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
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This is the first of hopefully about 6 books this year, Fiction, Non-Fiction and who knows what else.
The Decapitation of Care was first given as a Talk in Maastricht in March 2019 –Responsibility, Care and Neuroscience
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As mentioned in earlier news features we are looking for authors who can work in a new way in the new health service space – a space that is rapidly occupying the place once reserved for religion and later for political economics. If you are working in the way we are interested in – we’ll know it when we see it but at the moment its difficult to put into words that work – there is every chance that mainstream publishers will not be keen to support your efforts.
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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:
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Beginning in 2014, life expectancy in the United States dropped every year for five years straight. This was before the time of Covid, by the way. This is an absolutely unprecedented development which has been completely ignored by the mainstream media.
What is behind this staggering drop in life expectancy? David Healy, a professor of Family Medicine at McMaster University in Ontario, points the finger at a health care system which is centered not on delivering care to the ailing but diseases to those who didn’t even know they were sick – and which also is set up to deliver adverse consequences, up to and including death, with impunity.
The facts back up Dr. Healy’s argument. Forty percent of those over the age of sixty-five take five or more drugs per day, despite overwhelming evidence that being on five or more drugs shortens lives rather than extends them. The pharmaceutical companies have all but abandoned any pretense that they are in the business of saving lives. Since the World Health Organization compiled its first list of “Essential Medicines” in 1977, no new life-saving treatments have emerged other than Gleevec, Triple Therapy for AIDS, and treatments for Hepatitis C. That’s a rather puny haul, given that the cost of prescription drugs has skyrocketed, along with the cost of the system designed to deliver the drugmakers’ wares to us.
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My bold, because DAYUM.
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This is how we got to the point where we now have more hospitalizations for hypoglycemic episodes or falls on antihypertensives than we have for diabetes or hypertension. Treatment-induced death may now by the modal cause of dying, and treatment-induced disability may be the greatest cause of disability.
Dr. Healy notes that medicine once entailed a judicious assessment of risks, weighing the risks of a poison (medicine) or a mutilation (surgery) against the benefits. Now health services have switched to risk management, which actually means covering risks to the service.
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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.
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Shipwreck of the Singular is broken into three parts: 1 The Early Years, 2 The Intervening Years, and 3 Castaways.
Part 1, The Early Years is a fascinating history of the development of medicine and well worth the price of the book in itself. Dr. Healy weaves the history of medicine into the larger historical context, such as the Enlightenment and the Reformation, their philosophers, and the rise of capital...
Part 2, The Intervening Years, tracks the transition into supposedly more scientific medical treatment with the discovery of germs and antibiotics and with the military leading the way.
All of this sets the stage for Part 3, Castaways, which describes the huge amount of harm caused by modern-day, algorithm driven, judgment devoid, medical "services," rather than health "care."
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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.