Paleo Quick Tip of the Day #77 Polypharmacy and Death by Doctor

pqtd 77 Polypharmacy and death by doctor

Polypharmacy is the use of four or more medications by a patient, generally adults aged over 65 years. Polypharmacy is most common in the elderly, affecting about 40% of older adults living in their own homes.

It is hard to believe that we have come to this, as a society!  Older adults, in particular, are more susceptible to this, since as a rule they have more medical conditions,  and also they are from a time when people just “did what the Doctor said, no questions asked!”  Let’s hope that time is now GONE, at least for those of you listening to or reading these words!

Iatrogenesis is the word that means “Death by Doctor”.  This means that if you follow a doctors advice and suggested treatment, that it winds up KILLING you!  Rare, you think?  Once in a blue moon??

Think again:  Death by Doctor is now the third leading cause of death in America, right behind heart disease and cancer!  Some of these deaths are from botched surgeries, and infections picked up in the incredibly dangerous hospital environment...

But the vast majority are from prescribed medications, being taken as prescribed.  The side effects of the medications, particularly in relation to one another, are that deadly!

We used to think of medicines as cure-alls- a simple PILL that would cure all our ILLS.  We rarely consider that ALL pharmaceuticals have side effects, often side effects that are far worse than the disease or condition they are supposed to “cure”.  And they do not cure the condition!  This is a common misconception: the vast majority of prescribed drugs just treat the symptoms, and do nothing to achieve a cure- only your own body, given enough healthy nutrients from good food, ample sleep, rest, and sunlight can cure itself.  Increasingly, our ever more potent and dangerous pharmaceuticals pose a real threat to our physical and mental health.

My own advice?  Steer clear of modern medicine, as much as you can!  You can do this by living a healthy lifestyle, eating right, ditching grains and sugars and loading up on green veggies, grass fed meats and dairy.  Have a daily Green Smoothie, so you don’t need a “drug cocktail” each day as you get older.  Invest in a Vitamix, so you don’t have to buy an insulin pump later.

And if you do have a medical condition already?  Keep your medication list down to TWO at the most at any one time!  Even with two medicines, the complications of side effects are staggering to monitor- get it down to ONE.
And I mean non-prescription drugs as well- Tylenol, Ibuprofen, even aspirin- these are toxic drugs, and also interact with other drugs in negative ways.

Even ONE modern, super potent, mind-altering drug is way more than a human should ever have to endure, but at least it can be isolated in its effects that way.  I like to think of modern pharmaceutical medicines as similar to modern processed fake “foods” like fast food, breakfast cereals, and pop tarts- horrible JUNK that should be completely avoided as much as possible!

The human population used to live long, healthy lives with no drugs.  Once a person survived childbirth, they lived just as long (or longer!) than modern Americans do today.  Go into any old cemetery and read the born and died dates.  The only thing that makes people think we all live longer today is because we have eliminated almost all of the deaths in childbirth of both mothers and children.  That skews the statistics in favor of modern lifespans.

But, the quality of life is also very different- heart disease, cancer, diabetes- virtually all the diseases of modern life we now take for granted hardly even existed back then!  And let’s not forget one of the biggest modern killers of all- iatrogenesis, or death by doctor!



Check out this episode!

PaleoJays Smoothie Cafe #105 Would you buy a colonoscopy from a used car salesman?

pjsc 105  Would you get a colonoscopy from a used car salesman?

Here we go, another inflammatory podcast by PaleoJay!  Well, actually I don’t think it really is, it’s just contradicting another piece of “common medical wisdom and advice” that actually is quite dangerous, expensive, and health damaging.

It’s this last that really bugs me, since medical care should above all obey the dictum to first do no harm.  The inevitable harm caused by doing a full colonoscopy is the complete devastation of the gut biome, in other words all the little microbes that live in our guts and do things like control our body weight, mood, and the countless other vital processes we have not come close to mapping out yet.

Just like statin drug prescriptions, the colonoscopy seems to have become all about the money... at 5-10,000 dollars per scan, this is a huge moneymaker for medical clinics- why would they eliminate that cash cow for a little blood or stool test that costs a few hundred at most?

Well, the main reason would be because the blood or stool test is just as or MORE effective at detecting cancer, and there is no destruction of our precious gut biome, and no risk of perforation of the colon by the procedure, which is a very real danger!  Why would you go into the hospital perfectly healthy, just to put yourself in extreme danger of being damaged, and with a certainty of making your health immediately worse, and your immune system compromised?  It just doesn’t make sense.  Just going anesthesia is a real danger to you as well!

And, it costs a lot of money too!

You can get a FOBT, a fecal occult blood test, a fecal immunochemical test, and the newest is called Cologuard.  Cologuard costs $599, which is a far cry from a colonoscopy.

This is the kind of thing that really gets me doubting the motivations of our medical clinics, doctors, and system- they recommend things like colonoscopies that are expensive and dangerous with very little upside, and things like statin drugs for high cholesterol when there is no evidence that the symptom of high cholesterol really even causes heart disease, and they recommend multiple servings of grains per day to diabetes patients, and then sell them lots of insulin to mask the problems caused by the grains...

I could go on and on- but the obvious point is this:

IT’S ALL ABOUT THE MONEY!
IT’S NOT ABOUT YOUR HEALTH-
IT’S ALL ABOUT THE MONEY!

If you can be sick, and they sell you things to just treat the symptoms of that disease forever, wow- that’s the best business model for them ever!  There is absolutely no incentive to cure you of the disease, or of your many diseases.

Buyer beware.  Don’t ever go to the doctor and just do whatever he or she says! Would you go to buy a new car and just buy whatever the salesman told you to?  No, you’d do your research, look up the cars that interested you on the internet, compare prices and reviews, and then make your best decision based on knowledge.

Do the same thing with your health, but put in MORE time and research, because this is your HEALTH you are researching here.  And it hurts me to say this, but try to imagine your doctor as a kind of seedy used car salesman, because that is what the profession has been tending towards in recent years.  You don’t have to say it, but keep it in the back of your mind.

And, if he tells you no, you can’t screen for colon cancer with a blood test, tell him he’s fired, and go to another doctor or clinic.  You’re the boss!

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”