Labels: how and why heavy use of drugs for chronic diseases drive UP health care costs and what to do instead, how to LOWER our health care costs, why taking statins is harmful and not needed by most people
Friday, November 09, 2012
Key way to
cut your health care cost AND everyone's....
Today's
Post: Friday, 11-9-2012
Most of our
healthcare costs -- both for you as an individual and for all of us over our
lifetimes -- now goes to bad cures for almost completely preventable diseases!
Modern doctors and
medical care have found out how to tell if you are headed for these diseases
but don’t know much yet about how to prevent them or reverse them.
The mostly bad
cures and symptom removers they know a bit about are drugs. So when you see a doctor in a system that at
least checks you to see if you are headed for trouble, when you are most
doctors then prescribe these drugs.
If you have more
than one of these red flags or have one of them in the red zone, you wind up
with a LOT of money going out for multiple
prescriptions.
BUT not only does
that drive up YOUR monthly out of pocket costs and our national spending on
health care, it often produces more problems than it helps!
Worse, some of
these drugs have DEATH rates and are not adequately checked in individuals as
prescribed now. Some of them stop you
from using effective methods to prevent disease that work better. Many of them
worsen your quality of life AND your ability to perform well at work! Incredibly, some of them even reliably cause
OTHER diseases or increase your chances of dying later!
This process was
well described as it now exists in a serious article written FOR doctors that
just came out recently:
Annals of Family
Medicine
The Changing Face
of Chronic Illness Management in Primary Care
A Qualitative Study
of Underlying Influences and Unintended Outcomes
Linda M. Hunt, PhD,
Meta Kreiner, MSc, Howard Brody, MD, PhD Nov
01, 2012
It gets worse. The drug industry is actively still trying,
RIGHT NOW, to have most supplements disappeared by forcing them to be removed
from the market or tested AS drugs to stay.
This, if done,
would drive most supplement companies out of business. And it would at a stroke make the drug
companies a monopoly and remove hundreds of supplements that prevent these
diseases better than their drugs and at lower cost.
The few vitamins
and minerals left available to you would at least double in price. And you’d have to buy them online or at the
grocery store because almost every health foods store in the United States now
selling them would be bankrupted and disappear.
So my hope is to
enlist responsible medical institutions in the effort to reform this system
that is causing so much grief and massive and unneeded expense.
Since there has been
some work done on removing drug company influence from medical schools and
research done there, this looks possible and I will work to make it happen.
For you as an
individual the cure is to:
Learn as many ways
to prevent these diseases as you can and add them in doable ways to your
lifestyle:
&
Learn as many
things as you can that you are now doing that cause these diseases and find
doable ways to STOP doing them!
One way to do that
of course is to read the posts here as almost all of them are on just those two
topics.
Here’s a case to
study:
It’s now become
standard practice to test people for high blood sugar with fasting glucose and
HBA1C which shows your average blood sugar levels over the last 60 to 90 days
compared with the ideal or dangerous levels.
People who test
high are then tested for LDL cholesterol and blood pressure.
THAT part is a
dramatic improvement and highly desirable.
If you can’t see or
don’t see you are driving your body into a ditch, you can’t know how avoid it.
Without such tests,
it’s literally like driving your car on a busy freeway without being able to
see out the windshield!
The harmful part
comes next though.
In today’s practice
of medicine, people are NOT taught how to reverse this or improve it in the
most effective ways that or not taught well enough.
Instead the
seemingly time-efficient way to now used is to prescribe drugs.
But often these are
the truly harmful and only partially ineffective ones that are now usually NOT
as effective as the needed lifestyle upgrades.
As just one
example, if someone tests as having high blood sugar and an LDL reading of 100
or more where 100 is actually low risk for most people, the current practice is
to suggest or prescribe statin drugs.
Does this take into
account that most people have a heredity that makes statin drugs and
ineffective choice or is the $150 test done to see if an individual patient is
in that category.
Unbelievably at
this time it does NOT.
Does that person
get an easy to follow list of the worst things they are now likely doing to
boost their blood sugar and cholesterol and how to stop doing them?
So far, the answer
is not at all or not at all well.
But statin drugs
cause as many cataracts as heart attacks prevented overall. They make the person taking them feel
de-energized and old. They were recently
NAILED as causing drop offs of mental performance. In that study the people who began statins
quickly got lower test scores on cognitive ability tests. AND, when they stopped taking statins, their
test scores on cognitive ability tests went UP! Some statins cause insomnia
too. And there is some evidence they
cause high blood sugar to develop.
Oops!!
That means that
causing such people to take statins without at least doing the test to see if
they are in the smaller group that they protect somewhat – is a WASTE of money
and harming our economy if those people are still working.
The horrible thing
is that this idea, lowering LDL cholesterol in people with high blood sugar is
actually sound!
High blood sugar
causes its damage to your blood vessel walls and capillaries by adding what
amounts to sugar spikes to your LDL particles even the larger ones that are
usually harmless.
So what’s the
solution?
Better and more
effective ways to help people lower high blood sugar without drugs AND much
safer and lower cost ways than using statins to help them lower their LDL
cholesterol!
(We’ve done dozens
of posts on those methods. Niacin and
sterol supplements and curcumin supplements and others reliably lower LDL
cholesterol and are MUCH cheaper, safer, and actually reduce death rates better
than statins!)
Some of these
methods are simple such as never using nondairy creamer in coffee or virtually
never drinking soft drinks and some of them involve the supplements the drug
industry would like to remove from the market or sell ONLY as drugs themselves.
What can you do?
While these
supplements are still available, use them and help fight to keep them as they
are.
Learn for yourself
what things boost heart disease and strokes and LDL cholesterol and STOP doing
them.
And, learn what
things, such as regular and vigorous exercise at least for a few minutes most
days of every week, lower high blood sugar and LDL cholesterol and insist to
yourself to learn these things and work them into your lifestyle.
PS: By the way, the WORST slam on statins is that
they have been found to make that exact kind of exercise dangerous to do! Really!
0 Comments:
Post a Comment
<< Home