What group is a leading cause of most crises our world faces - from economic inequality to deficits to skyrocketing rates of depression?

🧑‍⚕️👩‍⚕️Doctors

Doctors gets paid when you get sick. They lose money when you are healthy. This incentive has had catastrophic consequences.

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Embark on a thought experiment:

Imagine if you could control the levers of society and your only interest was the economic advancement of doctors.

What actions would you take?
(1) The first thing you would do is ensure the majority of the U.S. diet shifts to highly processed food the human body isn't designed to ingest.

Until 80 years ago, 0% of humans diet was processed food. Today it is 70% of the American diet.
You would collude with the processed food industry to convince American consumers and policymakers that this processed food (which, again, the human body isn't designed to process) is healthy.
Food companies would become one of the largest supporters of medical groups, leading the American Heart Association to say Cheerios and sugary Coca-Cola-owned fruit drinks are heart healthy (!).
Why would you have such an interest in pushing processed food?

Because 9 of the 10 killers of Americans are chronic diseases primarily tied to what we eat. These diseases include cancer, heart disease, diabetes, Alzheimer’s disease.
Since doctors only get paid when people are sick, nothing is better for business than chronic diseases. These kill people slowly and cost a lot of money along the way - and it is often hard to pin down the culprit. You don't just get a chronic disease -It grows in you for decades
For instance, a patient dying of Alzheimer’s has almost certainly generated hundreds of thousands of medical bills in their lifetime for related metabolic disorders (like diabetes and heart issues). This is a dream for the doctors, economically speaking.
(2) Since chronic diseases are largely preventable but healthy patients decrease revenue, your medical lobbying group would spend millions of dollars to make sure preventative measures are weakened in laws like Obamacare and state-level laws.
(3) At medical school, you would teach students that preventative medicine and nutrition are for wimps, and that the point of medicine is to "cure". This is like giving a fish in a dirty tank antibiotics (instead of cleaning the tank), but don't question the logic!
At @harvardmed and other major med schools, there would be almost no classes on nutrition (I.e., what humans are putting into their bodies which is the greatest determinate of health).
Oncologists would graduate knowing how to perform chemotherapy, but without an understanding of what actually causes cancer. OB-GYNs would graduate without a full understanding fertility pills and procedures, but without an understanding of what causes infertility.
(4) You'd make sure the godfather of American surgical is an abusive, sexist drug-addict who would make his surgical residents operate for days at a time (not mentioning that he was on cocaine binges that would take him months to recover from). https://www.nytimes.com/2010/04/27/health/27zuger.html
Dr. Halsted designed medical residency using principles of brainwashing (sleep deprivation and verbal/physical abuse if students questioned his words). Importantly, he was intolerant of anyone who suggested there was a better option than surgery.
He ruined the careers of colleagues and students who suggested preventative solutions and through force of will, made sure medical school budgets were steered towards curing diseases that already existed, not studying how to prevent disease.
Halsted's methods would still be the underpinning of American residency education and his picture would hang in many elite hospitals today.
(5) You'd build monumental hospitals in major cities and donate millions of dollars to Republicans and Democrats to make hospital systems (and doctors specifically) an untouchable class (like the military).
(6) You'd support marketing efforts to frame unhealthy lifestyles as a matter of personal choice, ignoring that statistics about metabolic disease (like Type II diabetes) skyrocketing among CHILDREN.
You would frame the fact that the majority of CHILDREN are obese (when almost none were 60 years ago) as an unfortunate byproduct of personal choice. Obesity is highly correlated to depression and chronic disease - which means more medical billings!
To normalize the processed food diet that makes the medical profession so much money, the vending machines and food choices at hospitals (to patients and medical students) would primarily consist of processed food and added-sugar drinks.
(7) You would cheer the fact that that sugar consumption has gone up more than 100x (!) in the past 150 years.
Sugar is great for business! It is added to processed food (under dozens of different names) and is as addictive as heroin. Luckily for the doctors, it kills more slowly and is responsible for racking up $2 trillion in healthcare costs along the way!
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The incentives (and outcomes) of this system are real - and they are so bad, it's hard to believe. While almost every doctor is a dedicated professional- they are collectively contributing to a sick system. I'll be exploring that more here and welcome your comments!
You can follow @calleymeans.
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