Health Care Reform: Problems for Human Health

Click here for part 1.

Fundamentally, our health care system is a mess because it focuses on treating the symptoms of a diseased culture that manifest in the form of human ailment.

In other words, it's our culture that's sick ... and one of the side effects of this cultural sickness is that humans get sick, too:

"The main source of pain, disability, and death is now an engineered—albeit non-intentional—harassment. The prevailing ailments, helplessness and injustice, are now the side-effects of strategies for progress. Nemesis is now so prevalent that it is readily mistaken for part of the human condition.

Ivan Illich can be a bit obscure in his writing, but the gist of it is that our culture is blind to the effects of our sick civilization upon human health. We've lost the memory of what human health is in a natural environment, just as we've lost the memory for what a natural old-growth forest looks like in the Midwestern United States.

Because optimal human health has fallen down the memory hole, modern medicine has been able to succeed by promoting 'fixes' for health ailments. Modern medicine is great at cutting out a tumor, setting a bone or providing pills to regulate a specific body function ... but is very poor at determining what the body is missing in order to promote self-healing. Even the little preventative care available focuses on regulating things like blood pressure and body weight ... other critical variables like vitamin and mineral levels are almost entirely ignored.

This problem has been further compounded, as medicine has become a commodity in a profit-seeking economy. There is a lot more profit in fixing ailments, as opposed to promoting optimal human health ... and so interventionist techniques and pills have become the answer for nearly every question.

When people talk about 'preventative medicine', this really isn't the same thing. Promoting optimal human health means eating nutrient dense foods, living in a nontoxic environment, being physically and emotionally engaged in the world, and using medicine as a tool to determine what specific elements a patient is lacking (such as a magnesium deficiency, or spending 8 hours a day in a sick building). Taking pills created from petrochemicals, cutting invasively inside the body, and dosing the body with radiation would be a last resort once it was clear the body wasn't capable of healing itself.

We are very, very far from seeing this reality ... the medical industry is approaching 1/8th of the total US economy. It got to this point by promoting pills and surgery; changing this perspective would require a total revolution in medicine.

The problem that modern medicine poses to human health is that it discounts the importance of proper nutrition (which is far more complex than USDA requirements), sees disease as something to be fought and eradicated, and sees every problem as a nail to be beaten down with their every expensive (and very profitable) hammer.

This fundamental issue will not be on the table in any health care discussion, as it reveals the soft underbelly of our toxic culture: we're the cause of most of our own pain and misery.