The American healthcare (read: medicine) is the number one cause of death, followed by cardiovascular disease and cancer. This has been announced by 'The Nutrition Institute of America', a non-profit organization that has been conducting independent research for 30 years, with results validated through published peer-reviewed scientific studies. Although this study dates from a few years ago, I think that little has changed in the meantime.
Drugs facilitated by the government are responsible for no less than 700,000 deaths per year. The ironic thing is that the same government, in order to protect us, is telling us something different. Often they try to label anyone who offers alternative medicine as quacks. You can read the full report here.
In my country, the figures are 17,000 - 20,000 deaths a year due to medical errors and drug use. By way of comparison: the number of road fatalities per year is less than 600.
Cash Cows of the pharmaceutical industry
Everyone knows that prevention is better than cure, but that seems to be irrelevant to the medical-pharmaceutical world. Treatment brings in the bucks, prevention only costs money. The Danish medicine professor Peter Gøtzsche says that the pharmaceutical industry is making more victims than the mafia! You can read about it here.
Reading the various reports and articles make me think about the current role of doctors. In fact, we often only visit a doctor when we are sick. This sounds logical, but shouldn’t it be the job of a doctor to educate us about health instead of diseases and medicines?
Long ago, in Eastern medicine, you paid your doctor to stay healthy. In case of illness, it was the job of the doctor to make you better again, because he didn’t do his job properly. He activated or reactivated the patient's immune system so that he could heal himself. It is a huge contrast with the approach that our medical world uses today.
What many people still don’t seem to understand is that medicines do not make you better, they camouflage the symptoms of the actual disease. If you do not tackle the metabolic underlying problem of your illness, you’re on life-long medication. How often do we see that today?
You know them, the Cash Cows of the pharmaceutical industry who get their medicines every week at the pharmacy. But what should we do differently? Learning to eat, live, think and feel differently? A doctor doesn’t have the time to do that at all, he is only there to link disease symptoms to a disease and to make a diagnosis on this basis, so that prescription A and B can be prescribed.
Here lies the core of the problem in the current medical system. I certainly do not want to criticize doctors here. It is just how our society is organized today.
A holistic approach
A doctor should look at the whole person. This means that all the cornerstones of ‘our being’ are included: physically, emotionally, spiritually and mentally. You can also say body, mind, heart and soul.
Starting with the body: what we put into our mouth daily affects our health. 'You are what you eat'. How can you expect a building to stand for 100 years if you use bad building materials? The same applies to your body!
The above sounds obvious. The strange thing is that the medical world is still paying too little attention to this. For example, nutrition and health are certainly not a main subject at a medical school. Simply put, during their training, doctors mainly gain insight into existing diseases. For every disease there are drugs that they can prescribe. Not for nothing are they also called MD (medical doctor).
How would it be if we could put nutrition here instead of medicine?
"Doctors are trained at a nutrition school where they study nutrition and health in order to be able to prescribe nutrition later on."
Let food be your medicine and let medicine be your food. - Hippocrates, founder of modern medicine.
Nutrition is greatly underestimated and has a HUGE influence on the prevention of diseases and your functioning.
A second approach is the approach of our mind. Our thinking determines how we feel and how we interpret the world and the events around us. It is not the event that is annoying, it is your perception of this!
When it’s raining, we talk about bad or dirty weather. It is an idea that has been bred into us. This is also the reason that some people are very susceptible to stress, while others are a bastion of temperance.
One person gets strength from failures and challenges, while others are in a constant cycle of victimhood. If we have long-term stress, our body does not invest any energy in keeping the immune system strong. This makes us very susceptible to diseases.
It also works the other way around
With positive life energy, you give a huge boost to your immune system. Just think of the grandmother of 96 who, despite her metastatic cancer, still experiences the birth of her granddaughter. A few days later, she dies. The working of the mind has an enormous influence on our body!
Structural changes in the human brain
'Emotional' and 'spiritual' are cornerstones that are very closely connected to our mind. There is a reason why meditation is recognized as a health-promoting activity. Science has shown that meditation already brings about structural changes in the human brain within eight weeks.
When people meditate for about 30 minutes a day for eight weeks, more gray brain mass develops in the hippocampus. That is a brain area that is associated with memory and learning ability.
It is fascinating to see that we can change our brain and well-being by practicing meditation. We are very rational. We are living in our head. We contemplate about a lot of things and more and more information needs to be substantiated with numbers.
Some people loose control, so they are completely out of touch with their feeling and their intuition. If you are out of touch with your feelings, you are automatically out of touch with your body.
We can make or break our own health
Do not always count on your doctor if you are ill. We ourselves are responsible for our body. Take health any day. We may have to go back to the basics. Try not just to think of your body. Your body also needs your mind. Do not just try to eat healthy, but give yourself some time to meditate every day. Choose the holistic approach. You have to choose you!