The Decapitation of Care, book series
 

Two books in a projected series on pharmacological distortions in healthcare have been published. This review outlines some of the pertinent details:

The Decapitation of Care: The Healthcare Manifesto



My italics. I'm sensing some understatement there.

I have purchased, and on chapter 4, of The Shipwreck of the Singular. This starts deep in history, and I'm into the part about the first beginnings of public health that didn't begin and end with quarantine and superstition.

This review puts it well and sums up the scope of this series:



My bold, because DAYUM.



My italics. As we've seen in statins, a drug is worth marketing simply because it changes a lab number. Which doesn't necessarily change anything in the body if we are taking a drug simply to change a lab number... and ignore the side effects.


Those of us watching diabetes in our friends and relations as they are urged to take more medicine and "cover" insulin with carbs, only to suffer from diabetic side effects which we KNOW are preventable.

Like it or not, we're part of this change.



I experienced this when I was visiting new doctors a couple of years ago (finally happy now) and got some kind of dry and persistent cough I couldn't shake because I couldn't sleep because of it. I endured a badminton match of I know what works for me and the PA trying to get to me to take things that didn't work. I probably turned down 5 or 6 totally useless things until they finally gave me a tiny bottle of codeine cough syrup.

Boom! Worked! Three days and I was feeling fine. And not risking exploded Achilles tendons (WHY am I taking this antibiotic with this risk when there is no such risk with the old types?) or the loss of smell and taste I risk when using an OTC steroid (Flonase) for a stuffy nose? These were some of the things I refused.

I don't want to take these risks!

I've read about and had friends of friends SUFFER from misplaced use of steroids routinely prescribed for "inflammation." The people with common colds who used Flonase and then lost their sense of taste and smell remind me of the man who was prescribed steroids for his macular degeneration and wound up completely blind virtually overnight.

The inflammation has a cause, and forcing the body to shut down its immune response lets this hidden cause run wild and do damage.

I searched to find a physician who agrees with me. He's working to get DH off his blood pressure medicine, and then we can tackle the kidney issue that his Nexium caused. I've already gotten him off of THAT.

There's fixes for these things. But the drug companies aren't looking for them.

I just downloaded the book. The attitude that everything is an illness, needs a diagnosis and then needs at least one pill to manage it is rather horrifying.

I can't help but notice the repeated word "health" and "helthcare" in WB's post.

What really gets me is that when I was a kid (admittedly back in the dark ages), you generally only went to a doctor when you were sick, not when you were well. Your doctor was practicing "medicine" at a "medical center", because he was treating sick people, not people who were well.

Nowadays, it seems that almost every single doctor out there is in the business of prescribing medicine, and works at a wellness center, or a health care center.

They won't infer that you're actually sick - they prescribe medicines of all kinds using the argument that those meds will keep you healthy, not because it will make you well. Ironic that if you were actually healthy, you shouldn't need all that medicine to begin with. And the medicine itself has so many side effects (making you sick) that you need more medicine to counteract those side effects, all in the effort to keep you healthy, while ultimately making you sick.

Glad to read you're diving into these books, WB and Jean. Given today's medicine based on questionable Standards of Care intended to be applied to everyone equally and informed by the calculated risk of the mean, medicine has been overtaken by data masquerading as science and informed by the pharmaceutical companies who own the data. Physicians with vast practice knowledge of treatment and individual patient experiences have been subsumed. I finished Shipwrecked a couple weeks ago and am getting ready to dive into "The Decapitation of Care: The Health Care Manifesto."

In the meantime, I've encountered some very interesting information on my quest to replace my primary doctor, who, being my age, retired in June of 2021. At the time, I wondered about his retirement and what could have prompted that, as he enjoyed his profession and had lots of energy. Fast forward to the past couple weeks, and things are starting to make sense, but not in a good way. I received a call from my medical group where my doctor practiced and where I've been a patient since 1987. I was informed that my appointment in November with the doctor recommended to me by my now retired doctor had to be cancelled. They wanted me to reschedule with another doctor, because the recommended doctor just made the decision to retire himself. Hmmm, now this guy is in his 40s and a very popular doctor at that practice due to his collaborative approach. On top of that, another doctor well versed in metabolic health who I see occasionally to confirm I'm on the right path, has just taken a sabbatical. He's also not near retirement age. I'm starting to experience large medical groups managed by administrators who have no medical knowledge or history of treating a variety of patients are tracking physicians to ensure they are treating all patients based on current Standards of Care. No room for collaborative, individualized medicine, because of course, all people are the same and fall into the average cookie-cutter approach in standard treatment. Prescribe a drug or more as people age, because that's what they teach in medical schools that are now primarily funded by pharma and some large "food" manufacturers. Drugs that are often ineffective, result in harmful side effects for many, and increase mortality rates as more medicines are prescribed to the individual as symptoms emerge. These experiences and trends in healthcare are things, as I mentioned in another post, people now must acquire the awareness to take control of their own health and treatment.

We here are the fortunate ones who have figured out that we have to take control of our own health and not rely on the drug prescribing doctors who use standards of care in place of clinical judgment. As long as pharmaceutical companies control the data and do not allow others access to that data there is absolutely no reason to trust anything that they might say in support of the drugs that they sell.

I seem to be some kind of anomaly. I have been able to lose weight and keep it off and I take not a single prescription drug. All this without the help of a medical professional. I am not an extraordinary person with extraordinary powers. I often wonder why there so few of us given how ordinary I am. A good friend of mine just died of heart disease. His diet was atrocious for as long as I had known him and the medicines he was taking were making him sick. It makes me very sad. I gave up a long time ago suggesting to him that his diet was doing him no favors. Whether or not he could have had a better quality if not quantity of life if he had changed his diet I will never know. Still I wish he had tried.

Same here. Every year when I go to the dentist they ask what drugs I'm on and I say "none". Then they start suggesting some in case I think they are so common that they slipped my mind. "No, no, nope!" My teeth and gums are in great shape too, with hardly any tartar buildup. That should be a clue.

Just finished reading the The Decapitation of Care: The Healthcare Manifesto this morning. It's a short, summary version of Shipwreck of the Singular, more recently published. If interested in this topic, I'd recommend Decaptitation, as it covers all key and alarming points in fewer pages. As mentioned a couple times before, it's almost required reading to understand what has happened to medicine as it's become a service industry managed by non-medical professionals. This information confirms my suspicions over the past 10 years and is helpful for navigating through this morass if one needs to choose or visit a doctor. I come away feeling very sorry for the physicians who are committed to patient treatment based on professional experiences and individual patient needs.

Thanks, Rob! I think a simple summary like that is good for most readers.

In any case, our spreading the word about this series will support more writing on the important subject.