The story is common enough: Someone goes to the doctor complaining of an illness and leaves with a prescription for a medication. Sometimes they also get an understanding of how that illness came to them, and even a mention or lecture of changes they could make to alleviate the condition. For chronic conditions most continue on the medication for great lengths of time. Sometimes the medications are increased, sometimes they are augmented, sometimes they are changed to different medicines or combinations of such; but less often does the patient set about to change the conditions that put them on the medicine to begin with. They may consider their condition was just a bad break, and that their meds are helping them cope. They feel some people are just unlucky and they get these conditions.
This is mostly not true.
I was once at the home of a couple, aged late sixties, who had a small kitchen table full of pill bottles between them. Pills for conditions and pills to counteract the side-effects of those pills and pills to counteract the side-effect of those counteracting pills. They each had two of those weekly plastic medicine sleeves (one wasn’t big enough) and they told me that they spent an hour on Saturday afternoon careful filling the sleeves with pills, and consulting charts they used to track pills and plan re-ordering. Their pill regimen was a part time job. It was a great awakening for me. This can’t be right, I thought. It can’t be that the human race could have survived and flourished for all these many thousands of generations without medicine if we were so prone to conditions that required them. And it isn’t just the race that has survived so long, but the individuals living into old age. Don’t be fooled by reports of life expectancy. We’ve all heard that people in past generations didn’t live past forty. This isn’t true at all. A cursory glance at a history book, or even our own individual genealogy, will show many people lived into their eighties and nineties long, long ago. You needn’t consult a bible to find very old people in our collective history.
The life-expectancy that we hear about is a birth-death model. That is, a child born today has a likelihood of living X number of years, on average, depending on where they live. It is an average for all human life. If one person lives to be one hundred, and another dies of crib death, the average of the two is fifty. When it says life expectancy was forty, it is an average that counts infant mortality to arrive at that number. Those numbers climb dramatically when and where we’ve eliminated or reduced death from childhood illness. And for the rest of the population we have seen increases. There are more people becoming centenarians. The average does go up a little do to medicine. And work place safety. And think of the bump when CPR (cardio pulmonary resuscitation) was developed. But it was always possible, bad luck notwithstanding, for individuals to live long and healthy lives – without medicine.
When it comes to how we approach health management. Some of it comes down to choices. Not a choice of which pill, but do we take pills at all? Can we replace pills with modified lifestyle? Can we strive to “un-catch” whatever ailment plagues us? Maybe, but we certainly can make changes that reduce our risk of these afflictions ahead of time. And millions of people make conscious choices to do that everyday in this world.
A relative of mine went to his doctor and asked about a pill he saw advertised on television. It was one of those “little purple pills.” The commercial promised relief from chronic heartburn attributed to acid reflux. The doctor did mention while he was writing the prescription that some people found success in combating acid reflux by dramatically changing their diets, or embarking on a complicated regimen of food combining. And yes, according to my relative, the doctor used the words “dramatically” and “complicated regimen.” In truth none of those words need apply.
I will allow that the doctor was repeating the sales pitch that the pharmaceutical rep laid on him, and even make a fifty cent wager that the doc got some incentive for prescribing that particular pill. But I’ll even lay it out there that this doctor, and perhaps even most doctors, don’t really think their patients are going to change their behavior anyway. And when thinking of more serious conditions it is the same. How often does an MD have to see fifty year old overweight men with diabetes before he realizes that if the general and absolute benefits and obvious increased enjoyment of a fit, healthy lifestyle haven’t persuaded them to make a change, then telling them it could alleviate the need for diabetes medicine isn’t likely to either. They tell them to try and lose some weight, and write the prescription.
And then there is their lack of education of nutrition. Doctors generally need to accumulate as little as eleven hours of nutritional knowledge in the course of their studies to meet the curriculum required. And this is usually self tallied. Read an article here or a study there and it adds up. They often do not know how effective dietary changes can be. While ignorance is the case for some, and willful self-interest is possible in others, I think they most simply become jaded. People are fat because they aren’t interested in changing the habits that made them fat. People who exercise and watch their diets were already doing that. Their actions aren’t driven in response to medical advice. They didn’t need to hear that it’s good for them to be healthy. Doctors don’t need to be corrupt (though some are) to give bad advice or prescribe pills when healthier options are available. They just need to be human. Your individual doctor, for all of the wealth of knowledge he has, should not be your only source for health information. But she should be one of your sources.
When it comes to those who make those pills, there is plenty to be wary of. The pharmaceutical industry provides funding for medical schools, and they advise those schools on curriculum; they promote the use of drugs directly to doctors through sales reps, all expense paid conferences, financial incentives, and advertising; they promote the use of their drugs directly to the would be patients in form or print and digital advertising; they market and sell medicine for normal conditions that do not require it (sometimes to the detriment of the individual, see osteopenia); and they have been accused of inventing diseases to medicate them. They might be evil if you believe in that sort of thing. I believe that they have too great an influence on the culture of healthcare. There are benefits to pills and times when they should be used, but not needing in the first place is better. And skepticism of pill companies is always warranted. But the reason they have so much influence is because much of what they make works. Medicine as a whole is largely worthwhile. My advice here isn’t to skip the doctor or the pill, but to take steps to eliminate the conditions that caused the need for the pill.
It is in our best interest to find better ways to approach our personal health. And there is plenty of information out there to help. Unfortunately there is plenty out there that will not help, and will likely even hurt. So here I am now deep into this post and finally getting to the point. The point is bad advice.
In the paragraphs above I tried to show why doctors and pill companies should be listened to with some level of skepticism and even occasional suspicion. And I’ve suggested that we adopt healthy choices to alleviate the need for medicine. It feels great to make a healthy change, and this kind of alternative approach is great. But sometimes we try to address everything with an alternative, and sometimes those alternatives are not going to help. But the reasons that we don’t carefully or successfully sort out good alternatives from bad ones are the same: ignorance and laziness.
If doctors and Big-Pharma are wrong, then whatever the alternative we find must be right. This is misguided logic that brings failure. Life is not simply making choices of who to believe. If we are willing to do the research we can find out a great deal about how we got the illnesses we have, and what changes we can make to alleviate them. We can find out what diet will lower our risk of the great killers our culture faces. But if we cheat and look for the shortcut to that research, we will often find ourselves following bad advice disseminated by fools and charlatans.
If medical science seems too eager to push a pill at me, I should assume they are wrong. This is bad logic. It is the same with any absolutes. The government lied once therefore they always lie. The mainstream media got it wrong that time, so they are always wrong. And taken to the logical conclusion of those arguments, we are led to believe “they” are actively trying to harm us and should never be listened to. As a rule, your doctor means well and is more of an expert than people selling alternative treatments on a website. “Ask your doctor,” is pretty good advice. But don’t ask which pill you should take, ask what changes you could make to alleviate the condition. You might get a really good answer, and a suggestion for future research. Look at alternatives, and ask your doctor about them. Your doctor might not have the answer, but if he’s a good one he will start to look knowing that you are interested.
In the world of alternative cures there is ignorance and chicanery to go along with occasional good advice. The empty meaning of the word “natural” will often lead us to believe that something championed by alternative advocates is better. And in following those claims of alternative therapies and medicines we may cause great harm to ourselves. Trying to improve our health by trusting advice from unregulated sellers of magic powders is foolish. We need to understand how our bodies work, how disease develops, and why peer reviewed studies in accredited journals matter. We should find resources that are trustworthy, but we should check their math anyway. We may have been happily doing business at the same local bank for decades, but we still count our cash before leaving the teller window.
It would follow that it remains incumbent on each of us to do some of our own work. And when we do this we can use established methods to determine truth, or what is most likely truth. This means we need to understand what reason is and how it works, why some arguments are fallacies, and the importance of evidence. The simplistic view that if “the man” can’t be trusted, then whomever is opposite can be trusted, is foolish and naive. And this may seem daunting when you read it here, but it needn’t be. The simple starting point might be that when an alternative treatment seems appealing, do at least one thing that science would always prescribe: Try and debunk it. The web has science based sites that review alternative claims and examine their effectiveness. Often there are tests already done that show whether or not the claims have merit. Try to find the ones that say they don’t.
It is blindly following alternative health cures without examining them that can lead us to believing that microwave cooking “kills” nutrients and gives us cancer; or that vaccines are dangerous and part of a globalist plot to “dumb down” or reduce the population; or that commercial airlines are spraying chemicals over the population to poison us; or that the purpose of fluoridation of drinking water is nefarious. None of those things are true, but millions of people have been lured into believing them because of a convincing story. I believed some of them for awhile before I understood how to apply skepticism to what I heard. At first I was embarrassed to admit such foolishness, but in time I came to drop the shame. I am human, and didn’t know the difference between a good argument and a bad argument that sounded good.
An article shared on Facebook recently claimed that microwaving broccoli “killed” ninety-eight percent of the nutrients. Headline readers immediately responded by either declaring how woke they were to microwaves, or how they only use them for warming food, or how they will now stop using them to improve the nutrient content of their food. In skeptical inquiry, the best first question to ask is often: is this really a thing? I opened the article and looked for three things. First, who is making the claim?; second, what references do they cite?; and third, what are they selling?
In that case the claimant was a discredited alternative medical site that promotes pseudoscience. Their parent organization has been called out several times for promoting quack cures. They cited no studies to support the claim, but actually referenced other discredited sources who also made claims without sourced studies. And yes, their whole site was a sales platform for alternative cures. From naturopathic medicines to healing crystals, they have something for everyone. Even microwave free cookbooks. Before microwaves these were just called cookbooks, and you probably already own some. That site was selling any number of miracle cures and new age therapies, along with the usual litany of pseudoscientific nonsense so often peddled by quacks.
A quick search of the internet about microwave cooking found a wealth of information that show the opposite to be true. Microwaving is actually very good at retaining nutrients. A slightly deeper reading showed that the culprit in nutrient loss during cooking is water. So, boiling vegetables (whether in a pan on the stove or in a bowl in the microwave) will leach out a large part of the nutrients in the vegetables. Oh, and nutrients aren’t living, so you can’t really kill them.
Eight and a half minutes later I was back to Facebook refuting the claim and wondering why so many had just accepted it as true. It took little effort to refute it. Why don’t people look? Well, probably because it was presented in an official looking way, and by someone they trusted to be informed. And probably also because it attacks as dangerous some newer technology which we managed for all of humanity without, and a technology with the words “microwave radiation” in it at that. This isn’t a term we have hundreds of years of experience with, and one that few of us have ever really studied. A site proclaims that this new thing has hidden dangers to it, and our instinct is to become suspicious of it. But we should also be skeptical of the claim. Microwaves can be dangerous to people using pacemakers. And maybe if you stand directly in front of one while cooking something for a long time the radiation might effect you. Might. But studies have shown them to be safe. And apparently good for cooking vegetables.
I don’t use them much, but that has to do with a preference for slow cooking. I’ll have a post on that in the near future.
My relative could have stopped washing down every mouthful of food with a big drink of soda, and the acid reflux would likely have gone away. Perhaps not, but that is how that person eats. It was how we all ate in our family, a family whose members often carry antacid around with them or take purple pills. Except me. I chewed my food more and sipped instead of gulping drinks and the acid reflux went away.
I didn’t ask my doctor about acid reflux because I found it easy to look up. I found that is easy to address, and that the pills prescribed trick the body into thinking it had preformed a digestive step, and yes, studies have found associations between these pills and other illness and early death.
He should have been concerned that he had chronic heartburn. That is not normal. He should have looked into why he had acid reflux and how he could make changes to alleviate it. That is a good alternative to taking a pill.
But if he had instead found some claim that eating the leaves of some plant would relieve the symptoms, that would have been a bad alternative. The problem isn’t what to take, it is why you would need to take something at all. The alternate that works is finding cause and changing conditions to remove that cause. If you had a rock in your shoe that was making your foot hurt, you would remove the rock, not begin a regimen of aspirin to ease the pain.
But I listened when my doctor told me I was pre-diabetic and should consider medicating myself accordingly. Or, I thought, I could look into the what is the diet of people who don’t have diabetes. Yep, there are large populations of people who don’t have diabetes. It turns out they also don’t have heart disease or hypertension either. Obesity can cause diabetes. Duh. It also can cause hearth disease, and hypertension, and more. Is that the only cause? No, but if we are obese, we should know that changing that will likely reduce our risk of disease. For all the politically correct calls not to fat shame, we are forgetting that obesity is unhealthy. There is a big difference between rejecting societal standards of physical beauty and recognizing that obesity puts us at risk of serious health consequences. We shouldn’t be shaming fat people, but we shouldn’t be pretending it’s just fine either.
I found that through diet I can reduce my risk of diabetes, heart disease, allergies, hypertension, and cancer. I changed my diet and my doctor beamed at the new test results. No need for any prescription drugs. She encouraged me to try and stick with it. The prescription she wrote was “keep it up.” It seems easy enough and I expect I will, but even if I don’t I feel good and I’ve no need for the pills she would have otherwise advised.
In my search for better treatment I also found people that are claiming that eating a whole bunch of habanero peppers will cure cancer. There are plenty of studies that show the claims of better health through diet and weight loss to be true, and none that support the Habanero claims. This is the nature of the internet. Plenty of truth to be found, along with plenty of nonsense.
Sometimes the pill from your doctor is the best choice, at least to start with. And sometimes the alternate claim is pseudoscientific foolishness. The only way to know is to do the research. But until you do, stop sharing bad information. Too often the people in our lives assume we know what we’re talking about and follow it. Learn how to read claims skeptically. Learn how to research claims and the people making them. Everyone has an agenda.
We can do a lot to make ourselves healthier, and healthier people have fewer of the chronic conditions that plague the pill-popping public. Taking steps to improving your health are positive changes that seem alternative to mainstream medicine, but in truth it is not. This is advice that your doctor should be giving you and probably is giving you, though he or she may not try very hard. (See above.) Stopping smoking, losing weight, switching to a plant-based diet, and getting regular exercise all have proven positive effects on our health and reduce our chances of suffering from many of the maladies that kill our western populations at increasing rates. But that doesn’t mean that medical treatment isn’t good. It doesn’t mean that magic crystals or spiritual healing is a reliable alternative. And it doesn’t mean that microwaves are dangerous.