Just in an effort to get people more engaged with their health, I thought I’d gauge their reaction to a question about traditional medicine. I asked the question on my Facebook page, and at my office. And we got some really interesting—and incredibly encouraging—responses! I got about 25 comments on my Facebook question and dozens of answers in my office.

I asked on a big white board and I had to erase it and let patients start over four times to get all their answers. Luckily I took photos.

The question was simply:

Will Medicine Ever Be Able to Prevent Disease? 

Overwhelmingly, people in my little sample do not seem to think that medicine can actually prevent disease. And they gave various reasons, though only one person played the devil’s advocate—and gave a justification that we’ll get to later in the show.

First, I’d like to approach the “No” answers a bit like a survey.

The most popular answer was:

“No, medicine only treats symptoms rather than causes and, thus, cannot prevent disease because it needs a symptom to treat, which only comes when there’s already a
disease there!”

14 people gave this as an answer in some way or another.

And it’s absolutely right. Imagine this scenario. You get in a car accident and break some bones. You go to the hospital to get patched up. There’s no way that hospital could have prevented you from getting in an accident.

In a sense, the mission of medicine isn’t even to prevent disease at all. They exist where disease comes to them. As a result, their model is to have a plan for every situation that presents itself. Broken leg? Here’s a cast. Cancer? Here’s chemotherapy. High blood pressure? Take some statins.

Of course, if you go into the doctors office with diabetes, he’s going to tell you to lose weight and cut out sugars. You should have done that years ago, but because of the nature and culture of our healthcare system, you wouldn’t ever hear it until it’s too late. You’ll spend your childhood and early adulthood absorbing the marketing efforts of soda and food and drug companies, which brings us to our next answer:

“No, the pharmaceutical companies and American Medical Association (AMA) have basically designed the healthcare system to maximize their profits, and they make no money on healthy people.”

I had 7 people say some variation of that.

This is also true. Take cancer for instance. It’s a $13 billion a year industry. How many people in power, how many corporate and government decision-makers would stand to lose if we actually cured cancer? The pharmaceutical industry is worth nearly a $500 billion/year. And there’s corruption everywhere. In 2012, the industry spent nearly $300 million in lobbying and campaign contributions. No other single industry came close.

Just a couple of examples: In 2004, national guidelines were written to advise doctors on how to handle cases of high cholesterol. The guidelines were written by nine doctors. Eight of them received money from statin drug manufacturers.

The first psychologist to recommend using stimulants to treat ADHD was a guy at Harvard named Dr. Joseph Biederman. He got $1.6 million from the drug companies that manufacture stimulants. Now, 15 percent of our kids are said to have a neurological disorder that requires constant medication. As a doctor, if I actually believed that, I’d be extremely worried.

No, it’s profits over results and it has taken an amazing bit of trickery to convince the public to follow a paradigm that is bad for them, and for most of us to believe that it’s the only option. They’ve had to create a product that either makes us feel slightly better, or makes test results look better, or prolongs life to some degree—without actually curing anything—and convince an entire culture that limping along is actually “health.”

The third most popular answer was,

“No, medicine itself actually causes disease, so how could it prevent, or even cure it?”

I had 5 people with an answer like that.

Again, absolutely true. Medicine is poison. 62 percent of people who take chemo develop a secondary cancer within 5 years that is a direct result of the toxicity of the chemo. Antibiotics are beginning to lose effectiveness in the first place, so what are we going to do when most bacteria don’t respond to them? Furthermore, antibiotics are trashing the balance of good bacteria in the gut, which is absolutely crucial to immunity. So in a sense, they really destroy the best defense against disease we’ve got!

Medications from headache pills to chemo open holes in the intestinal walls—a condition called intestinal permeability, or leaky gut for a more layman term. This allows toxins from food and the outside environment to seep into the blood stream, which causes an immune response and becomes autoimmune conditions. Autoimmune conditions evolve into everything from arthritis to diabetes to heart disease to cancer and dozens of other diseases.

So you’ve got to see how medicine prioritizes short-term gains over long-term health. If you go to the doctor and say, “I don’t feel good.” He’ll give you some sort of medication and you’ll feel better. But what he gave you is sabotaging your future health.

There’s a term called iatrogenesis. It is the number one killer in America. It kills more people than cancer, heart disease, car accidents, terrorists, lightning strikes and slipping on bananas. The definition of iatrogenesis is, death by medicine, and the conservative estimates for deaths by iatrogenesis is around 225,000 per year. Some estimates have that number closer to 420,000. This includes things like misdiagnoses and mistreatment. It includes picking up infections at hospitals, prescription drug overdoses, surgical mistakes and bedsores.

In 1976 in Bogota, Columbia medical doctors went on strike for 52 days, with only emergency care available. The death rate dropped by 35%. In 1976 in Los Angeles County a similar doctors’ strike resulted in an 18% drop in mortality. As soon as the strike was over, the death rate went back to normal.

It’s not really anything malicious. It’s just that doctors feel they have an obligation to do something when a patient comes to their doorstep. It’s not a MD’s style to let somebody be in pain, tell them to eat more avocados for a few months and it will go away. They consider themselves advocates for their patients—and that’s not a bad thing—but often it results in mistakes because they are in a rush to get those short-term gains instead of really getting to the bottom of the issue and curing it.

Another popular answer is that we have a natural ability, an innate ability, to cure ourselves.

Many people believe this comes from God. Medicine interferes.

I believe this is true as well. And I’ve seen it in practice hundreds of times. When you take away the unnatural (the processed foods, the medications, the heavy metal toxins, etc.) and substitute in the natural (organic fruits and veggies, grassfed beef, wild caught fish, herb-based supplements, etc) you’ll see the body start to restore itself to its natural state.

But we do have to address the one answer that is probably on so many of your minds. You’re thinking

Can medicine prevent disease? Of course! It’s called vaccines! What about polio and smallpox and the measles and so many other diseases?

So, yes, that’s a natural reaction. And it’s a cultural thing. But there are so many considerations. And I know, I TOTALLY know, this is a highly controversial subject and someday when I feel like getting 450 emails telling me I’m an idiot, I’ll address it in a more comprehensive manner.

First of all, look at the endless studies about vaccines. They are not about effectiveness; they are about safety.

Why are they so worried about safety? Because vaccine-makers know that their product is stuffed to the gills with toxins and heavy metals and other fillers. And one of those dangers is, yes, autism. But it’s not so simple; it’s not so black and white as: “VACCINES CAUSE AUTISM.” It’s more along the lines of “The combined measles-mumps-rubella vaccine, when administered to baby boys between 10 and 15 months who have a PRE-EXISTING intestinal problem have a greater risk of developing autism.” But that’s easily its own article–or 10.

Beyond that, you’ve got to look at the decline of a lot of these infectious diseases. The diseases vaccine makers rely on over and over and over are polio and smallpox. But take a look when you get a chance at the decline of these diseases over time and when during that decline, vaccines were introduced.

In 1952, Polio peaked in the U.S. with around 38 people out of every 100,000 people contracting it in the U.S. The first vaccine, the Salk vaccine, wasn’t introduced until 1955. By then, Polio was already on a serious downswing and the incidences of people contracting it were down to 22 out of ever 100,000. That’s a 42 percent drop without the vaccine. If you can see the graph, it continues downward at the same rate until bottoming out in 1958 at 3 incidences for every 100,000 people in America. And by 1961, it was down to 1 diagnosis for polio for every 100,000 Americans. That’s when the second vaccine came out, the Sabin vaccine, that was released as a miracle when polio was all but eradicated anyway on its own.

As society progressed in terms of sanitation, sewer systems, environmental regulations, hospital cleanliness, etc., diseases started to die off on their own.

But that’s all another article with the energy to and time to give this topic the treatment it deserves. The point is medicine as we now know it, is not equipped to actually prevent disease. It treats diseases for profit. Nobody profits when you live a healthy lifestyle of clean foods, no sugar, and moderate exercise with supplementation and detox protocols.

It’s up to you to prevent disease, not doctors or medicine.