Ötzi the Iceman: No Healthcare

Ötzi the Iceman - from Wikipedia

I read an opinion piece by J. D. Kleinke in the WSJ about "runaway" health spending (Kleinke is a resident fellow for the American Enterprise Institute).

Basically he says the rate of increase of the cost of healthcare relative to everything else is diminishing to the point were one should not say healthcare costs are running away.

He presents a couple of examples in his article pointing out that people are discovering "... a $5 generic drug might work just as well as a $50 branded one" and "... a nurse practitioner in an urgent care clinic can spot an ear infection for $30 a whole lot faster than an emergency-room physician can for $1,000."

Now this is all well and good but what bugs me is that he, and in fact, no one, is really looking beyond the existing paradigm here.

Antibiotics and cholesterol drugs are, as I have written extensively here (example and example), bad for you.  So, while I am glad that you are now harming yourself with less expensive forms of poison and less expensive delivery systems, I am still sad that you are poisoning yourself in the first place.

And this is really the problem with articles like this.

Am I glad that little Jr. is diagnosed with something less invasive than an ER?  Of course.  Not only is the local health clinic more pleasant but its less expensive too.

But no one is asking what's really wrong with little Jr. in the first place.

I contend that in fact little Jr. is actually malnourished and his sinus hygiene is probably being neglected.  No more iodine in his diet.  No fatty acids in his parent brains to help them think clearly about the problem.  Everyone too busy to do their own research on the internet to see what these antibiotics are really doing.

And on and on.

There is a relative in my life (not my own) who is about to have "tubes" put into his ears.

His parents believe that this is the only solution to his chronic earache problems.

Another relative (a different one, er, actually two) have chronic sinus problems and operations.

Again, thinking only modern medicine can solve these problems.

But people like Ötzi the Iceman (pictured above) lived sophisticated lives 5,300 years ago: complex shoes, implements, clothing and the like.

But what did Ötzi do without the local urgent care?

No doubt he figured out how to solve his own health problems - something that many "moderns", like my relatives, apparently are unable to do.

I've gone down this road so far that I no longer believe there is such a thing as a "sore throat" and that throat pain is simply a sign of sinus problems that have not been addressed.

I used to get sore throats all the time - but now I don't, er, rather, I get them and then I fix them with low-cost tools at home and they just go away.  I only have sore throat pain if I am lazy and don't attend to them.

I used to suffer a variety of running-related problems - but no more.  I think this is related to my on-going study of cod liver oil.  I think that low cholesterol is really a "death sentence" for healthy people and I have written extensively about it before here in "Lower Cholesterol = Memory Loss."

No one questions basic assumptions (like the one that says "cholesterol is bad" and assumes that the flow of information from their video set (phone, TV, whatever) is basically correct and must not be questioned.

My guess is that Ötzi did not carry an iPhone.  Hence no one told him what to eat save for his wife.  No one told him cholesterol is bad.  So he ate it.

Perhaps, though he lived 5,300 years ago, he was smarter that your average Lipitor-consuming Joe (or Joette) today.

Why?

His brain had enough cholesterol to function correctly.

Certainly during his time there were problems like blindness, deafness, and so on.  And modern medical treatment has addressed those.

But today, 5,300 years later, we have taken it too far.  To the point where it runs our lives.

My guess is that if someone 5,300 years in the future studied our time on earth via video they would conclude that we all had problems pooping.  (Thousands of hours of TV time devoted to various products that support varying degrees of "digestive health.")

Another easily curable problem if you simply do the work of understanding how your lifestyle is killing you.

Even today people from primitive societies who come to live in the USA fall ill because of our lifestyle and nutrition problems (see this I wrote a while back for documentation).

Poor Ötzi... (No, its not me in the picture, but its close...)

He doesn't know what he's missing.