When will modern medicine focus on disease prevention and not the curing or control of disease? I seem to be focussing on health quite a lot at the moment, I don’t know why? As a result of too much belly fat and various unhealthy practises my heart is not in as good a shape as one would like, which has caused me to do a lot of reading and consulting of various medical experts. Mainly, I am researching how I can rely as much as possible on natural remedies and practises and as little as possible on pharmaceutical drugs. The world of functional and regenerative medicine isn’t new to me, but I am learning a lot more about it. The fact that leaps out of the pages and smacks you between the eyes is the potential for massive savings in the NHS budget if a lot more time, money, energy, research and commitment were given to all the many exciting possibilities that exist to allow us to live long and healthy lives. In other words improving our healthspan and not just our lifespan.
There are some hugely significant obstacles in the way. The first challenge would be a wholesale change of emphasis, from teaching doctors how to treat disease, to training them in the not very mystic arts of maintaining a healthy body and strong immune system, thereby dramatically reducing the numbers of people requiring hospitalisation and appreciably enhancing everyone’s quality of life into a long and happy old age. This is not complex, but the shift in attitudes required across the spectrum would be massive. The first and most important thing is diet. If everyone cut out sugars, refined products, preservatives, a lot of nutrient zero carbohydrates and saturated fats and cut down drastically on dairy products, many modern diseases like diabetes, cancer, heart disease and strokes would all but disappear. But that of course would have a monumental impact on the powerful agricultural and food industries and the exchequer. Imagine what supermarket shelves would look like with no breakfast cereals, no mass produced breads, cakes and biscuits, no sweets and confectionary, no sugar and flour. Wipe out whole aisles of alcohol, processed foods and a lot of cheese and dairy. In fact suddenly supermarkets might look like old fashioned specialist shops on the high street….now there’s a thought! The rise of the supermarket might have been one of the single biggest factors in our dreadful modern diet. How lovely is it still to visit a small market town in France and shop at the street market and the boulangeries and patisseries.
To diet, you would have to add stress management and lifestyles, quality exercise, weight control and a list of other things that are entirely achievable and don’t involve pharmaceutical drugs. But that is the second challenge! How to control and minimise the influence of the hugely powerful Pharmaceutical industry. Already, so many treatments and protocols exist that the bulk of doctors and others are blithely unaware of (or turn a blind eye to) because Big Pharma keeps them in ignorance. The Drugs industry pays so many bills, but their wares predominantly only manage conditions, often with quite unpleasant side-effects. Unfortunately, to benefit from all that functional and regenerative medicine has to offer, one currently has to go down the expensive private route and clearly that is outside the majority of people’s financial compass, even if they are aware of it, which millions aren’t.
If Star Trek is to be believed, there will come a day when obesity is a long forgotten word, when nutrition involves popping a few highly nutritious pills each day and almost anything can be resolved by scanning the body with a handheld “thing”. I fancy that day is still a long way off though, sadly. Prior to Covid, the NHS Budget was roughly £130bn annually. Imagine how that could be used to offset the loss of tax income from the Food and Pharmaceutical industries if the population was fit and healthy?
Is it not extraordinary that medicine and nutrition are seen as separate professions? In computing, rubbish in, rubbish out. Likewise with the human body. Prevention has always been better than cure, but it’s only now that a growing band of functional medicine aficionados are starting to make waves and scientific research is focusing on prevention and very early detection of disease that there might be a small shaft of light at the end of a very long tunnel.
So ends the Sermon on the Mount.
ADayInTheStrifeOf 