Proactive Health Strategies – Introduction

I’m a board-certified plastic surgeon, a true-blue product of Mainstream Medicine, but almost certainly not the type of plastic surgeon most people would think of.  About 75% of my practice was in the area of reconstructive surgery.  I introduced reconstructive microsurgery to the community in which I practiced, and I prided myself on successfully repairing bedsores that other surgeons shied away from.

I was attracted to medicine in general, and plastic surgery in particular, by the ability to earn a good living while providing my patients the best I had to offer in the best way I knew how.  I relished the challenges of successfully handling difficult problems, and I participated in both a top-notch Level I trauma center and an aggressive wound management program with one of the busiest hyperbaric oxygen facilities in the nation.

Then things began to change.  For economic and political reasons, both the trauma center and the hyperbaric oxygen facility were shut down.  Over the 19 years I was in practice, there was a steady erosion of doctors’ autonomy, to the point that many decisions regarding patient care were being made for financial reasons by bureaucrats.  A set of personal circumstances sealed my disillusionment.  Mainstream Medicine failed both my father and my younger brother.  My father died unpleasantly, while my younger brother died at much too young an age.

My father had coronary artery disease.  He had suffered at least 1 silent heart attack, and underwent coronary artery bypass surgery.  He was put on statin medication to lower cholesterol levels.  Unfortunately, this medication also lowered his Co-enzyme Q10 levels, and he went into intractable congestive heart failure.  I didn’t understand the significance of low CoQ10 at the time, and his treating doctors certainly didn’t.  As a result, he spent the last 5 years of his life as a cardiac cripple.  Toward the end, he was unable to go from sitting to standing without assistance.  This was a man who had been strong and vigorous all of his previous life, and it was not a pleasant sight.

My younger brother died unexpectedly and suddenly at age 45.  He had recently undergone removal of his gall bladder for symptomatic stones.  As is usually the case, that was all the treatment that was done for him, other than to advise him to limit fried and fatty food intake.  A post mortem exam only turned up extensive fatty deposits in his liver.  I now know that this liver problem was the source of his gall stone disorder (and apparently intimately related to his death), and I also now know measures that might have helped the situation.

There is a disturbing presence of cardiovascular disease on both sides of my family.  Knowing that I didn’t want to suffer a fate similar to my father’s and realizing that Mainstream Medicine didn’t have real solutions for him, in 1998 I began to investigate alternative approaches.  I was amazed at how much useful information I found, along with supportive research.  This was particularly surprising to me, since I had not been exposed to any of this information (other than to discredit the alternative approaches) during my extensive medical training.

I started accumulating information on alternative approaches to wellness and embarked on a journey of self-education that continues to this day.  I quickly realized that real health requires proper nutrient support, regular cleansing and detoxification, and exercise.  It’s a bit like your car.  You can’t expect a gasoline engine to run well on diesel fuel.  You know that your car needs regular changes of fluids and filters, as well as tune-ups.  And it is good to regularly get it out on the highway to keep it running well.

I began to understand that Mainstream Medicine is primarily reactive in its approach to health matters.  This is because it follows an allopathic approach to medical management, one centered on drugs, surgery, and other interventions.  It focuses on controlling signs and symptoms of diseases once these have appeared.  The allopathic approach has generated an abundance of skill and technology that can provide amazing results when dealing with injuries and acute health crises, but it also has a significant down side.  People suffering from health challenges (and the medical professionals charged with caring for them) can be lulled into a false sense of security.

Disease processes invariably begin long before signs and symptoms appear.  This is why a common initial presentation of coronary artery disease is a fatal heart attack.  People who presume themselves to be in good health are often far from it.

Also, it is easy for people to presume that they can pursue an unhealthy lifestyle, and that a skilled medical professional will be able to effectively repair any resulting damage.  Even medical professionals are lulled into the somewhat arrogant belief that they can be very successful in reactively dealing with illnesses through the allopathic approach.  This leads them to managing the signs and symptoms of diseases rather than truly defining and treating the real underlying causes.

The impact of this allopathic approach can be seen particularly well in the U.S., where other approaches to health have long been either marginalized or frankly outlawed.  Despite the fact that we spend far more per person on medical care each year than any other country, our rankings among the nations of the world in the “bracketing” outcome measures of medical system quality and efficiency – infant mortality and life expectancy – have been declining.  A recent report compiled by the CIA placed the U.S. at 42^nd among the world’s nations for infant mortality.  Even worse, the CIA ranking for the U.S. in life expectancy is presently 47^th.

Another ranking is even more disturbing to me.  When asked, most people, including physicians, will state that heart disease is the leading cause of death in the U.S.  This is widely asserted in most statistical evaluations.  However, a group led by Gary Null, Ph.D., compiled information that would indicate that an encounter with our medical system is actually a more likely cause of death than heart disease, injury, or any other pathologic process.  I meticulously examined the information compiled by Dr. Null and his colleagues.  The only problem I saw was that many of the numbers used were most likely way too low, due to the nature of reporting of medical statistics (any honest doctor will confirm this). 

It is clear that something is wrong with all this, that we are not getting anywhere near our money’s worth with regard to medical care.  Many argue that there are many social factors at work, such as the estimated 45 million Americans lacking health insurance coverage.  While such factors cannot and should not be ignored, I think that the reactive focus of our medical system plays perhaps the largest role.

My aim in the chapters that follow is to first give you some background information on how our existing system of medical care developed, then to educate you about what I consider to be a better strategy for true healthcare – namely, maintaining your health as well as possible through a proactive approach.  I will discuss both why and how to do this.  It is not a passive thing, and it is not always easy, but the results will likely astound you.  And remember – the best time to start is right now, not when your health is a mostly irretrievable thing of the past.

Roy F. Brabham, MD

or call to order 270-688-0075

Proactive Health Strategies

Chapter 1 – The History of Modern “Healthcare”

Where We Are and How We Got Here

In my Introduction comments, I pointed out that we in the United States are not getting our money’s worth with regard to healthcare.  I also alluded to my belief that “healthcare” is a misnomer – what we receive is actually more like “illness management.”  I would like to examine the specific information that supports these notions.

THE NUMBERS

Let’s start by looking at the figures related to “healthcare” spending in the U.S. during the last 50 years.  We will examine total annual expenditures, per capita annual expenditures, and annual expenditures as a percentage of gross domestic product (GDP).  To get an idea of what our spending is accomplishing, we will also look at the United States ranking in relation to other countries with regard to infant mortality and life expectancy.

Up until around 1980, the per capita annual spending and the annual spending as % GDP in the United States was not that much out of line when compared to other leading industrialized nations.  By 1990, we were running away from the other nations in these parameters.  At present, we outstrip the closest nations in these benchmarks by about 50%.  It’s abundantly clear that our spending is going through the roof, while, at the same time, our ranking among the nations of the world with respect to the “bracketing” indicators – infant mortality and life expectancy – is declining in an alarming way.  Is there something specific behind all of this?

THE WAY WE WERE

To answer this question, we need to look at U.S. healthcare from a historical perspective.  In the first half of the 19^th century, the landscape of healthcare in this country was quite different from what we are familiar with today.  The allopathic method, consisting of drugs (generally synthetic), surgery, and other invasive modalities that produce effects different from the diseases being treated, is the dominant and almost exclusive approach followed today, but this was just one of many healthcare modalities followed at that time.  Homeopathy, which uses treatments (generally derived from natural sources) that produce effects similar to those of the disease being treated, was a close rival.  Most of the practitioners of homeopathy at that time were converts who came from the same training background as the allopathic physicians. 

Besides the allopathic and homeopathic physicians, there were numerous other types of practitioners in the healthcare arena – naturopaths, pharmacists, midwives, nurses, and later, osteopaths and chiropractors.  These were all well-regarded by the general public during much of the 19^th century.  In fact, public reputations of allopathic physicians were often quite low at the time thanks to their proficiency in harming or killing patients through crude practices such as bloodletting and mercury injections that were then considered to be “standard of care.”  In addition, some medical degrees could be purchased through the mail, while many others could be “earned” with marginal training at understaffed medical schools.  To be fair, there were also obvious and serious problems at the other side of the fence.  We have all read about or seen depictions of medicine men, snake oil salesmen, and other charlatans.

ORGANIZATION

In 1846 a group of 29 allopathic physicians met in New York City to discuss how they could establish their type of practice as the accepted standard for medicine in the U.S.  It was their belief that there were too many different kinds of doctors practicing too many (in their opinion questionable) forms of medicine.  They determined that they should set up an association of medically elite physicians that would then establish a government-enforced monopoly over healthcare in the United States, ensuring high incomes for mainstream doctors.

The American Medical Association (AMA) was officially launched in 1847.  It immediately set forth 2 propositions: that all doctors should have a “suitable education” and that a “uniform elevated standard of requirements for the degree of M.D. should be adopted by all medical schools in the U.S.”  One of the AMA’s earliest accomplishments was getting exclusive rights for its membership to medical regulatory positions in the federal government.  Later, around 1870, the AMA became instrumental in setting up medical boards in each state.

ENFORCEMENT

The state medical boards were promoted as state consumer protection agencies staffed by AMA members.  They were charged with the examination and licensing of physicians to practice within their jurisdiction, and they were given policing authority to enforce what they determined to be competent and suitable medical practice behavior.  A Federation of State Medical Boards was organized to coordinate the boards of the various states.  The organization of this structure comprising the AMA, the Federation of State Medical Boards, and the state boards of medical examiners was complete by 1912. 

The allopathic physicians had thereby locked up control of the direction to be taken by mainstream medicine.  In the years that followed, they were able to either marginalize or frankly outlaw other approaches to healthcare.  The homeopaths, who represented probably the strongest challenge to the allopathic doctors, were expelled from state and local medical societies, even when they had received training in accredited medical schools.  Despite having a fiercely loyal patient base, decades of well-financed and coordinated attacks on them eventually took their toll.  While homeopathy still thrives in Britain and Europe, American homeopaths practice mostly underground.  Naturopaths and herbalists have shared a similar fate.  By the 1950’s, the AMA and state medical boards had succeeded in establishing a ...................