unpopular opinion: your health experts know nothing
What we know as the classical “healthcare” system has devolved into little more than disease management, where the suppression of symptoms leads to the best health outcomes, but nothing could be further from the truth. If anyone actually took the time to “follow the science” instead of blindly repeating it, they would realize recommendations from the trusted mainstream sources have not made us any healthier over the last 50 years.
Don’t believe me? Look at the skyrocket rates of obesity, diabetes, coronary issues, cancer, etc. — all of which are comorbidities associated with the increased severity of complications with covid. The surprising part is that “healthcare” system isn’t broken, it’s a very successful and effective venue for disease management, generating billions of dollars, and that’s the problem.
Healthy people don’t need medications, surgery, or hospital care. Allowing people to fuckabout, making lifestyle decisions that are in complete contradiction to our evolutionary biology has failed to serve us, but has served the bottom line of those who enable our poor lifestyle choices, that lead to our poor health outcomes, that lead to us seeking assistance from the “experts” whose only advice comes by way of offering this or that medication to mask the fact that we aren’t living in accordance to our natural way of life.
I work with a lot of people who have issues — like high blood sugar, high cholesterol, poor sleep, obesity — that their “healthcare” practitioner could very easily have helped with if they could simple step out of the false paradigm that allopathic medicine is the best way to solve a health issue. Instead of complex pathways and medications, we need to start thinking about simple recommendations revolving around eating better, going outside to get some sun, getting enough sleep. These things are rarely addressed, yet are the very foundations of health.
Don’t believe me? Did you ever hear anyone on the News over the last 2 years recommend any of these very simple, free, and effective things? Likely not. What is recommended, are medications or pharmaceutical interventions, which — as any student of history can see — has proven to be a very poor path to achieving or recapturing any semblance of real health.
Personally, I think the future of health, both how to recapture and how to optimize it, lies not with the recommendations of those who are deeply entrenched within the “healthcare” industry, but those who understand the natural world and how we evolved from it. Not one time in human history have we ever been deficient in a pharmaceutical drug, yet just about everyone in the Western world is deficient in something because they lack a natural connection to their environment — real food, natural sunlight, restful sleep, and meaningful relationships are the way to health. None of these foundational things are espoused by the establish “healthcare” experts, so when do we start listening to someone else? In my opinion, the future of achieving health and optimizing longevity lies literally outside the walls of modern medicine and within the natural environment we can all stand to benefit from returning to.
Be careful who you listen to. Sick people make great customers.
322. improve your health
There is an entire industry devoted toward biohacking. Much of the time it serves as a distraction from focusing on the fundamentals of improving health. Rather than getting overwhelmed with all the opinions centered around hacking different aspects of your biology, just work on the basics. You could spend thousands of hours researching the best bio hacks and not come up with a better recommendation to improve your health than to eat whole, unprocessed foods, get outside in the sun, move a lot, sleep like you’re on vacation, surround yourself with loving relationships, and practice a bit of gratitude for everything you experience. You can put all the money you save on gadgets and expensive supplements into building a life that lets you live and capture health how you’re supposed to.
312. form implies function
The way we look speaks volumes about our health because of the simple fact that form implies function.
When a racehorse breeder sees obvious disruptions in healthy growth, they naturally consider the nutritional context in which the animal was raised. If a prize-winning mare gives birth to a foal with abnormally bowed legs, the veterinarian recognizes that something went wrong — asking the logical question: what was the mother eating?
Applying this example to children, rarely do physicians ask the same question, even when life-threatening problems show up at birth. And we continue to neglect the nutrition-development equation when people develop scoliosis, joint malformations, autism, schizophrenia, and other maladaptive issues later in life.
Our desire for beauty is not solely a matter of vanity. The way we look speaks volumes about our health because of the simple fact that form implies function. Less attractive facial features are less functional. Children with suboptimal skull structure may need glasses or braces, whereas those with a more ideal architecture won’t. This is because suboptimal architecture impairs development of normal geometry, leading to imperfectly formed facial features; whether it’s the eyes, ears, nose, or jaw.
For example: narrow nasal passages irritate the mucosa, increasing the chances of rhinitis and allergies. When the airway in the back of the throat is improperly formed, a child may suffer from sleep apnea, which stares the brain of oxygen necessary for normal brain development.
Frederick Douglas once said that “it’s easier to build strong children than to repair broken men.” Yet, with our complete avoidance of looking at the root of the problem and addressing the nutritional and environmental factors, it is getting increasingly more difficult to even build strong children.
305. why we dream, a hypothesis
Other than memory consolidation, it is hypothesized that a large part of why we dream is to work through our daily experiences in a safe environment. Research into this topics suggests that the phase of Rapid Eye Movement (REM) is used by the brain to relive stressful experiences without arousing the hormonal cascade associated with real-life interaction, so that those traumatic moments don’t have a long lasting affect on how we interact with the world. In essence, dreaming strips the emotion away from the memory, providing us with a fresh start to the new day.
This hypothesis arose from studies comparing those with and without PTSD. In those without PTSD, REM dreamstates were reported with a significant reduction in stress-related hormones, whereas people who reported with a history of PTSD were not correlated with a lowering of stress hormones. When most people go to sleep, they dream in a very low stress state, which allows them to work through their stressful experiences over and over until they eventually lose their power to influence their daily lives. This doesn’t happen in those with PTSD because their stress is so high even in dream states that they aren’t able to work through a traumatic experience.
It’s interesting to think about all the adaptive mechanisms the body has. We’ve been dreaming for thousands of years, yet there hasn’t really been a good explanation as to why. As far as I’m concerned, this makes a lot of sense.
212. double punishment
Our collective narrative — the stories passed down through generations to help the next succeed — has become lost amid a rapidly advancing world. No longer can we agree on a path forward, as a result, our health suffers. All this stems from a profiteering medical system that seeks to “better” humanity by further disconnecting us from our natural past, and what gave us the strength and vitality to thrive up to this point, instead creating greater discord within our body.
We’ve been misled in thinking that there is no knowledge to be drawn from our past that can improve our health, when everything in life, and especially science, has been built upon the foundation that came before it. What works sticks, what doesn’t sloughs off. Now we are led to believe that the best way to capture health is NOT to look back to what gave us strength and vitality in the past, but to look forward to what science can manifest. That medicine has the power to save us from ourselves, if only we take this or cut that out. All the while we casually walk down the path of double punishment, losing who we are, along with the health we are trying to reclaim.