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!