who is crating emergencies. Great for his business: first he creates the disease with his hyperbaric treatment, and then he later treats it at the ER.
Want obesity and heart disease? Then eat the Atkins diet with lots of meat, butter, and processed oils that a medic made famous. Reduced exercise and a high-calorie diet lead to an increase in the fat mass and obesity-associated (FTO) protein, which has numerous deleterious consequences, including an increased chance of vision loss. When a physician recommends a calorie-dense, high fat diet, expect poor health, and possible death due to cardiac arrest as happened to one of the most famous medics promoting this nonsense, Robert Atkins. Newer fad diets from physicians that build on the stupidity of the Atkins diet include the South Beach Diet and the Keto Diet, which may, among other problems, induce dysbiosis, cancer, and poor cardiovascular health. Instead, educate and inspire yourself by reading The Blue Zones Kitchen and take part in a way of life that the longest lived, most healthy people on the planet practice. This will keep you out of the hospital or clinic, where you have a significant probability of becoming ill from diseases such as Covid-19 and Legionella.
As I wrote in my book, Thinking and Eating for Two, many people in the modern world are overfed, but undernourished, leading to much disease. With many people relying on their physicians for medical advice, disturbingly most US medical schools (86/121, 71%) fail to provide the recommended minimum 25 hours of nutrition education to medical students. Given that most diseases are result of our exposome, and the most critical aspect of our exposome is diet, physicians profoundly lack any understanding of the root cause of most diseases. It’s even worse than this. At the Texas A&M University, poor studies paid for by the meat industry and published in scientific journals without disclosure of the funding, sell beef under the disguise of science. The money paid to scientists and physicians to publish advocacy studies is laundered through industry-funded non-profits, such as the International Life Sciences Institute. Fortunately, a number of scientists and physicians have educated themselves about nutrition and are not beholden to the corporate food industry.
My early foray into nutrition began in high school as QB of my football team, and a tall, skinny kid with mild asthma. I wanted to improve my game through better health, and found Adele Davis’ book, Let’s Get Well, in our local health food store. She was a graduate of UC Berkeley’s nutrition program, the first in the US, had a master’s in biochemistry from USC in Los Angeles, and was an advocate for improved health through better nutrition. She wrote an early nutrition textbook in 1942, followed by four best-selling books for consumers which praised the value of natural foods and criticized the diet of the average American. Based on the evidence of the time, she believed that most Americans inflicted harm on themselves with their typical diets, which was excessively high in salt, refined sugars, pesticides, growth hormones, preservatives and other additives, and thereby “devitalized” of its essential nutrients by the excessive processing. Another UC Berkeley trained scientist, a giant in the field of nutrition, Dr. Ancel Keys, Ph.D., influenced me with his 1960s book, The Benevolent Bean, researched and written with his wife, Margaret, who was a chemist. Ancel died at 100 years old, and Margaret at 97 – they practiced what they preached! Yes, despite the blithering nonsense of a surgeon, Steven Gundry, who claims beans are bad for health in a poorly researched and written book, other scientists and physicians who have educated themselves on nutrition, and now educate others through the popular media include, Dr. T. Colin Campbell, Ph.D. of Cornell University; Dr. Joel Fuhrman, M.D.; Dr. John McDougall, M.D.; and Dr. Michael Greger, M.D.
Further to diet, exposure to a mixture of synthetic chemicals found widely in the environment alters and upsets many critical biological processes, including the metabolism of fats and amino acids. The disruption of these biological processes is connected to an increased risk of many diseases, including developmental disorders, cardiovascular disease, metabolic disease and many types of cancer. Two massive train derailments in Ohio in one month, spewing toxic chemicals throughout the region will likely be causative or partially causative for many people’s afflictions. Thanks to the deregulation mentality of the US, “Cuts in manpower and inspections, combined with reductions in regulations via waivers and changes have resulted in the deterioration of rail safety in the industry.” Deregulated states such as Florida and Texas are becoming havens for industrial polluters. Examining water quality across the U.S. shows Florida ranking first for the highest total acres of lakes too polluted for swimming or healthy aquatic life. That means water can have high levels of fecal matter and other bacteria that can sicken people. As for Texas, a new report by Environment America, a Denver-based nonprofit, Texas ranks first among U.S. states for toxic discharges into streams, rivers and lakes, a title held by Indiana since the organization began analyzing nationwide water pollution in 2009. “Texas has a pretty lax regulatory environment where it’s very easy to permit new polluting facilities and very difficult to get fined for violations,” said Luke Metzger, director of Environment Texas, the local affiliate of Environment America. “They know they’ll likely get away with it.” Again, rising rates of disease are not due to changes in our genetics, which hasn’t changed much in modern times, but is due to our exposome, something that includes all of the pollutants to which we are exposed, and some of which is growing exponentially. In Texas, laws may be passed to thwart the adoption of electric vehicles, continuing the pollution of our air by petroleum fueled vehicles. Among the many other diseases linked to tailpipe emissions, now eczema, also called atopic dermatitis, has been linked to isocyanates from gasoline engines. Isocyanates have been found in the lesions of those with eczema. Rates of eczema are growing steadily from year to year.
Artificial sweeteners are another exposome problem. For example, increased chances of heart attack can follow the consumption of erythritol given that platelet reactivity and thrombosis is enhanced by this chemical. If you’re addicted to meat, which is bad for the heart, eat mycoprotein (fungi stems of the mushrooms you’re accustomed to) instead. Mycoprotein is meaty, and has sufficient protein and much fiber to help keep one healthy, helping to create a healthy microbiome and increase short chain fatty acids (important for immune regulation and reducing inflammation). Fermentation of mycoprotein by bacteria in the human gut yields lower concentrations of ammonia, and the many negative effects it produces. Studies have found cardiometabolic benefits when replacing meat with mycoprotein that is partly attributable to its fiber composition. Companies such as Better Meat Co. in Sacramento, CA, are developing meaty products based on mycoprotein. For myself, grilling or roasting oyster (or similar) mushrooms, there are many varieties and many producers in CA, yields a tasty, meaty dish. Eating a whole food plant-based diet that include fruits and vegetables and mycoprotein will help to prevent and remediate many diseases.
You are not a victim of the hereditary factors with which you were born. A simple example is how eating added sodium induces inflammation throughout the body by modifying the immune system such that immune cells (T-cells) no longer properly regulate themselves. In such states of the immune system, autoimmunity results. Autoimmunity, such as eosinophilic esophagitis, can be effectively treated simply by eliminating dairy. For myself, following a whole food plant-based diet with little or no added sodium, sugar, or processed foods, I haven’t taken a drug in over 5 years. No aspirin, no ibuprofen, nothing. I’m over 60 years old and have never felt better. You can too. Eat well, predominantly plants, exercise (walking an hour a day does wonders), and stay socially and mentally active. Healthspan and lifespan will benefit greatly. Let’s bring new meaning to a saying, which I’ll call here, “Wholier than thou.” Eat whole foods, not processed plants and not animal products, and lead a whole and healthy life.
Stem Cells, Health, Technology 