One of my friends has found that his digestive tract shuts down if he doesn’t eat a good bit of wheat fairly often, and it’s the same for a couple of his relatives. I wonder whether there are people with intractable ailments who just need to add the right food to their diets.

Something else that was simple, cheap, safe, and effective– I cleared up a case of acid reflux by sleeping on my left side for a couple of nights. The suggestion was in wikipedia.

Most physicians have no in-depth knowledge of this and, if they ever do advise life-style changes, it is usually along the lines of “eat less, exercise more” which is utterly useless advice. ( Our grandmothers can do better than that!) Beyond this, in the case of doctors, it’s usually a matter of pulling out the Rx pad or administering tests. But this is not working for most of us, and it will only get worse unless and until we take charge of our own health and well being. We all need to acquire more self knowledge of what works and what doesn’t, and it’s mostly free.

What does (and can) work is some degree of individual effort to set aside certain assumptions (such as, e.g., the “balanced diet” is best) to find out what kind of nutritional changes can actually help many of us eliminate (reverse) many common “diseases” and then implement those changes. Seth has talked about some of these on this blog. There is a lot of great information out there on the world wide Web, and even in “old fashioned” books. One just has to open the mind a little bit and start digging. It’s not necessarily easy in the beginning, but is well worth it.

In my view, that’s a lot better approach (and cheaper to boot) than expecting doctors to be able to show us the way to health. There may be a few, but you won’t find them in the main stream. Conventional “medicine” is fine for things such as repairing injuries and helping us overcome some infectious diseases. But if we’re seeking long term, every-day health, medicine is a wrong-way street.

Fat people (possibly especially fat women) are apt to have their actual symptoms ignored and just get told to lose weight. This can mean years of unaddressed illnesses, whether because the patient has to go through a number of doctors or gives up on trying to get help.

I’ve only heard a little about it, but apparently unusually thin people are at risk of being told to just gain weight.

What’s more, if you’ve got a disease that’s considered uncharacteristic of your weight (like type 2 diabetes in a person who isn’t fat), it can take a long time to get a diagnosis.

Pain medication is frequently withheld, partly because doctors have a rational fear of being accused of giving pain meds to addicts or resellers, and partly because of a less rational tendency to not take pain seriously.

More generally, only getting paid enough for very short appointments means that doctors have much less time for diagnosis, and are less likely to hear all the relevant symptoms or have time to think about them.

Its not that only ants create superorganism (SO). Every organism will build one. And humans are no exceptions. The Medical establishment is also an SO. It has its own set of incentives, that define the SO.

It is not that individual members of the SO are inherently evil, its just that they have to behave that way for the betterment of the SO. So the people who don’t work for the SO’s health are thrown out and the people who work in accordance are nurtured.

Yes the only way to fix the problem would be to change the incentives. And yes criminal penalties for mistakes would make it better, as it will change some incentives.

http://economiclogic.blogspot.de/2012/10/disclosing-hospital-quality-works.html

(I have not read the paper it refers to.)

2. There is an important blog, http://hcrenewal.blogspot.com, that focuses on ethics problems in the medical care industry. The lead author is Roy Poses, MD who has been actively talking about it for a long time without getting much traction either within his profession or in main stream media. He refers to this as the “anechoic” effect. The blog describes its mission as “Addressing threats to health care’s core values, especially those stemming from concentration and abuse of power. Advocating for accountability, integrity, transparency, honesty and ethics in leadership and governance of health care.”

3. @ Steve G. The medical malpractice system is more than weak. It is part of the problem because of the way “malpractice” is defined and determined by our court systems. This system helped open the door to what is generally referred to as “defensive” medicine based on “protocols” for testing and treatment concocted by the medical care system and (as it turned out) designed mostly to protect physicians against malpractice claims. As long as the physician follows the applicable “protocol,” legal claims are nearly impossible to pursue effectively. This is something that needs to be addressed by policy makers (e.g. legislators) rather than doctors or lawyers. The reason is that there are way too many conflicts of interest among the regular players in the existing medical system. And I agree with you that it is a greater problem than most of us realize — much greater.