The 1-Minute Weight Loss Cheat Sheet – Quick Shortcuts & Tactics for Busy Women (8 page)

Medicines are difficult for our bodies to process. Many times medicines
save lives
and help people live a fuller life. Before I go any further, I must set the ground rules because sometimes people do not understand the goal of a book such as this one:

1. I am not anti-medicine.
   
2. I am not anti-pharmaceutical company.
   

I need you to know that I absolutely see the need for the medical industry. I am
thankful
for that industry. The medical industry has saved countless lives.

What I am
not
thankful for is the majority of medicines used today. They often mask the real problems. It is these times when medicines do not solve problems, but they only delay bigger problems down the road.

And antibiotics and vaccines are some of the worst culprits.

The average lifespan has been increasing slowly but steadily over the past century. This is due to a two-fold benefit from the medical industry:

1.
    
Infant fatalities are far fewer than they were 100 years ago. This dramatically skews the average lifespan of a people to the upside (the good side).

2.
   
Through trauma research and development, trauma patients are surviving in record numbers to go on to live normal, healthy lives.

According to the U.S. Census Bureau, the average life expectancy at the beginning of the 20th century was 47.3 years. A century later, that number had increased to 77.85 years.

It would be unfair to harp on antibiotics, other prescription drugs, vaccines, and their prescribed use without first being completely fair and giving the medical industry great credit for what it does well.

The medical establishment is wonderful at many things, the most important of which surely has to be its expertise in treating trauma. Every decade that goes by, the survival rate of crash victims rises. This extends even to the battlefield where wounds that were lethal only 10-20 years ago become more manageable and survivable as the medical industry does its research and improves upon its techniques.

The medical establishment’s praise extends beyond accidental and war trauma. Heart patients are living longer than ever even though major, invasive techniques such as open heart surgeries are being replaced with far less invasive procedures. AIDS patients are today able to survive in numbers never-before considered possible due to drugs that manage (not cure) the disease. Breakthroughs in cancer are being seen in every corner of the oncology divisions throughout the world.

The medical industry is poor at disease and malady
prevention.

Consider how many
trillions of dollars
have been spent in the past fifty years on “curing” various diseases such as:


        
Cancer


        
Heart disease


        
AIDS


        
Multiple Sclerosis


        
Birth defects


        
Muscular Dystrophy

Although some diseases have been cured in the 20th century, none of the big ones have. For these “big ones” we pour thousands of more times the dollars into their cure than the various “lesser” diseases such as Chicken Pox. I’m limiting the list solely to the United States now, where problems such as malaria, easily prevented with the now-banned DDT, are not problems. Worldwide there are more major diseases that fall into this same category: spending trillions to find evasive cures.

Let me ask you a simple question: How many major diseases have been cured in your lifetime? I’m talking about diseases with epidemic numbers such as the six maladies I mention above?

Let me make it even more critical: How many major diseases have been cured in your parents’ lifetime?

Let me be blunt: How many major diseases have been cured in your grandparents’ lifetimes?

The answer is a shocker: absolutely
zero
.

Note:
Did you know that in 1920 when Paul Dudley White invented the electrocardiograph (the precursor to the electrocardiogram, the EKG or ECG), his Harvard colleagues suggested that he abandon that invention and work on a more “profitable branch of medicine”? You see, heart disease and related problems such as hypertension were statistically not even on the radar. Heart disease occurred in such few numbers, it wasn’t worth focusing on as recently as the 1920s. We must admit we are a failure at so many aspects in medicine and prevention.

Again, I want to be fair. Polio was cured in 1961 and we should be extremely grateful for that. It is my suspicion that back then attention was put on prevention rather than finding the cure. Jonas Salk’s polio vaccine was a medical miracle and all of mankind benefitted from it. Still, the number of people who died from polio, and yes even one is too many, was not even a fraction of one percent of the people who suffer and die from the six major maladies above, the “politically correct” ones that get the lion’s share of the trillions of dollars of funding for “the cure.”

Why do we continue to pour those
trillions
of dollars into “finding the cure”? Do you think that
possibly
those
trillions of dollars
that were earmarked and given for finding “cures” might be better put elsewhere? I’ll just say it: I think we should
stop
chasing after cures.

“But Jennifer, you don’t want to see these horrible problems cured?”

Yes I do. Of course. But when do we realize there very well
might not be cures
to most of the diseases we face today? Wouldn’t it be far better to seek
effective disease
prevention
? The answer is Yes. Prevention research takes only a small percent of a percent of a percent of “cure” research.

When I recently asked a doctor, the head of one of the largest Osteopathic schools, how much money the major organizations such as the American Heart Association and the American Cancer Society spent on prevention, his answer was: virtually nothing.

Why don’t these organizations want to prevent their diseases? A cynic would say if they found a way to prevent the problems, the need for those organizations would go away. I am not that cynical. I truly believe organizations such as the AMA and ACS do want to see an end to their diseases. But they don’t
appear
to be seeing the forest from the trees. And after
trillions and trillions
are spent over the decades looking for “cures” that are never found, pretty soon you’re talking about some real money...

Much of the time: medicine comes out of medical research.

More and more medicine.

If the meds worked so well, why do the number of major disease-ridden patients increase annually? Yes, many with those diseases are surviving but at what price both in regards to their health and standard of living and to the cost to society? Let me be clear – I would rather see people live longer, managed by drugs, even if their lives have side effects and problems from those drugs. And certainly
many people are being managed by drugs have no major side effects
.

My problem with the whole thing (and I am not alone... not by a long shot) is two-fold:

1.
       
Why do diseases, even though we can manage them better each day, keep increasing in numbers?

2.
      
Why can’t we focus on prevention more instead of calling “health nuts” and “phony natural doctors” those very names because they are the only ones who seem to focus on prevention?

As for me and my family? I’d rather prevent a disease like diabetes than have it and manage it. And since trillions have been spent without finding a cure, I’d be fine if we put the elusive search for the cure on hold and work on
eliminating
the problem through prevention.

“How can that be?” you ask. Given the title of this book, you’d think I despise the very mention of the term
antibiotics.

Not at all.

Antibiotics have been responsible for saving the lives of – no doubt – millions of people since Selman Waksman first invented them and then Howard Florey and Ernst Chain made them safe for use in humans around 1945.

To say antibiotics are horrid and should never be used would be to reduce the lifespan of people. Antibiotics are no more evil than a hammer is. Antibiotics are a tool for health that can be used for good or misused for bad. This goes for other medicines we’ll discuss in this book.

The fact that antibiotics have such a bad track record speaks volumes about their massively over-prescribed rate as well as the patients’ bad use of them. This book explains both problems. By doing that you will have a much greater appreciation for when you may want to use antibiotics and when you may want to try to avoid them.

Note:
Do I have to remind you I am not a medical doctor? So how much does that rule out my research and educated opinions on the matter of antibiotics? Do I have to remind you I am not a lawyer? So how much does that rule out my research and educated opinions on the matter of responsibility? Please consider that hardly any newscaster who reports on the government has been a government official and hardly any newspaper columnist who has reported on arson crimes was ever a firefighter. One can properly use sources and draw conclusions and state those conclusions. The fact is I have ample evidence on my side in regards to antibiotics and other issues I’ll discuss. I do not hesitate to offer you my educated and reference-supported opinions throughout this book.

I take antibiotics. About once a year.

Does that help show that this book is not a battle cry to eliminate antibiotics? It should.

About once a year I get sick. I eat healthy, extremely so by almost every standard. I take multivitamins and minerals. Each morning I take one of the most expensive and highest-regarded liquid vitamin and mineral formula ever developed, available only through doctors (http://www.DruckerLabs.com).

My sickness begins the way many do. A scratchy throat tells me I’m headed toward an incident. I then begin to get sinus drainage. A day or so later, it’s achy, fever, and so on. Yuck.

If that was it, I’d probably get better in 3-4 days. I stay in, take care of myself. But for some odd reason my body has a habit of developing secondary problems and it turns into something deeper with darker mucus and... I’ll stop there, you get the idea.

Note:
A healthy body gets sick once every year or two. It is the body’s way of getting rid of toxins that build up through normal living, even extremely healthy living. The person who never gets sick is in danger of early health problems through the build-up of the toxins that enter our body normally over the years.

So I go to my doctor. He gives me the wonderful
CBC blood test
. This is the Complete Blood Count test that tells you the relation of white to red blood cells among other things. Both my doctor and I agree I am sick. The question then is: is this a viral or a bacterial problem? If the latter, then antibiotics will help it go away. If it’s not bacterial then antibiotics are useless at best and possibly even harmful (in the long term).

This CBC test, very simple to do with the results available right there in the doctor’s office, tells my doctor the likelihood of needing antibiotics. Or it tells my doctor I only need time to get better. If the CBC test says I need antibiotics, I am
thrilled
to take them.

If not, I don’t want them. I know I’ll get better with time.

Most routine sickness we get is either viral or bacterial. Their symptoms often overlap which is why the CBC blood test is so helpful. Many doctors treat virus problems with antibiotics however.
Therein lies the danger as you’ll see in the next chapter.

Note:
By the way, this test is under $20. And I will happily pay the $20 to find out I don’t or do need antibiotics. Because the
last
thing I want to put into my sick body is an antibiotic if I don’t have a bacterial infection!

One big problem with antibiotics is their overuse.

As you saw at the end of the previous chapter, your doctor has a simple test available to determine the need for an antibiotic prescription. One major problem with antibiotics is they have been given far too often when they do no good. People who are sick with a virus should get well over time. A doctor who “goes ahead and prescribes an antibiotic” for someone with a viral sickness masks the cure. The person gets well only because time goes by, but antibiotics were thought to be the reason. The patient’s healthcare costs are higher due to the antibiotics, damage can be done to the body by the antibiotics, the use of unneeded antibiotics have a greater chance of mutating, and everybody loses when the patient would have gotten just as well without the medicine.