Guest Post: Alix of MedNauseum on Health

The MOMocrats welcome health blogger Alix from Med Nauseum, who poses some interesting questions about our nation's health and possible reasons.

A new poll among 100,000 Americans has me thinking we are all a bunch of human guinea pigs. The new Gallup survey  found that 51% of Americans struggle with chronic illness. The CDC is at least giving lip service to these findings:

Dr. Julie Gerberding, director of the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, said the findings can help launch a new approach to health care in the United States.

"We are investing the most of any country in the world -- $2 trillion -- and we rank 37th in terms of health," Gerberding told the news conference.

Healthways President Ben Leedle said 51 percent of Americans are stuck in a cycle of chronic disease such as heart disease and diabetes, in part because of their poor choices.

But why are we so ill? Is it really "our choices" that have made us so sick? What would CDC's "new approach" be?

(Warning: this post gets kind of radical...)

We spend the most on healthcare of any nation.  We have the most vaccinated population. We think these things should make all of us healthy, but something's wrong.

From my research, it's clear that federal programs and policies have forced us to trade mortality for morbidity. We can extend quantity of life, but at the cost of quality of life. Most of our "choices" are dictated by federal agencies. We have robbed Peter to pay Paul. Here are some examples:

• USDA: The 1980s Food Pyramid launched an epidemic of obesity, heart disease, and diabetes. These are the exact conditions it was supposed to prevent. Farm subsidies for the least nutritious foods - wheat, corn, soy, and rice - create a disincentive to choose more nutrient-dense foods. More than 70% of the average diet is based on nutrient-free white flour. Flour is cheap, so no one is starving in our country, however, this leads to an odd phenomenon where we are simultaneously stuffed and starved - our food-supply is "watered down" due to these nutrient-poor food choices. Even when we choose vegetables or fruit, they have fewer nutrients per bite because we have whipped the soil in which they grow to produce the maximum yield. Paradoxically, we have more food, but fewer nutrients. As the USDA incents farmers to produce more, they need to sell more, so we consume more. Are human beings the same as foie gras geese? With more than half of us overweight or obese, I'm seeing little difference.
• CDC: Our health care system is actually a "sick care" system. Vaccines may save lives (and some say that is debatable or patently false), but they likely contribute to allergies, autism, asthma, arthritis, and even autoimmune conditions. How many injured kids equal one child's life saved, assuming vaccines do actually work? I'd hate to be the Public Health official in charge of that equation. Can you imagine having a spreadsheet that showed 20 children with autism is equal to one saved from polio? Really. That's the equation. Morbidity versus mortality. And who pays the price? Not the government -- they are trying their best to prove they are not responsible since it might bankrupt our country if they were.
• NIH and FDA: Medical errors kill the equivalent of six jumbo jets of people -- per day -- and "side effects" from prescription drugs kill 106,000 people per year. We've ingested and excreted so many prescription drugs that they are are showing up in our municipal drinking water. The average water filter does nothing to protect us. If you drink tap or even filtered water, you are part of Prozac Nation, whether you asked for it or not. Remember SOMA from Aldous Huxley's book, Brave New World? That's not science fiction anymore.
• FDA: Chemicals are introduced into our environment and our food supply and they are innocent until proven guilty. Excuse me, but chemicals shouldn't have the same rights as citizens. With the exception of the Vaccine Injury Compensation Fund (which we actually pay for via a surcharge on each shot), chemicals don't even have to post bail. They are free to circulate in our bloodstreams and accumulate until they start making enough people sick that we begin to investigate. Agent Orange, DDT, mercury, thalidomide -- the list is endless. Again, we are guinea pigs.  
• DOE and EPA: We continue to use dirty energy when clean alternatives are available. Every time we turn on a light, a coal-fired power plant makes our electricity and pollutes our land and oceans with mercury. In fact, using electricity from coal is the number one reason we are advised to avoid shark, mackerel, swordfish and tuna. They have dangerous levels of mercury, mainly due to our electricity consumption. How much longer will it be until every type of fish has so much mercury in it that we can no longer eat any fish safely?

We are one big human experiment gone awry. We are guinea pigs inhaling smoke from a lab that's on fire.

This 5 minute 9 second video, Most Astonishing Health Disaster of the 20th Century, is particularly hard for me to watch, as I 'blink 'em back' each time I view it, but it's worth it if you want to understand what is going on with our health.

Sure, life is more convenient these days. Happily, fewer people die, but we have more people living with chronic illness. Is it worth it? Isn't there a safer way to manage a population's health? Should we emulate Canadian and European national healthcare models where the government knows they'll have to pay for medical conditions they create when they approve chemicals or bad medical treatments, or market nutrient-free food? Those countries invoke the Precautionary Principle far more often than the U.S. - erring on the side of caution rather than risking ill health in the population.

My own mother was a medical experiment in the 1940s when her doctors arbitrarily radiated her thymus since they deemed it too big. She was a little girl. As a young adult, this radiation led to Hodgkin's Disease. Massive amounts of radiation gave her thirty-five more years of life. Five years ago she died due to the long-term consequences of radiation poisoning -- all dating back to the thymus radiation. This is not a unique story. We all know someone who has chronic illness and we all know someone who is a medical experiment. Most of us are.

I'm another example. I initially became disabled after a trip to Bali. I received a bunch of travel vaccinations before the trip and collapsed during a Balinese performance. I spent the next 3.5 years in bed and am still not as healthy as before that trip. I have spent an average of $20,000 per year since 1996 seeking diagnoses, paying for supplements, buying special food. It allows me a normal life, not a bedridden one, but I'm still yoked to a special diet and supplement program to keep me healthy. It's expensive and time consuming but I really have no choice. Looking back at my life, I have one regret: I wish I'd been more informed about vaccines. I wish I hadn't had blind faith in medicine.

Like most MBAs, I'm not a huge advocate of anything socialized, but I'm increasingly interested in national health care. Why? Because then the government would be 'holding the bag' when they make us sick. The government would finally have a financial incentive to protect the health of its citizens. Today, we are left with the expense of our illnesses, though we are doing what our government - whom we think is acting in our best health interest - is telling us or incenting us to do. Shouldn't the head of any health-related government agency be off-limits for lobbying and special interest money? They are in charge of our health. Shouldn't they be as uninfluenceable as a Supreme Court judge?

That's a law I would get behind. And, I realize that this would affect corporate profits at Big Food, Big Farm, and Big Pharma and that this would lead to higher taxes since we need to get the money to run our country from somewhere, but I'm ready to pay with my dollar rather than my body. We are coming to a tipping point where most of our bodies are showing signs of our own negligence.

Earth is showing these same signs. We are collectively waking up to the fact that we have begun to destroy Earth as we know it, but why are most of us - Julie Gerberding, I'm asking you - so oblivious to the destruction of the precious ecosystem in each of our bodies? Excuse me for sounding so radical and for sounding a little like Michael Moore, but the big picture is coming together for me and I don't like it. I'm all for making a profit, but I'm also into ethics -- profits cannot be at the expense of my health or yours.

Intrigued or enraged? Please forward and comment.

Originally posted at Med Nauseum, Alix's blog devoted to research supporting dietary and environmental causes of chronic illness.

Comments

[hibikir]

The autism-vaccination craziness again? Where are the studies? Correlation doesn't imply causation! What's next, washing my car makes it rain?

The article is a mix of pretty reasonable points with wild speculation and plain disinformation. Doctors are not evil monsters trying to squeeze everyone out of their money while cackling maniacally: They are people that make mistakes, just like everyone else. A doctor's mistake can let someone die, while an MBAs mistake can destroy the job of the primary breadwinner in hundreds of families. But I guess that the doctor sounds worse, because that one is more personal. I'd say the executive's bad decision is worse, because it's so much easier for him to detach himself from the personal consequences of his actions. Talk to a doctor that works in a mobile ICU sometime, and hear what she has to say about the mistakes she made.

Given that you are an activist I doubt that I can even begin to change your mind on the evils of medicine. That's why I'll save my time and avoid giving you a point for point of the places where this post goes completely out of whack. I do hope though, that this short comments are enough to show the rest of the readers of this site that your views are rather slanted, and to research for themselves.

In the years I've been in America, I've always been astonished by how much the country likes black and white. Either medicine is perfect, and has to be followed in blind faith, or doctors are experimenting on us, giving autism to children, and overall doing all kinds of evil. The flag has to change: Instead of red, black and blue, it should be black, white and pink. That'd fit the country more.

[John J.]

I have to agree with Hibikir; this post is filled with misinformation and FUD. We are a nation of "sick care" and not health care, that's true. But the reasoning in this post completely misses the actual causes. Yes, the emphasis on corn subsidies has contributed to the obesity epidemic, but the real cause isn't the food pyramid. The real problem is that Americans, over the past two to three decades have had increasingly cheap food and slowly increasing income. At the same time, schools have re-focused away from phys. ed. to teaching for the NCLB (and related) test.

Your vaccine comments are the worst sort of fear mongering out there. Not only do you have completely wrong information, but you use that information to damage the health of your readers and more importantly the wider community. Vaccines DO NOT cause autism. Thimeresol, the mercury based preservative that anti-vaccine activists had cited as the cause of increased autism rates, was removed almost a decade ago (1999-2000) and yet autism rates have continued to rise. If the vaccines were causing autism, those rates would have flattened or fallen.

But as I said before, encouraging parents to avoid vaccines for their children has a larger harm than just the risk to those children. There are valid reasons to not get a vaccine. Some vaccines can cause serious reactions - the old whooping cough vaccine being a good example - and people with certain family histories should not get some. This isn't a serious issue if most of the population does get vaccinated. It's call group immunity - so few people in a group are susceptible to a disease that it can't spread. If that stops being true because people stop vaccinating kids that will be perfectly fine getting the vaccine, those other people who can't get the vaccine are at a much greater health risk. The recent outbreaks of measles is a great example.

If you are so against the "sick care" of our current system, I have no idea how you justify not focusing on prevention through these vaccines.

This was as far as I had made it, I may have more to add shortly.

[Alix]

Dear John J. and hibikir,

Thanks for reading the post and commenting. I can see why you focus on the vaccine part of the post, but that was only one of many points in the post. Neither of you is up to date on the latest vaccine news, and no, just because I question the safety of vaccines and the schedule does not mean I'm advocating people not get vaccinated. I'm well-versed in statistics and am very familiar with the difference between correlation and causation, thank you very much.

This post is about why half of americans have chronic illness and john j., I agree with you that one of the causes is cheap food - which is why I mention the subsidies - and I also point out that the pyramid is the marketing tool for that cheap food.

I don't disparage doctors in the post, just the system that 'incents' them to make decisions that might not be in the best long-term health interests of the patients. Newly minted MDs are aghast at how Big Pharma dictates their medical education these days. I don't know if older MDs realize how much this has affected their training. I see a nice trend of younger MDs being more educated about nutrition and supplements, but we are also in an HMO system where 10 minutes per patient is not enough to explain the benefits of a dietary program that could help a patient avoid medication. How do you get a patient out of your office in 10 minutes? Write them a prescription. Pharmaceuticals should be used as a last resort, but they are unfortunately used early and often and frequently lead to more problems that need to be medicated.

People like to label the vaccine debate a "controversy" - that word is used when the findings are impolitic, uncomfortable, inconvenient etc. I realize how uncomfortable it makes all of us to realize that herd immunity is like a draft where some will be sacrificed for the good of the whole. Yes, the odds are low, but it happens. The Vaccine Injury Compensation Fund has paid out almost $2 billion in injury payments, and none of those include autism. Vaccine Court just conceded an autism case to Hannah Poling. If there are other Hannah Polings, and estimates are that mitochondrial disorders are quite common in children with autism, with estimates from current studies between 7 and 30%, there could be 70,000 to 300,000 more Hannah Polings... mitochondrial autism is a term beginning to be used. And, this only explains one tranche of the autism epidemic.

So, I find the autism studies and arguments quite interesting. I'm fascinated by the data and the point-counterpoint from both sides of the debate. I read the published papers and the many critiques of methodology, sampling, and vested interests. I do not focus exclusively on autism and/or vaccines.

My research shows that we know enough today about the adverse health effects of some of our policies and practices. We should be taking action now to avoid the situation getting worse. Maybe for more people to take action, most of the 50% with chronic illness have to become disabled which will lead to huge declines in productivity. Things are moving that way and it makes me sad for all of us.

[Julie Pippert]

Just a point and then I'll try to reply more comprehensively:

John J, you know I respect you. But. Thimeresol has NOT been removed completely from all vaccines. If you go to the vaccine Web sites (and if you want I can link to an article I wrote for Moms Speak Up about vaccine info) there are some with mercury still in them, especially the flu vaccine.

What people have mistaken is this: Thimeresol has been removed to either be considered "trace" or "innocuous." That has misled people to believe it has been removed, totally.

Also, citing continually rising autism stats despite the vaccine formula alteration is a little misleading. The parameters for diagnosis keep changing. It's very dynamic. I know personally three kids who were diagnosed on the autism spectrum and then were undiagnosed. The stats freeze a photo in a second in the middle of motion.

Also, IMO the REAL controversy is the vaccine delivery schedule: one size fits all, system overload.

I don't oppose all vaccines, but I do oppose the idea that every child needs them all (some are designed for daycare children, and at home kids don't REALLY need them, but that is rarely considered) and all in the same way on the same schedule.

Adherence to that concept nearly killed my oldest daughter.

I guess I really should link to my vaccine article.

Alix, will be back to comment on your post instead of the comments. :)

[jaelithe]

I recommend everyone (ahem, including you, John) who is interested in the vaccine debate read an excellent book I reviewed recently on my blog, The Vaccine Book by Dr. Robert Sears (one of the younger Drs. Sears from the famous Sears family). Even though Dr. Robert is pro-vaccine himself, he is very even-handed in his analysis of current evidence pro and con individual vaccines, and he even offers advice to parents who want to delay or forgo vaccines on how to get doctors and school officials to work with them. The book actually gives full ingredient lists for every major childhood vaccine, and explains what the ingredients are for, where they come from (for example if they have animal sources) and what the risks associated with those ingredients are. The book also provides statistics on infection rates, morbidity and mortality of the diseases each vaccine is meant to prevent. So you can do your own risk/benefit assessment. I know I sound like an advertisement, but holy moly I wish this book had been around when my son was a baby and I was trying to get information on vaccines.

Now, that debate aside: I agree with you entirely, Alix, that the government and the medical establishment have made some major mistakes that have contributed to poor public health. It is absolutely true that many medical "truths" are based more on assumption, tradition or hearsay than actual science. For instance, fifteen years ago doctors as a group were recommending that all parents put newborns on their stomachs to sleep to prevent SIDS. This recommendation was based not on any real scientific evidence, but on an ASSUMPTION that babies who died of SIDS must have choked on their own spit, and that putting a baby on his or her stomach would prevent this. Now of course we all know that putting a baby on his or her stomach to sleep actually significantly INCREASES the risk of SIDS. Why do we know this? Because someone finally did a scientific study to check the conventional wisdom. But how many babies here in the U.S. died of SIDS over many decades because their parents were given the wrong advice? Hundreds? Thousands? We may never know.

Another example: Ulcers. For decades doctors insisted that ulcers were caused by stress, or too much spicy food, or both, and often they prescribed medicines or lifestyle changes to patients with ulcers that actually made the condition worse. When a doctor discovered that ulcers were caused by bacteria, no one in the medical establishment would believe him, because they were clinging to traditional beliefs. The only way he could get anyone to pay attention was to INFECT HIMSELF with the bacteria, upon which he promptly developed an ulcer. Now his theory is universally accepted. But why did he have to go to such extremes to prove such a reasonable hypothesis? Because doctors are just as prone to cling to tradition and superstition as the rest of humanity. That's why.

This is why I personally believe that, rather than just focusing on bringing alternative medicine into the fold, what the medical establishment here REALLY needs to do is focus on providing science-based medicine. That does not mean I want to exclude alternative medicine. On the contrary, I want the medical establishment to subject any and all reasonably methods of healing and prevention to scientific scrutiny, and focus on providing those that have been scientifically proven to work. That means testing alternative methods, AND testing traditional mainstream medicine as well.

[Crysta Krames]

Briefly, Jenny McCarthy has offered the public wonderful wisdom and personal insight about her struggle with autism and the wrong turns taken within the medical community finally leading her there... I personally can attest to the dietary benefits of casein and gluten removal with my own son, who was only recently diagnosed with autism because I private paid for a comprehensive assessment. His doctors never suggested this diet...

The truth is, the science sadly LAGS at the cost of improving the lives of many Americans. My son was born in March 2001 in the Bay area, Thimeresol was removed from vaccines in September of that year here. I think it's very easy to sit in judgement of the ideas and consequences of medicine if you personally don't have to rely on it in order to function. To go to the MBA metaphor, I'd say that MBA's have done quite a number on the US taxpayer for the SAME encouraged risk taking that big Pharma has done to MD's, moreover, until the country recognizes our obligation to hold the greedy "detached" accountable, and begin to step in with regulations like spacing out vaccinations for infants, I will look to sites I trust like Med Nauseum for direction.