CHAPTER 1

The ModernHealth-Care Myth

He who cures a disease may be the skillfullest, buthe that prevents it is the safest physician.—THOMAS FULLER

What a great time to be alive! Modern medicine promises salvationfrom scourges that have plagued humanity since time began.Disease, infirmity, aging—all soon to be eradicated thanks toadvances in technology, genetics, pharmacology, and food science. Thecure for cancer is just around the corner. DNA splicing will replace our self-sabotagingor damaged genes with perfectly healthy ones. New wonderdrugs are discovered practically every week. And genetic modification offood, combined with advanced processing techniques, will soon be ableto turn a simple tomato, carrot, or cookie into a complete meal. Heck,maybe someday soon we won't have to eat at all—we can just swallow apill that contains every nutrient we need.

There's only one problem with that rosy picture—it's totally false.None of those lofty promises is anywhere close to being realized. We "racefor the cure" by pouring billions of dollars into dangerous and ineffectivetreatments. We seek new genes, as if the ones we've evolved over millionsof years are insufficient for our needs. We medicate ourselves with toxicconcoctions, a small number of which treat the disease, while the resttreat the harmful side effects of the primary drugs.

We talk about the health-care system in America, but that's a misnomer;what we really have is a disease-care system.

Fortunately, we have a far better, safer, and cheaper way of achievinggood health, one with only positive side effects. Furthermore, this approachprevents most of the diseases and conditions that afflict us before theyshow up, so we don't need to avail ourselves of the disease-care systemin the first place.

THE DISEASE-CARE SYSTEM

The United States spends more money per capita on "health" care thanany country on earth, yet when the quality of our health care is comparedwith other industrialized nations, we rank near the bottom.

As a country, we're quite sick. Despite our high rate of health expenditures,we're not any healthier. In fact, rates of many chronic diseases haveonly increased over time, and based on health biomarkers like obesity,diabetes, and hypertension, they may be headed for further increases.The prevalence of obese individuals increased from 13 percent of the U.S.population in 1962 to a staggering 34 percent in 2008. The U.S. Centersfor Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) report that the age-adjustedType 2 diabetes rate in the United States has more than doubled from 1980to 2010, from 2.5 percent to 6.9 percent of the population. Hypertension(high blood pressure) among American adults increased 30 percentbetween 1997 and 2009.

Drugs and surgical advances are keeping the death rates more or lessconstant despite the increased risk factors (except for diabetes, whosemortality rate has increased an astounding 29 percent in North Americafrom 2007 to 2010). But the data make it clear that none of our advancesin medicine deal with primary prevention, and none are making us fundamentallyhealthier. They aren't decreasing the death rate. And the pricewe're paying for these advances is steep.

For many years, the cost of medically prescribed drugs has beenincreasing at a rate faster than inflation. Think we're getting our money'sworth? Think again.

Side effects of those very same prescription drugs are the third leadingcause of death, behind heart disease and cancer. That's right! Prescriptiondrugs kill more people than traffic accidents. According to Dr. BarbaraStarfield, writing in the Journal of the American Medical Association in2000, "adverse effects of medications" (from drugs that were correctlyprescribed and taken) kill 106,000 people per year. And that doesn'tinclude accidental overdoses.

Add to that the 7,000 annual deaths from medication errors in hospitals,20,000 deaths from errors in hospitals not related to medications (likebotched surgeries and incorrectly programmed and monitored machines),80,000 deaths from hospital-caused infections, and 2,000 deaths per yearfrom unnecessary surgery, and the tire-screeching ambulance ride startsto look like the safest part of the whole hospital experience.

Yet when you ask the U.S. government about this, you're met withdeafening denial. Look at the CDC web page on the leading causes ofdeath shown in Figure 1-1.

Notice anything strange? Not a peep...