Will you please discover the surgery trap with us because this might save us untold hours of pain, misery and discomfort as a result of having unnecessary medical procedures?
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I say unnecessary in the sense that the problem the medical procedure seeks to solve can be completely fixed in a lot of cases without any medical intervention.
Thank you for reading about day 189 of Happier People Podcast and I hope you enjoy it!
How Do We Heal Ourselves Without Surgery?
Now, I'm an ordinary person. I'm no doctor and I'm giving my point of view as an ordinary person, which I find is often more helpful than the position of an expert.
I trust you to do whatever you need to do with this because these are based on observations I've noticed from the people I love and care about in my life.
Here's the case study of one of the family members.
Case study, the family member was in the military and was responsible for physical training or PT. As a part of this PT, a lot of running was included. The family member’s feet continued to hurt more and more over time and in order to continue running they had several foot surgeries on their feet, which now, 20 years later, has resulted in feet that are so messed up they can barely walk on them, and it takes medication every day in order to deal with that as a part of the total physical pain.
Now, an alternative to having that surgery would have been to stop the trauma. Stop running on those feet and the feet would have completely healed themselves more than likely, if not simply have continued to at least stay in a similar condition instead of continuing to deteriorate quickly.
As a result of those foot surgeries that family member went through hundreds of hours of discomfort, pain, and even a third-degree burn as a result of a medical error during one of the surgeries resulting in permanent scarring on the leg, which was not involved in the actual foot surgery.
If we consider the alternative, had the family member simply stopped running and got a different job that did not require running, they would have avoided thousands of hours of pain and suffering as a result of those foot surgeries and the related continuing injuries on the feet.
The family member still ended up not being able to run and fulfill the physical training requirements after ten more years of running in the military despite the multiple foot surgeries resulting in alternative physical training allowances.
The foot surgeries from what I observed appeared to only truly provide a little bit of rest, because with those foot surgeries the family member was not able to run for months. Had the family member simply rested instead of having surgery, the result would have likely been almost identical in terms of improvement offered by the surgery and far superior twenty years later.
I have started this line of questioning because I recently read something by a doctor that said approximately half of all surgeries produce nothing more than a placebo effect. In other words, if the patient thinks they had the surgery, the exact same result is produced even though no real medical intervention was done. About half of surgeries produce nothing more than a belief in the patient that it would heal and likely the trauma being stopped for a period of time. I've also seen further complications of surgeries even if the thing itself did work. For example, patiences often end up getting addicted to pain pills or having complications as a result of medications.
Add to this a reinforcement loop like relationship troubles as a result of the surgery and the altered state from the medications, then ending up on more medications, then going back for further and further surgeries and we get a total mess that could have been completely avoided by simply resting and stopping the trauma instead of inviting more guaranteed injury to the body with surgery on the slim hope it might fix what otherwise would not fix itself. **When we take that first step into the surgery trap we often are sucked into this vortex of more and more pain. **
I saw another lady recently who had a surgery that messed up her left eye and caused her eye to not even open. That was a medical mistake. They were doing a different surgery and they messed that up and now her eye is healing by itself.
The eye is fixing itself over the period of months with no more medical intervention. The eye is slowly opening more and more and fixing itself. She scheduled another surgery to try to fix the eye and she couldn't see how ridiculous this looked from an outside point of view.
I'm telling her, "Look, what messed this up was surgery. Your eye is clearly fixing itself WITHOUT MEDICAL HELP. Don't get another surgery to fix the eye because it's fixing itself. You're likely to mess it up more with another surgery." She thought I was crazy for suggesting that and maintained her faith another surgery would help fix her eye.
These case studies are clearly supported by data showing that medical errors are one of the leading top causes of death. You see, a lot of people die as a result of getting surgeries that weren't even necessary in addition to all the suffering coming from those that live.
If there was some kind of shooting epidemic that produced this same level of death, we would be furious, and yet someone we love goes in and dies due to a medical error, "Oh, well. That's unfortunate. We couldn't have done anything to prevent that."
I was thinking about this because a friend died recently after a medical error started a fatal progression in motion. He got a biopsy on something. They messed that up, hit something and paralyzed the right side of his body. He died shortly thereafter.
If he had not had that surgery and just left the biopsy, it probably would have gone on a lot longer just fine even if whatever eventually killed him, even if the biopsy was revealing something that was fatal, the biopsy they did ended up causing his death.
In other words, even if it was a tumor, even if whatever they were looking at was going to kill him, just the biopsy and going in and messing around with it ended up producing a worse result.
Another case study from my own father who started his cycle in motion with a heart attack. After years of refusing to go to the doctor before this, Dad started going to the doctor frequently and accepting more and more medical interventions. My father's health continued to drop from the point of having the heart attack and then died around a year and a half later. From my point of view all the medical interventions did was make the end of his life more miserable and make the doctors, hospitals, and health insurance companies a profit.
What I think about today is prevention because when you look at something like a heart attack, sure, you may be in the position where you really do need some medical attention. I had a family member fall off a horse and nearly die. Yes, medical attention does help sometimes. It's not as easy as saying, "Well, we should just never go to the doctor, never get any medical intervention."
Sometimes medical intervention is really helpful. Sometimes it is life-saving. From what I've observed about 80 to 90 percent of medical attention is either unnecessary, unhelpful or in fact makes the problem worse. The other 10 to 20 percent does make all the difference in the world.
Now, from a business standpoint health insurance companies, doctors, hospitals want to do as many surgeries as possible. Doctors, hospitals, insurance companies all have an incentive to have the maximum amount of medical intervention and the smallest amount of prevention. This is just from a purely business growth standpoint and this is something any of us can easily see when we think about it for a minute.
Just think about it. If you want to grow your business as a medical profession you need more sick people and preferably you need repeat clients. Therefore, it is in any doctor’s self-interest, any hospital’s self-interest, and anyone in the medical profession's self-interest when just considering themselves, their business, and their family to consistently recommend more medical interventions.
Now, that's not to say every doctor is purely thinking of growing their business. I've experienced this with dentists. One dentist told me I needed about a thousand dollars of work on my teeth after brushing and flossing every day in my life, not every single day, but mostly every day.
I went to another dentist, they said my teeth look beautiful and all I would need to do is simply clean them for the rest of my life and keep doing what I'm doing, and I would never have any problems.
Now, why did one dentist tell me I needed thousands of dollars of work and another one say my teeth look beautiful? The teeth each saw were exactly the same. One dentist had an understandable profit motive, had a way of looking at things of finding every single little imperfection and turning it into a medical procedure. The dentist recommending thousands of dollars of work was simply thinking of himself and his business and choosing to see every single imperfection in my teeth instead of seeing what was best for me and reasonable.
I have another family member who's been to the dentist a whole lot of times and had dental procedures and things are now to a state where the family member’s considering getting all of their teeth pulled because the dental state is such a mess. The more medical procedures we have the more opportunities there are for error, and the more we think we have to have medical procedures, the more we don't pay attention to alternatives.
What I've found in my life is that when I think prevention and when I trust my body to fix itself, it does because my body is a living organism. Unfortunately, a lot of us think of our bodies as basically this dead instrument we're carrying around that without some kind of intervention will continue to stay the same or get worse.
The fact is our bodies have remarkable healing abilities all on their own.
I read a story called "Dying to be Me."
The author had a near-death experience. Her body miraculously cured end-stage cancer all by itself. The medical interventions were simply causing her pain and suffering, and the doctors were absolutely blown away because they'd never seen it before.
Her body cured itself almost instantly of cancer.
When we think that we have to have medical procedures done and we're not aware that our bodies are capable of fixing most things that go wrong. In fact, I would argue that we don't even have a clue of what our bodies are capable of.
I believe our bodies are capable of regrowing limbs. I listened to another documentary, I think it was "Heart of a Dog" where the lady was paralyzed. The doctor told her at 12 years old that she'd never walk again and she knew the doctor did not know what he was talking about. She knew all she had to do was pay attention to her spine and it would fix itself and it did. It fixed itself. Her spine repaired a paralysis that the doctor said she would never walk again.
I have another friend, the doctor said he would never have children, and then he got a girl pregnant. You see, doctors are just guessing at what's going on in the human body. Any expert in a field does not know everything.
An expert in a field often knows a little bit more than the average person. With more than 2.5 million followers online, many agree I am an "expert" on digital marketing and advertising. Meanwhile, I realize I know a very small part of the whole. Often an average person has initiative insights about marketing online that seem new to me or brilliant. Every person has something to teach me about digital marketing and advertising. I know just enough to be effective and often make epic mistakes.
I've read another book by a doctor titled "Whole" and he talked about how the nutrition facts we get on labels are estimates, that often in terms of how our bodies process the fruits and vegetables we eat, it may be off as much by 40 times.
One peach may have 40 times as much vitamin C as a different peach and our bodies have a choice on how to process everything. You see, what goes on in our bodies is so much more complicated and has so much depth to it that a single doctor is not capable of understanding all of it. In fact, a doctor is lucky to be able to master a little bit of what goes on with a few systems. Now, think about having someone that's relatively clueless messing around inside our body. That is scary.
Have you ever had the feeling that the doctor was relatively an idiot about your body during an appointment? I certainly have because I AM IN MY BODY all day every day. How is a doctor supposed to just look at us and know more than what we do? My two and a half year old daughter works this angle on me all day because while I have a lot to think about and do, she is completely focused on what she is doing. She easily pushes through my resistance because she is focused despite not having years of experience in interpersonal relations. My brother worked this angle until he moved out because he knew no matter how much resistance Dad put up that eventually my brother's brute force and persistence would pay off. Experts and experience are overrated against an ordinary person's full attention.
Now yes, there are lots of helpful medical interventions out there. It can help you when you have a cut to get it stitched up. I took my daughter to a doctor when our dog bit her to get her stitched up and yet even that she went through more pain and trauma at the doctor getting it stitched up than she did with the thing itself.
In my opinion, that shows a clear example of most of what goes on.
There's more trauma with participating in a medical system most of the time than there is not participating in it, simply trusting our bodies to fix themselves.
I broke my finger when I was 21. It fixed itself completely with no medical intervention necessary.
What's possible and what we often think is possible are often different. My hope in sharing this with you is to open your idea of what's possible when you realize your body can heal itself if you stop the trauma. I used to have a lot of back problems like chronic back pain. I hurt my back at work and that was also due to my sexual conduct and my stress levels.
Guess what?
With stopping the trauma, with stopping what was causing the problem, stopping my behaviors, I have no back pain. I have almost no neck pain even though these used to be things I suffered on almost a daily basis.
Had I not stopped the trauma and left with the causes in place, I would have ended up having back surgery at some point and likely fell down the rapid hole of having back problems for life.
Fix the cause of the problem and there's no need to get a surgery.
Stop the trauma and rest.
I think the guy who wrote "How Not To Die" made a great analogy in his book, another doctor.
He said, "If we are getting up from sitting on the sofa and we keep banging our knee on the table and we do that enough times you're going to have some serious knee problems. The answer is not to get knee surgery so we can keep standing up from the couch and hitting our knee, the answer is to stop banging our knee off the table, stop hurting whatever part of our body it is."
I saw another guy, he's talking about how bad his back problems are and he keeps going to work and hurting his back more and more, and I could not convince him, "You need to do a different kind of work or your back problems will continue to get worse until you can't handle doing that kind of work. No surgery, no medical procedure can help fix what you are causing. Stop causing the trauma and the problem will fix itself most of the time without surgery."
We have the information we need today to avoid massive pain and suffering. When we stop saying yes to unnecessary medical procedures and instead take responsibility for what we cause while trusting our bodies to fix themselves, we can help our doctors to live more relaxed lives free from the stress of too many patients, help reduce health insurance costs, and eliminate the need to keep building more massive hospitals to serve the sick.
Thank you for reading and I hope this day 189 of Happier People Podcast was helpful.
I love you. You're awesome. Thank you for reading this post, which was originally filmed as the video below.
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Jerry Banfield with edits by @gmichelbkk on the transcript from @deniskj
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