Just walking into a doctor’s office, there is a lot that is already known about you that can be directed toward keeping you healthy but goes unmentioned.  Just walking in the door of a doctor’s office, without blood tests or other diagnostic studies having been done, there are a lot missed opportunities to prevent inherited or intrinsic disease from ever occurring.

For example, red haired individuals, particularly females, are prone to develop multiple sclerosis.  There is a strong association between red hair and low blood levels of vitamin D.  Makes sense because red haired individuals sunburn easily and avoid the sun which leads to low levels of sunshine vitamin D.  Prophylactic vitamin D pills would be in order.

Just walking in the door of a doctor’s office, patients with dark skin (East Indians, Blacks) need about 10 times more sun/skin exposure to produce the same amount of sunshine vitamin D as Caucasians.  Young healthy Blacks do not achieve optimal vitamin D blood concentrations at any time during the year.  People with darkly pigmented skin and concurrent low vitamin D levels are prone to develop neutropenia – a shortage of neutrophils, a type of white blood cell.  Neutropenia can give rise to symptoms such as sore throat, mouth sores, painful urination, sweating and chills, chronic cough or abdominal pain.  And low vitamin D levels are associated with diabetes and a risk for early death.  Again, across the board vitamin D supplementation would be wise. Fat Chance: Beating th... Lustig, Robert H. Best Price: $2.31 Buy New $8.53 (as of 11:55 UTC - Details)

Vitamin D blood levels are likely to plunge in winter months when sunny days are limited and the earth tilts on its axis away from the sun, increasing the thickness of the atmosphere that filters out UV sun rays, required to produce vitamin D in human skin.  So, low vitamin D blood levels are universally experienced in winter and certain health problems such as heart attacks and cancer and even dental decay due to softening of tooth enamel from a lack of vitamin D are more likely to occur.  Virtually no vitamin D is produced in the skin of individuals living north of the 37 Parallel in winter months.  Population-wide vitamin D supplementation would be advisable.

The iron overload problem

Just walking in the door of a doctor’s office, men age 30-69 years have stored more iron in their bodies because iron that has been accumulating since they ceased growing around age 18.  Iron accumulation doubles their risk for diabetes, cancer and heart disease compared to menstruating females whose ferritin levels are much lower due to dumping iron in their monthly menstrual flow.

Iron is stored in the human body in a blood protein called ferritin.  Healthy ferritin levels are 20-90 nanograms/milliliter of blood.  Be mindful, a large percentage of the general population has a serum ferritin level between 200 and 1,000 ng/milliliter.

The following chart shows nearly all middle-aged men have ferritin levels above 100.  All males universally accumulate iron after childhood growth is achieved.  Iron accumulation doubles their risk for diabetes, cancer and heart disease compared to menstruating females whose ferritin levels are much lower due to dumping iron in their monthly menstrual flow.

While a ferritin blood test may be advisable, virtually all men should be counseled to reduce red meat intake that provides a source of highly absorbable heme iron – no blood test needed.  Should ferritin levels reach even higher levels, blood donation or blood-letting may be advisable given that 90% of iron in the body is stored in red blood cells.

With early hysterectomy and/or the onset of menopause and the cessation of menstruation, women begin to develop iron overload and eventually develop the same increased risk for disease as males.  Women who have grown up craving iron-rich meat to prevent anemia are not being informed as they approach menopause they need to back away from red meat as they are now vulnerable iron overload like males.

The iron underload problem

There is a growing trend towards vegan diets.  Vegans are more likely to develop health problems emanating from a lack of vitamin B12, iron (due to lack of meat), zinc, calcium (due to lack of dairy) and omega-3 oils (due to the absence of fish) in their plant food diet.  Just walking in the door of a doctor’s office, all vegans should be advised to supplement their diet with iron, vitamin B12 , zinc, calcium, magnesium, copper and omega-3 fish oil capsules even though there are no overt clinical symptoms of nutrient deficiency.  Again, no blood tests needed.  Recognize, blood levels may only reflect recent consumption.  Over-reliance on blood tests is folly. The Truth About Beauty... Kat James Best Price: $1.38 Buy New $11.51 (as of 09:35 UTC - Details)

The poor health habit problem

If you drink alcohol on a daily basis, alcohol depletes zinc, vitamin B1 (thiamine) and magnesium and vitamin C.  It would be advisable to supplement the diet with nutrients as well as cut back on high balls, beer and wine coolers.  For those who want to quit or just avoid a hangover, a dietary supplement from the Asian raisin tree (myricetin) reduces craving for alcohol (works better than AA).

Alcoholics also absorb more iron from their diet and their liver subsequently overloads with iron (cirrhosis).  Alcoholics never hear about any of this.  Iron chelators are needed to pull an alcoholic out of liver troubles.  A natural iron chelator (IP6) is available as a dietary supplement to cleanse the liver, but goes unused.

Tobacco depletes vitamin C and carotenoids like beta carotene.  Again, supplementation is called for.  Smokers go in and out of doctors’ offices and never hear a word that they should be augmenting their diet with vitamin C and beta carotene.  It seems unconscionable that doctors just allow their smoking patients to kill themselves.

(There is the silly notion that smokers should avoid beta carotene because of a study that allegedly showed an increase in lung cancer among smokers who consumed beta carotene pills.  But looking back on that study, there was no significant difference in lung cancer rates between smokers who took beta carotene and those who didn’t.  The conclusion of that study should have been — stop smoking!  Beta carotene may be ineffective in preventing lung cancer, but it did no harm.  Imagine, modern medicine believes eating 3 beta carotene-rich carrots a day is toxic to smokers.  If there is a scientific rationale for avoiding supplemental beta carotene among smokers, beta carotene converts to vitamin A which competes with vitamin D for storage in the liver and a low vitamin D level is associated with lung cancer.   Modern medicine has its own biases).

Smoking tobacco also depletes another carotenoid pigment, lutein.  This yellow pigment protects the retina at the back of the eyes from sunlight damage.  Smoking is associated with a vision-threatening eye disease called macular degeneration.

It’s been said that smokers and drinkers should just abandon these unhealthy practices, not mask them with vitamin pills.  Certainly vitamin pills don’t give license to unhealthy practices.  But until people do give up their health vices, vitamin pills are in order.

The obesity problem

Just walking in the door of a doctor’s office, if you are 30 or more pounds over your high school weight, you are far more likely to develop high blood sugar levels due to insulin resistance.  A low, low carbohydrate (no bread, no rice, no pasta, no cereal) and no added-sugar diet is in order.  Give yourself permission to eat fats again (butter, lard, olive oil).  Americans ate those fats without concern in the 1960s and 1970s and Americans were lean and healthy.

Fats are required to produce sensitivity to a satiation hormone (leptin), otherwise we keep eating.  Fats are required to produce sex hormones.  There weren’t fertility clinics before low-fat diets became the false paradigm of health.  Don’t continue to fall for the low-fat trap.  It’s all documented in a book entitled FAT CHANCE: BEATING THE ODDS AGAINST SUGAR, PROCESSED FOOD, OBESTIY AND DISEASE by Robert H. Lustig MD.  Read Kat James’ landmark report on how to transform your health by regaining leptin sensitivity.  It is difficult for the public to fathom that the food industry designs foods to disengage satiation so the public will all overeat to boost their profits.

You may be a couch potato, so it would be good to know that resveratrol, a red wine molecule, molecularly mimics physical exercise.  It’s not an excuse to be a couch potato, but for invalids or the infirm who can’t exercise, resveratrol may be especially useful. The Rosedale Diet Rosedale, Ron Best Price: $0.25 Buy New $5.98 (as of 01:10 UTC - Details)

What goes unsaid

The problem in American medicine is that patients never hear about any of this. Doctors are clueless about all this as they are not taught nutritional medicine in medical school.  Every disease is treated like it is a drug deficiency.

Health authorities say most chronic disease is avoidable or can be delayed, Doctors don’t practice preventive medicine and fail to advise their at-risk patients of their future prospect of illness, then modern medicine has become a mass deception.  A treatment-based rather than prevention-based healthcare system prevails and news media neglects to inform the populace of self-care measures because of rich advertising budgets by Big Pharma.  Therefore self-care is the only remaining option says a report in Corporate Wellness Magazine.  Don’t wait for a permission slip from your doctor to practice self-care and preventive medicine.

Doctors wait till symptoms of disease occur and then, following various protocols, conduct a bevy of tests to confirm their diagnosis.  Doctors will say they can’t treat till a disease it is diagnosed.  But then again, in order to drum up more business, doctors are beginning to treat a lot of pre-disease states or risk factors like cholesterol and slightly elevated blood pressure or blood sugar.  Aimlessly, thousands will be treated with drugs to prevent a single death, leaving many patients to experience no health benefits and possible drug side effects.

The lack of preventive medicine is lamentable and costly as measured by premature death, morbidity, failure to maintain independence and human suffering.  Most so-called preventive medicine, colonoscopies, prostate and breast biopsies, are simply fishing expeditions for more disease to treat.  There is a 1 in 10,000 chance a patient will benefit from a colonoscopy.   An abnormal pap smear sends women off to the surgical suite for a hysterectomy.  But 50% of the time abnormal Pap smears normalize on their own.  Vitamin C and folic acid help normalize cervical tissue.  Women never hear of this.  Pap smears continue to be done among women who have undergone hysterectomies, that is how misdirected the practice of preventive medicine has become.  Anything to bill insurance.

Law of diminishing returns

The law of diminishing returns is in play.  An old preventive standby, aspirin to prevent heart attacks, has now been found to produce more harm than benefit.  Modern synthetic vaccines do not produce lasting immunity.  Flu shots for the very young and the very old, the two groups that are most at risk for death from influenza, don’t provide immunity.  Because of increased survival after a heart attack, the rate of heart failure is soaring.

Prevention is a bad word in modern medicine. 

Many people who receive a so-called preventive service do not benefit and therefore pay something for nothing. Obamacare for example mandated preventive care, more screening for disease and problematic vaccination, the very practices described in this report that yield little if any benefit.  Doctors relished the idea of getting to search for more disease to treat under Obamacare.

The Greek philosopher Galen bemoaned the fact that philanthropy is the inspiration for only a minority of physicians, because the majority pursue money, honor, or glory.

Most people walking into a doctor’s office with known risk factors for disease and death will never hear of any of this.

At best, preventive medicine in America is one huge placebo.  (Is there really such a phenomenon as placebo effect?). At its worst, it is a sham.  The profit motive is a disease within medicine.  Health care without true prevention is no longer affordable.  The American population is being gamed for more disease to treat. Bacon & Butter: The Ul... Celby Richoux Best Price: $1.49 Buy New $5.00 (as of 06:45 UTC - Details)

When someone else pays, who cares about prevention?

The provision of health insurance has been the greatest deterrent to self-care.  Over-reliance on doctoring has kept patients from exploring self-care as doctors only pretend to offer preventive medicine.  The proposed Medicare-For-All coverage would increase demand for doctoring, wiping out cost sharing.

Medicare-For-All would increase Medicare rolls from 58 million to ~300 million.  Medicare-For-All would be great for doctors, hospitals and drug companies.  All that Medicare does is get the medical industrial complex paid, it doesn’t raise levels of health, unless true preventive medicine is practiced.

While there are arguments over the cost of Medicare-For-All given that some private healthcare expenses would shift to the Medicare, a fair estimate is that Medicare-For-All would add $660 million a year to public-funded health care costs.  Medicare now costs ~$582 billion/year.

Shifting costs from private insurance to Medicare would be problematic because Medicare only covers around 87-cents of every healthcare dollar that goes to hospitals, with these institutions making up the difference by billing full-charge to private insurance.  Now that cost shifting would be impossible.

Furthermore, Medicare-For-All would worsen an existing doctor shortage (up to 49,300 primary care and 72,000 non-primary care doctors).  So, Medicare-For-All is a practical impossibility at this moment.  Which is why this article posits self-care as a way out of this quagmire.

Do you really need that prostate or thyroid gland removed?

In the auto repair business, an old con-job is when an automobile owner takes a vehicle to the repair shop because the car won’t start.  A mechanic replaces the battery, but the new battery conks out and the car owner returns the car to the repair shop to be told the alternator now needs to be replaced.  The alternator, which charges the battery, should have been replaced initially, thus avoiding the need to replace the battery.

But when such ruses are practiced throughout “ethical” modern medicine, this kind of hidden fraud is the worst because of the level of trust patients bestow upon their doctors — their very lives.  Put simply, doctors are withholding information how to prevent disease from occurring in the first place.  So is the news media.

With a shortage of physicians and out-of-pocket healthcare costs soaring, self-care may be the only practical option for many.