Robert Paterson's Weblog

Why Modern Medicine is a Fail for Chronic Illness - And What will replace it

Why has modern medicine failed to stop the chronic illness epidemic? My quick answer is this. Modern Medicine has been captured by a simple linear idea of how the world works. It can only deal with local and simple problems. It cannot comprehend complex problems. It keeps trying to use simple tools, a pill based on one pathway that are based in the simple idea of cause and effect.

This all came from early success. 

Joseph Lister created a breakthrough in medicine in the 1860's when he discovered that you could prevent infection in major operations by washing your hands and spraying the site with carbolic acid. Of course it took more than 10 years to be accepted but by the 1890's surgery did not mean a high chance of dying from infection.

Lister solved a problem that was simple and local. Keep the wound clean. Keep all that touch the wound clean. Keep the room where you treat the wound clean. Jenner did the same with small pox. Vaccinate with a close relative and you create immunity. 

That is progress. But it is also the problem. Ever since then medicine wants the simple answer. It's early success in treating the simple has trained it to see only local cause and effect. 

This is why it has failed and can only fail in treating chronic illness. For Chronic Illness is a complex problem brought on by interactions between your ancestry, the food you eat, what you do with your body, how much time you spend outdoors, your social status and how much sleep you have. There is no local cause. There is no one cause. There is only many variables interacting over long periods of time that result in emergence of disease that in turn result in the emergence of more disease.

You become obese, then you might develop Type 2 Diabetes, then heart disease, then eye problems and so on. Or you might get depressed and then get an auto immune disease such as IBS or worse. 

Modern medicine treats each new disease as a stand alone. Much of the treatment drives further disease.

Our failure to see the difference between what can be seen as simple and local and what is complex is what is at the root of our failure.  Now chronic illness is an epidemic. Every decade in the 20th century it has got worse. Since 1980, the epidemic has accelerated exponentially. Billions of dollars has been spent in "research". The entire medical world has been looking for answers. And they have failed. Why?

I had a flash this weekend as I was doing a final edit for the first book of my series You Don't need a ..." Modern Medicine, like all of our industrial institutions, has a machine design. All are based in a core process that ends in the sale of a product or a procedure.

Modern medicine is a linear world where the pay off is in the sale of a drug, a test, or a procedure such as an operation or a Botox shot. No one gets paid to work with complexity. So no one does. 

All of Modern Medicine is focused on finding direct cause and effect pathways that end in a transaction that is based also on a mass market model. So in this world, depression can be "cured" by one pill. 

If I am correct - what do you think pile in please - then we cannot expect any results from medicine. Medicine is captured by the fallacy that all linear institutions share of the world being linear and so reducing all interaction to a single payoff - a classroom with a teacher - a newspaper with a journalist - a pill with a doctor.

All the money you raise to go to this research is wasted. All the money we spend in this model is wasted. Investing more in the study of epicycles is not going to make the Ptolemaic system work any better.

So what to do?

Dave Snowden's Cynefin model says it all for me. Modern Medicine lives in the right hand quadrant but our chronic illness lives in the left hand side. 

I don't think that the profession of medicine will welcome this insight. After all they all make their money and gain their status by their investment in the fallacy.

But we can help ourselves. For the systemic causes of chronic illness are all rooted in our lifestyle and in our ancestry. While complex they have only 4 quadrants.

1. Diet - Eat real food - give up all processed food - give up all grains and sugars - don't eat any food that has a chemical in it that you cannot read aloud
2. Be Active - Don't sit for more than 3 hours a day - Do physical work - be outside for at least an hour a day - get a dog - garden - get a standing desk
3. Get a Tribe - You will thrive when you have a real place and status in a  social group - we are primates - we have to groom and be groomed
4. Sleep More - Sleep is not just a mechanical time out - it is a vital part of keeping us renewed and well - we need 8 hours a day - have a dark room - light is the enemy - don't watch TV in bed - don't read in bed - don't get stimulated before bed

There is then one variable about how all of this interacts and that is our ancestry. The closer you are to beig a Hunter Gatherer, the worse the outcomes of breaching the evolutionary norms for these quadrants. That is why First Nations People, Polynesians and Scots and Irish do do badly in the chronic illness spectrum. 

There are no doctors in this picture are there? There will be a new research world though. A Big Data Crowd Sourced world. Where millions of us will share data about who we are - the ancestry variable and what we are doing and then we will start to see the emergent truth of what works best for you and for me. 

Emergence is the new research frontier. But the powers that be will hate that because there is no transactional payoff. There will be no pill. There will be no procedure. There will be only the knowledge that what you and I are eating or doing is working or not for us as individuals. 

We will have to find a new way of setting up this kind of research. 

Trillions of dollars of cost will go away. There will be a true revolution in health and in human society. 

Much more later this fall when I will release "You Don't Need a Doctor" I am still on track to release "You Don't Need a Job" and "You Don't need a Banker" at the end of June.

Real Food is Tipping - Chipotle & Hyatt #pasturemeat

People are waking up and are demanding meat that is free from drugs. Pork is the leading edge but the rest will follow. Here is the opportunity for PEI. (link)

It's no longer just foodies at farm markets or Whole Foods buying antibiotic-free, pasture-raised meats.

Increased demand is coming from lots of big players, includingHyatt Hotels; institutional food providers such as Bon Appetit Management Co., which caters to schools and companies; and the fast-food chain Chipotle Mexican Grill. And it's changing the game.

In fact, this year, Chipotle, which is growing so quickly that it's opening about three new locations each week, will slowly braise and sell about 120 million pounds of naturally raised pork, chicken and beef that meets its antibiotic-free standards.........

Lopez says this month Hyatt announced it will offer antibiotic-free, naturally raised meat, poulty and dairy options at all of its hotels. The chain decided to expand these options, in part, after it saw the success of a natural burger on the menu. Meyer Natural Angus supplies those burgers.

"When they [consumers] were given a choice between just burger, and burger that was naturally raised and hormone-free, 30 percent paid a premium, a couple of bucks" to get the antibiotic-free option, Lopez says.

The list of retailers making changes is expanding. Wal-Mart sells a number of antibiotic-free beef and poultry products.

And as demand grows some farmers and suppliers are scrambling to adjust.

One sign of growing pains — temporary hiccups in the supply chain. Hyatt's Lopez says just this week his favorite all-natural chicken supplier — Palouse Pastured Poultry — told him it is temporarily sold out. "I'm in a dry spell," Lopez says. "Their next slaughter is scheduled for the last week of June or the first week of July."

Lopez says the good news is that there are more farmers ramping up this kind of production, so he'll be able to buy antibiotic-free chickens from another farm this month.

As for Behr, and the contribution of his "Lost Taste of Pork" article that helped chart a new course for Chipotle, I called him up to ask him about it.

"This is the one huge piece of good I've done through writing about food," he said with a laugh. "The one, huge, thing!

Food Banks - a failed idea - Social Supermarkets - A Winner #urbanfarming

Here from BBC on how the Greeks are dealing with the collapse of their system:

But the social situation has only worsened, the demonstrators - still incensed - feel ignored and many Greeks are now unrolling a quiet revolution.

Tucked away in a side-street of Marousi, a hilly, green suburb of northern Athens, you come across the local garden initiative.

Marousi's mayor has transformed the land from a derelict dumping ground into small allotments for 40 families battered by the current economic climate.

The sound of raking and digging fills the air.

What, at first glance, may simply look like a healthy hobby is actually a lifeline for people in this community.

Sowing seeds

Argyro Papazoglou and her husband Niko are pensioners. They tell me they worked hard all their lives but have now seen their state pensions drastically reduced.

"We had to do something," Argyro said. The allotment, she explains, provides them with 50% of their food needs, allowing them to make much-needed savings on supermarket bills.

The Marousi allotment project is one of a growing number of examples in Greece where people have pretty much given up asking for help from outside - whether from their national government or the EU.

Instead, they are taking matters in to their own hands and finding ways to help themselves, their neighbours and their local community.

As well as feeding themselves, all the families working on the allotment hand over a chunk of their produce to others in need.

The fruits and vegetables are passed on to what Greeks have dubbed a "social supermarket". It is an idea catching on all over Greece.

Some of these supermarkets are supported by the state but a growing number of private initiatives stack the shelves with goods - from oranges to olive oil to nappies - donated by individuals or companies.

Ray of light

Social supermarkets allow low income families to shop at cut-down prices.

The money they pay is then used to provide the most destitute with goods for free, even helping them with gas and electricity bills.

Greece's Child and Family group supports more than 4,500 families and has a growing army of voluntary aid workers, doctors and dentists.

Why I am Backing Inspired Farmers Urban Farming Project #localfood #resiliency

I am backing the Inspired Farmers Project - they will start the first demo for Urban Farming in Charlottetown next week. 

The project is lead by Karen Murchison of the Queen St Commons and her partners at the Murphy Community Centre (Where most of the "Farm" will be) The City of Charlottetown, Cycle PEI, Holland College and the Food bank and Soup Kitchen in Charlottetown

It's a tiny project but has huge potential to make PEI more sustainable. If you want to make a difference that please help. Your help can be a few dollars or a donation of stuff.

You can donate $ here:

Or you can  help with stuff like this:

Here is how I see this project and why I am backing them and why if you care for the future of PEI, you might help too.

It starts often like this - with a community using a barren public space to grow food as a demo. The idea is to inspire us to think differently about the urban landscape. No longer only grass, concrete and isolated trees. When we see this in downtown Charlottetown, we can imagine how different our street could be.

This is not simply a new esthetic either. In World War II 40% of the food eaten was grown by people at home - most in cities. 

At the heart of this is the food and the health crisis. By making urban farming - which uses very small spaces and high intensity - important we all learn how to grow our own food. This Saturday there is a workshop on this. We meet our neigbours in a new way. We are more active and we have better nutrition.

We start to escape the trap of being dependent on Factory Food.  The Food Bank becomes a hub of a network of people who help each other grow food and cook food.  Growing food and making meals return as skills that most of us have lost.

This is big - isn't it? And you only have to make a small step to help. 

We start this weekend! 

Why we are becoming more stupid - 2 ways to get smart again #health

For some two million years of our evolution our brains became larger. John Hawks, anthropologist at the University of Wisconsin, says there has been a dramatic reversal. Over the past 20,000 years, the average volume of the human male brain has decreased from 1,500 cubic centimeters to 1,350 cc, losing a chunk the size of a tennis ball.

This is major downsizing in an evolutionary eye blink. Hawks claims that If our brain keeps dwindling at that rate over the next 20,000 years, it will start to approach the size of that found in Homo erectus, a relative that lived half a million years ago and had a brain volume of only 1,100 cc. (Link to more)

So here it is. The brain is shrinking. We are going back. 

What might have happened? I suspect two factors. After agriculture, most of us became domesticated. We literally became like sheep: animals who relied on our masters to shape our lives. We depend more and more on systems we don't control or understand to live. So we don't have to think. We stop being aware. We don't need as much brain. We were like wolves, then German Shepherds and now we are Pekineses. 

Then - The embodiment of wild and wisdom - Now the embodiment of the opposite

Two utterly different representatives of leadership!

And secondly we eat a very poor diet. At the advent of agriculture we lost 6 inches of height from poor nutrition.

Since 1980, we now eat an industrial diet. 

By 2050 nearly 100% of Americans will be obese.  We eat an Idiocracy Diet now like this one. 

It took a million years for us to lose our gut as a primate. The key to the new large brain was nutrition. When we learned how to use fire, we could eat more meat.

(The Gorilla is not fat - he has a huge gut to process all these veggies)

As we ate more nutritional dense food, our brain grew larger and our gut smaller. We became more smart and so better hunters and ate more meat and so on. 

We don't gain more gut - we just get fat. This is what most people will look like soon. 

Human Evolution is in reverse now. So what to do?

If you live like a sheep, you will become one. Become a "hunter gatherer" again. Work to control your own world and depend less and less on "THEM". Become "Wild" again. Largely support your self. Progressively disconnect from the system. 

Easier to do, eat more brain food - dense nutrition - eat more meat. eat real food. Cut back on the grains. We are not chimps or Gorillas. We have been designed for millions of years to eat food that is dense with nutrition.

Eat Real Food - Live a Real Life.

The History of Food - Why we are being poisoned today

Eating healthy takes a lot of effort in today's society when we are surrounded by food that is bad for us - but the alternative is you will get very sick and die.

 

School and Pop - A Wellness Battleground

Sometime this summer PEI will announce its Wellness Strategy. What will it say? 

If we start at getting our sugar and HFCS consumption down it will be a great start. School is a battleground where there is room to act. 

We could ban Pop and all sugary drinks at School. This includes Low fat milk, nearly as much sugar as pop. Juice which has as much and all so called sports drinks. These kind of drinks are the mother-lode of sugar and HFCS delivered to our children. They are the #1 source of calories for boys.

By doing this we put the issue publicly on the table. The rock in that pond will ripple across the Island. This way we will get everyone talking which is surely what we need?

There is precedent in the US where schools are starting to ban Pop. (link to more NYT)

Although schools have been removing sodas and other sugary drinks from vending machines for the last few years, the Faulkton district is one of the first in the country to institute a ban, according to the Alliance for a Healthier Generation, which works to reduce childhood obesity.

Cold, bubbly, sweet soda, long the American Champagne, is becoming product non grata in more places these days. Schools are removing sugary soft drinks from vending machines at a faster pace, and local governments from San Antonio to Boston are stepping up efforts to take them out of public facilities as the nation’s concerns about obesity and its costs grow.

Last year, the average American drank slightly under two sodas a day, a drop in per capita consumption of about 16 percent since the peak in 1998, according to Beverage Digest, a trade publication.

And its not just health but brain fucntioning itself. You get stupid by consuming a lot of HFCS.  (link)

""Eating a high-fructose diet over the long term alters your brain's ability to learn and remember information. But adding omega-3 fatty acids to your meals can help minimize the damage."

While earlier research has revealed how fructose harms the body through its role in diabetes, obesity and fatty liver, this study is the first to uncover how the sweetener influences the brain.

The UCLA team zeroed in on high-fructose corn syrup, an inexpensive liquid six times sweeter than cane sugar, that is commonly added to processed foods, including soft drinks, condiments, applesauce and baby food. The average American consumes more than 40 pounds of high-fructose corn syrup per year, according to the U.S. Department of Agriculture. "We're not talking about naturally occurring fructose in fruits, which also contain important antioxidants," explained Gomez-Pinilla, who is also a member of UCLA's Brain Research Institute and Brain Injury Research Center. "We're concerned about high-fructose corn syrup that is added to manufactured food products as a sweetener and preservative."

Then we will all see the wider issue of sugar and HFCS in the health of the Province (link)

How many times do you ask (or get asked), “Why do some cultures eat carbs like rice and not get the same diseases we do?”  A quick glance at China, for example, sheds some light on this.  They may eat rice, but they sure aren’t producing (or eating) much sugar, on average.  Furthermore, the distribution of sugar consumption within the country is wide.  In other words, while the few wealthy people do eat amounts of sugar approaching Western amounts (along with other simple refined grains), the vast majority of non-wealthy inhabitants do not.  So while some have asserted that animal products and fats are the clear culprits explaining the different disease patterns in Asia, they’re missing this important point:  Given the absence of mechanistic and evolutionary reasons why animal products and fats are bad for us, is it more likely that sugar consumption is the single biggest factor differentiating the state of disease across these populations?

 

 

What eggs do you eat - and why should you care? Why Pasture is what I eat

Watch The Story of an Egg on PBS. See more from The Lexicon of Sustainability.

The Real Food Pyramid

Source: eugenia.queru.com via E on Pinterest

Local Food - It's war

 

Stand up for real food! Food grown in a safe and authentic way. Eat real food. Be healthy and prosper!