Posted by
Rajjpuut's Folly on Saturday, July 18, 2009 1:27:20 PM
The single most dangerous part of the health care system is the FDA. The single most effective sector is the Center for Disease Control in Atlanta.
Unlike the past when killers and cripplers like plague, typhus, typhoid, polio, small pox, anthrax were lurking everywhere . . . today’s health problems are a wave of life-style caused silent epidemics: heart disease, diabetes, stroke, cancer and, of course iatrogenic incidents.
Today malaria kills two million people every year: before liberals banned DDT, the most virulent acute diseases were just about wiped off the planet.
DDT can be safely used as salad dressing or breakfast juice: malaria has killed fifty million since Rachel Carson wrote “Silent Spring” and set off the usual liberal over-reaction but DDT is making a comeback by popular demand in Africa and other threatened areas.
Rajjpuut Does It Better:
A Workable Health Care
Alternative: Part XII
Rajjpuut’s loyal readers have noticed that the ol’ boy doesn’t pull any punches. If his thirteen part RANT series on the FDA hasn’t convinced you that the single most dangerous part of the health care system in America is the FDA, there’s probably no hope your IQ will ever rise above 50. While the FDA is a disaster which must be cut off at the knees, the single most effective and little-used sector and even ill-used sector of the health care system in this country is the Center for Disease Control (CDC) in Atlanta. Before we talk about the CDC and how they can help us lick our intense health care mess, let’s get a bit of understanding under our belts . . . .
Disease has traditionally been divided into two spheres since about the middle of the 20th Century: acute infectious disease and chronic disease. Acute infectious diseases like the famous historical killers (plague, typhus, typhoid, polio, small pox, anthrax, cholera) were lurking everywhere. They were often diseases that thrived with lack of sanitation, personal cleanliness, and insect and animal vectors (mosquitoes, lice, fleas, ticks, rats, mice) or some that loved human crowds (small pox and polio). With Jonas Salk’s polio vaccine in the middle 50’s it appeared that mankind had the acute diseases on the run. Smallpox and polio were wiped off or about to be wiped off the planet and the other diseases were only capable of tiny flare ups here and there. Sanitation, inoculation and elimination of insect vectors like the anopheles mosquito had made the world a much safer place.
Those were the conditions when a pseudo-scientific book called “Silent Spring” was written by Rachel Carson. The book claimed the world was in danger of a silent spring as all the birds were about to be wiped out (thinning eggshells she said caused by DDT, which she said fouled the food chain for virtually all animal life including causing cancer in humans). The liberal over-reaction and refusal to actually “do the science” got DDT banned virtually everywhere on the planet. Malaria which had caused 50,000 illnesses in one year has now reclaimed its top spot with two million deaths annually. Since her book, Rachel Carson can claim fifty million deaths to her credit outdoing Hitler and Stalin combined. However, DDT (which is so safe you can use it for a breakfast juice or salad dressing; and which has never been scientifically proven to damage any higher animal life) is making a comeback because it’s cheaper, much more effective and far less dangerous than anything used to replace it. So hopefully within a decade we might once again be able to say that acute disease is on the run. But here in the United States it is chronic disease and iatrogenic diseases and injuries rather than acute disease that cause all the problems.
Most people are familiar with chronic diseases: heart attack, stroke, diabetes, various cancers, tuberculosis, pneumonia, Alzheimer’s, influenza, and liver and kidney diseases. These killers and automobile and other accidents account for a huge percentage of the American death toll. If you add in “iatrogenic” incidents (where medicines and medical treatment cause death) you pretty much know all you need to know about what kills Americans. In Africa the malaria mosquitoes do them in. In America we do ourselves in by our lifestyles causing chronic killing diseases or by auto wrecks or by poor medical practices. In short the biggest trouble in America is the “silent epidemic” of chronic disease that we face. Diseases caused by how we live our lives. In many cases Americans dig their graves with their teeth (or with cigarettes or alcohol or drugs).
When it comes to iatrogenic diseases the AMA, the hospitals, and individual doctors and nurses do play an important and deadly role . . . but the big killer is the FDA. You are ten times more likely to go to the hospital from a negative reaction to a prescribed medicine than you are from an automobile accident. You are also four times more likely to die in the hospital than from an auto accident. The roll call of dangerous drugs that the FDA has foisted off on the American people goes on and on. We now put 30 times more children on Ritalin then we did fourteen years ago. Ritalin has been proved in England to be totally ineffective both in the short and long-term and to have a string of vicious side-effects no one should wish upon their worst enemy. Drugs like Avandia, Celebrex, Vioxx, all the Proton Pump Inhibitors, and Statins are virtually loaded guns. To top it off, none of these drugs actually cures anything. Exit the FDA, quickly please! And enter the CDC.
The CDC is easily the most effective arm within the nation’s health care mess. By the way “mess” is a technical management term. Everyone knows what a problem is . . . sometimes a situation has three or four or more multiple easily recognized problems. When you have a whole slew of intertwined problems all impacting each other and the whole situation – that is a mess! The United States has a health care mess on its hands. Too many get sick, stay sick for a long, long time (that’s what chronic diseases or chronic situations do) and cost the system and themselves a whole helluva lot of time, trouble and an enormous amount of money. Just as the elimination of the FDA would help enormously, the CDC is the single most little used and even ill-used part of our health care system. In league with the National Health Facilitators, or NHFs, that in earlier blogs Rajjpuut suggested be created to help deal with our health care mess: the CDC holds a great potential to solve our most pressing health care concerns: chronic diseases and costs spiraling ever upward out of control.
“ How?” you ask. Simple pimple. Give the CDC Roughly twenty times its present public service announcing budget; earmark an additional $1 billion for the nation’s public broadcasting stations and set as a national goal the reduction of deaths from chronic life-style caused deaths to 33% of the present numbers by 2025. A worthy goal indeed. What will be the main messages for the public broadcast stations and the CDC over private TV channels?
A. Rajjpuut’s Seven Golden Rules of Health and the 35 extra-quality year connection**
B. Good sound nutrition based upon real science; for example, the egg and the potato are really healthy foods when science looks at them; dairy products are not of much use nutritionally for adults beyond say a couple slices of cheese a week for protein and a cup of yogurt daily (Born in Green Bay, Wisconsin, it pains Rajjpuut to say this but it is nutritionally sound advice); fried foods and highly processed foods are anathema to good health. Etc. DIETING is uniformly unhealthy practice unless it means six things: 1) in conjunction with a moderately challenging aerobic program 2) one only chooses healthy and mostly fresh foods and 3) slightly diminishes the portions being eaten 4) over 3-4 generally tiny meals after 5) a good large breakfast 6)certain “rabbit food” such as red cabbage, carrots, etc. be allowed at any time as a snack.
C. Recognition of emergency health conditions (excessive bleeding, shock, airway blockage, lack of pulse, poisoning, drowning, severe allergic reaction, etc.)
D. Exercise and stretching do’s and don’ts and constant encouragement to get started but start slow after seeing your doctor
E. Smoking cessation info
F. Info about abuse of prescription and non-prescription drug abuse and illegal drug abuse and the dangers associated with them and where to get quitting and help info
G. Numbers for contact with the CDC and local NHFs.
Basically then, the NHFs and the CDC and the public TV stations and PBS will be enlisted to carry out a crusade of reducing chronic deaths 67% in 15+ years. To be more specific: these people and instruments become tools for health education. The two most important chronic conditions to eliminate are diabetes and obesity (especially morbid obesity). We are on a crusade of disease prevention. If you’ve read Rajjpuut’s health care blogs so far, you know that entering at stage one: prevention is far less costly and far more effective than entering at stage four: disease treatment (which does NOT actually cure the underlying problem such as heart disease). Right now 92% of the doctoring is concerned with stage four that needs to change immediately and we need to intervene in people’s lives positively now to ward off, undo and prevent chronic illnesses.
Rajjpuut once saw a fellow on a Richard Simons show who had lost 792 pounds and still looked a good fifty pounds overweight, but obviously he was working on that. If we start now, enormous good can be done at enormous savings. More on diabetes and obesity in the next blog in this series.
Ya’all live long, strong and ornery,
Rajjpuut
** Add 35 QUALITY Years to Your Lifespan
Interested in adding 35 years of high quality living to your lifespan?
Here's how, and here's WOW!
If anything beside the spendthrifts in Washington, D.C., can derail the American Dream, it's the ever increasing cost of health care both to the nation at large and to the individual. Roughly 72% of the price of a new American automobile is tied up in employee salary and benefits, especially health care. In a very real sense, good health is a very personal matter . . . as the "Spider Man" movies remind us: "With great power comes great responsibility," and you, the individual, certainly wield immense power in the battle for your own health, fitness, longevity and in avoiding high health care costs.
While working as a health educator for Blue Cross and Blue Shield of Kansas in 1977, I read about a recently-completed long-range study of vigorous older people. The gist of it all came to this: the University of California (Berkeley campus, I believe) extracted seven lifestyle practices that these hardy senior citizens tended to share as a group. As for the study results, here's what those salubrious old folks had in common:
The Seven Golden Rules of Health
1. Eat a very large healthy breakfast daily
2. Regularly eat 3-4 smaller meals daily
3. Maintain a healthy normal weight
4. Avoid tobacco and drug use (and minimize over-the-counter remedies)
5. Drink alcohol extremely moderately
6. Sleep 7-8 hours nightly
7. Practice regular vigorous exercise
The "magic" from the study came when UC extrapolated their finding out into the general populace. They discovered that if they took two men, one aged 55 years old and the other 20 and compared their lifestyles . . . if the 20 year old practiced 0-1 of the "Seven Golden Rules" and the 55 year old practiced 6-7 of them: the two men had the exact same life expectancy. That is, it would be absolutely no surprise at all if they both dropped dead on the same day, say 28.2 years in the future. I'm not sure what that means to you, but the 35 years difference between the two men is my personal definition of "quality of life."
Further studies by other groups have shown that when it comes to changes made before age 42, once the individual starts to practice the Seven Golden Rules . . . within eight years most of the harm from the prior twenty years of a dissipate lifestyle is gone. That means, for example, quit smoking and follow the seven golden rules for eight years, and it's almost as if you've never smoked a day in your life. Benefits from lifestyle changes after age 42, were less consistent but still quite significant.
A few comments are in order. Buckling seatbelts was a fairly new idea at the time of the study. If an eighth and ninth golden rule are needed which I would add from my experience as a health educator, they would be:
8. Buckle-up in moving vehicles and always observe proper caution around machinery
9. Avoid highly processed foods and fried foods and eat some high-fiber food daily
Rule #5 "Drink alcohol extremely moderately" deserves some discussion. After a brief flirtation with boozing as a youngster, I myself rarely consume a six-pack a month these days, so that's what I practice and preach. However, in the actual study the amount of liquor mentioned was "averaging one beer or glass of wine per day." Over the years since the study, much has been made of the value of red wine in the diet. All this implies that a little bit of alcohol is preferable to none at all. If there is one area of the study that I would put in question it would be that conclusion. Here's my "take" on the matter. The trouble with saying that teetotalers are less healthy than extremely moderate drinkers comes in two areas: A) a whole lot of teetotalers are reformed alcoholics who in many cases regrettably did great damage to their health prior to quitting drinking altogether and presumably shortened their probable lifespans in the process. It is my intuition that IF the study had eliminated this effect from former alcoholics in its study, their fifth rule should have been: "Rule #5 "Drink alcohol extremely moderately or not at all." Additionally, from my experience I suspect that there are "overly pious personalities" out there who don't drink and resent everybody in the world who does . . . and in fact they deeply resent almost everybody in the world for any number of reasons. If they were removed from the rolls of non-drinkers, I'm sure the non-drinkers would have averaged a longer life also. So my last addition to the Golden Rules of Health is:
Rule #6 7/8 Have a sense of humor, relax
If on top of all this great advice, the individual, let us call him "Bill" takes charge of his own health and finds a health-conscious (rather than disease-oriented) doctor "muy simpatico" who believes that the purpose of wise medicine is to keep people hale-healthy, happy and out of his office . . . and if Bill always seeks at least a second opinion in considering serious health care matters, then he and his doctors are part of the solution to the health care mess rather than part of problem. If every company had a full roster of employees like Bill then health care costs and costs across the board would drop markedly starting now.