PaleoJay's Smoothie Cave Podcast #87 First, do no harm- AVOID your Medical Doctor!

PJSC First Do no Harm

Hippocrates

A famous saying from the founder of Western medicine, Hippocrates, it is meant to be one of the guiding principles of that modern medicine.  Unfortunately, in our time, this guiding principle seems to be largely thrown out the window!  Many thousands die yearly from iatrogenesis, which is a term meaning “Death by Doctor”... in fact, iatrogenesis is now the leading cause of death in the United States of America!

How about that in light of first do no harm?

The Nutrition Institute of America funded an independent review of “government-approved” medicine that was published in 2006. Professors Gary Null and Dorothy Smith, along with doctors Carolyn Dean, Martin Feldman and Debora Rasio titled the report “Death by Medicine.”
The researchers found that America’s leading cause of death isn’t heart disease or cancer: its conventional medicine. They found that the iatrogenic death rate in the US (death caused by doctors and/or medical treatments) is 783,936 a year. That’s 84,059 more deaths than those caused by heart disease in 2001 and 230,865 more deaths than those caused by cancer.

A large portion of these deaths are caused by the myriads of side effects from pharmaceutical drugs.  Statins are just one drug that is incredibly overprescribed.  Some of the side effects are muscle wasting, particularly of the heart muscle, severe joint pain, and being much more susceptible to cancer.  Does this sound like the kind of drug that right now about 1/3 of Americans should take?  Well, they are, and new guidelines would make 1/2 of Americans fall under the recommendations for statin prescriptions.

The reason?  The industry makes profits of around 30 Billion dollars per year!!  Strong incentive indeed to ignore the dictum first do no harm!

It is this profit motive that has taken over our medical clinics and hospitals, in fact the entire medical system.  There is blatant overuse of drugs that are loaded with side effects, blatant overuse of medical procedures like x rays and mammograms, and unnecessary surgeries- all ultimately done for increased profits.

The overuse of technology creates a “cascade effect” in treating patients: unnecessary outpatient treatment often leads to more visits, more prescriptions, more hospitalizations and deaths.
X-rays, CT scans, mammograms and other such diagnostics are costly and cumulatively dangerous, yet they are given regularly to soothe patient fears and often lead to unnecessary surgeries.

Also, to underscore the poorly conceived priorities of modern conventional medicine, we only have to look at the food and nutrition provided in a hospital cafeteria: There, you will see the worst possible foods being offered to both medical staff and patients, showing the utter ignorance and disdain nutrition is held in by the medical community.

Probably the most unsafe place to be, the unhealthiest place in the world, is within our modern “health care” institutions, which are actually disease care places, with a focus on disease, not health at all, and an emphasis on treating symptoms of diseases, not the root cause.  Health is not really the end goal they are even looking at!

Your own body is the only thing that can truly heal you, and restore you to health.  And your body doesn’t need drugs to cure itself, your body needs good, nutrient dense foods that supply the raw materials it needs to build your health from the inside out, as it has been doing in nature for millennia.

So, the next time it is recommended to you to go to see the doctor and go through a bunch of expensive tests, say you’ll pass, since first you will DO NO HARM to your health.  And remember the other Hippocratic dictum:

“Let food be thy medicine, and medicine be thy food”