Carpediem Barcelona

Archive for January 6th, 2012

Have you ever noticed that doctors tend to work from the middle out. They determine your obvious symptoms and give you a diagnosis and a prescription on the basis that this pattern of symptoms means this disease and here’s something to take away the symptoms. There is no effort to start at the beginning and find out what caused the symptoms in the first place. Perhaps this is a function of medical costs, limitations on what insurance companies will pay for, or simply time restraints, but it does not contribute to good health.

Diseases tend to fall into three categories: genetic, infectious, and systemic. The first is something that does depend on medical research for a cure. Infectious diseases can be controlled to some extent through vaccination and cleanliness but are otherwise beyond our individual control. Where we can make a big difference in our own health is in the systemic diseases that take a long time to develop and break down our bodies over time – largely the aging diseases of the cardiovascular system, cancer, type II diabetes, dementia, and so on. We’ve all seen the TV commercial for a blood thinning medication that says something along the lines of “while I was raising my family, something else was growing in my arteries.” We don’t need that medication – we need to stop what’s happening while our arteries are still clean.

Doctors tell us that these illnesses are more or less unavoidable as we get older. Why is that? These illnesses are not caused by time alone. If they were, everyone without exception would develop them at a certain point and that’s obviously not the case. Time and age are only factors to the extent that something has been going wrong for a long time until eventually the damage becomes obvious.

That means we all need education on the things that cause damage to our bodies and our cells; not just the pop-culture stuff about exercise, avoiding junk food, and so on, but also more detailed information than doctors are currently able to give us because they aren’t trained in nutrition. We don’t need to become experts in the biochemistry of the human body, but we do need to know more than most of us do at present. For two or three hundred years, people smoked tobacco, oblivious of the dangers to human health. Now we know better and smoking has declined dramatically. We need to apply that same approach to a multitude of other risk factors to lead us to healthy longevity.