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.

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.

Watching this with interest #paleo

You will probably get cancer - but you don't have to

PEI has the highest cancer mortality rates in Canada. As you will see from the stats below, you as an Islander will have a very good chance of getting cancer and dying from it. As the husband of a cancer person, I can also remind you that the treatment is as bad as dying.  As a citizen, I also worry as the costs of treatment are very high. 

But we give only lip service to prevention.

Nothing was said to my wife about how she might live her life so to reduce her chances of a recurrence  - other than to keep her porto cath (a device put in a vein in her chest to make it easy to give her more chemo) and to take a drup Tamoxifen that has brutal side effects. 

Lung Cancer rates are down nationally. No thanks to medicine. It's all due to the public health message getting through. It is fewer people smoking.

We will get all cancer rates down, if we do the same for the underlying causes. We have to get serious about the lifestyle issues that drive the other cancers.  We have to get the facts right about what we must stop doing to have a better chance.

It is not your genes and things that are outside of your control that give you cancer. It is food and other choices. When we come to grips with this, we will have to same success that we are seeing with smoking.

Lecture over - here is the data. You can choose to be a cancer patient or not. 

Overall, though, the picture still remains quite alarming. The province continues to have the highest incidence rate among men and the highest mortality rates among women compared to the rest of the country.

The Canadian Cancer Society estimates that there will be 186,400 new cases of cancer in the country this year with 75,700 deaths anticipated.

About 880 Islanders will be diagnosed with cancer and approximately 380 will die from the disease in 2012. Of these newly diagnosed cases, more than half will be prostate, lung, colorectal and breast cancer.

The Canadian Cancer Society reports that if this trend continues, 40 percent of women and 45 percent of men will be diagnosed with cancer sometime in their life and approximately one in four will die from the disease.

Lung cancer continues to be the leading cause of death for Canadian men and women and Islanders are no exception. P.E.I. has the second highest mortality rate among men for lung cancer.

In 2012 an estimated 60 men and 45 women will die of lung cancer in this province and another 105 Islanders will be diagnosed with the disease.

Dr. Dagny Dryer, a medical oncologist at the P.E.I. Cancer Treatment Centre, is concerned by the overall high cancer rate in the province.

She notes a "significant problem'' exists with prostate cancer in P.E.I. and she is also struck by the number of new cases of breast cancer that are very advanced.

People are waking up to the health risks of eating bread - Hitting McCains Hard too

Bread sales are down - a lot!

This is not a fad. More and more people are gluten intolerant. More and more try not eating bread and see how well they feel as a result.

This movement away from bread is having a major impact on mass market bakers like McCains, who have high fixed costs. The irony is that their response is to talk more about why bread is so healthy??????

First, cash-strapped consumers are being more disciplined with not wasting food products.

“Bread is a perishable product, so if one is more careful with it, putting it in the freezer for example, it doesn’t go stale,” he said.

Also, recent dietary shifts due to a stigma associated with wheat products and an embracing of gluten-free diets by people who are not adverse to gluten have driven down bread volumes, Mr. Hetherington said.

Maple Leaf president and CEO Michael McCain said bread woes are shared across the industry as “fundamental bread consumption is down.” Mr. McCain cited dietary trends, demographic shifts, and more cost-conscious consumers for the downtrend.

Its Bakery Products Group dragged down profits, experiencing a steep 73% drop in adjusted operating earnings to $3.3-million in the first quarter of 2012 from $12.2-million last year. Mr. McCain said the main factors were volume softness in fresh bakery sales and duplicate of costs related to the company’s new Hamilton bakery business.

Analysts anticipated bakery sales to fall, but were surprised by the magnitude of the effect on earnings.

“As [McCain] said, a big fixed-cost company, you get a small decline in volume and it really hits the profitability,” said Bob Gibson, an analyst with Octagon Capital Corporation.

Mr. McCain said Maple Leaf is addressing the volume crunch to meet its end-of-year earnings target.

Maple Leaf will implement marketing initiatives to drive sales in the category, including focusing on the health benefits of bread and target growth categories, such as English muffins and bagels, he said. The company also expects to benefit from lower commodity costs, including wheat, to improve margins later in the year

 

Nobody Expects the Comfy Chair to Kill us - But it does

I always thought that this was a joke but as you will see in the next video where I talk with Professor Michael Rose, the comfy chair is a killer.

 

And now the science for why the chair is a killer. 

 

Sitting a lot is killing you - 40% more chance of dying of CHD if you sit a lot

" people who sat more than 11 hours a day had a 40% higher risk of dying in the next three years than people who sat less than four hours a day. This was after adjusting for factors such as age, weight, physical activity and general health status, all of which affect the death risk. It also found a clear dose-response effect: the more people sat, the higher their risk of death" (link)

How can you sit less? I sit less by standing at work. It cost me nothing to make this change other than sore legs for about 2 months. Now after a year, I find sitting uncomfortable.

This is my home made Standing Desk - not much of a photographer but you can see what it is.

I have been standing at work now for nearly a year. I started this because I became aware that THE "Take More Exercise" advice, while good, misses the larger point. We are very inactive. It's not just that most of us don't work with our bodies anymore, it is that we sit all day.

Add up the hours. Your commute - sitting in the car - say an hour or two. A full day at work or at School - 8 hours. Then 4 hours in front of the TV of computer. Then bed for 6 - 8 hours. 14 hours on our bum all day. Your one hour workout twice a week is not going to be much help.

Think about this and how you can help yourself and your kids.

Here is the latest on the research:

It is now well accepted that too much sitting is unhealthy. Studies in the last few years have found that death risks rise when people watch spend more leisure time in front of a computer screen or TV or simply sit too much.

The current study took a more direct approach, looking at the relationship of total daily sitting time to the likelihood of dying within the next three years, seeking to put a number on just how harmful prolonged sitting is.

Its most striking finding was that people who sat more than 11 hours a day had a 40% higher risk of dying in the next three years than people who sat less than four hours a day. This was after adjusting for factors such as age, weight, physical activity and general health status, all of which affect the death risk. It also found a clear dose-response effect: the more people sat, the higher their risk of death.

The results are part of the Sax Institute's 45 and Up Study, the largest ongoing study of healthy aging in the Southern Hemisphere. It compared the self-reported daily sitting time of 222,497 Australian adults 45 years or older with their likelihood of death in the next three years.

Healthy or sick, active or inactive, the more people sat, the more likely they were to die in the next three years. Physical activity did reduce this risk significantly: the 40% higher death risk found when comparing people who sat the most to those who sat the least increased to 100% when comparing those who sat the most and exercised the least to those who sat the least and exercised the most. But while the death risk was much lower for anyone who exercised five hours a week or more, it still rose as these active people sat longer.

In other words, people still need to exercise, but it's also important to spend less time sitting.

 

Health Myths - Animal Fat is Bad - Vegetable Fat is Good

We have been programmed. For 30 years we have been told that we need to eat more healthy grains and to eat vegetable fats rather than animal fats. And the result? The epidemic of chronic disease and obesity has exploded. All this has taken place in 30 years - demanding that we look for a cause - something new in our diet.

The smoking gun is the Food Guide. The epidemic took off starting in 1987. At current rates, 100% of Americans will be obese by 2048!

At the heart of the new advice in 1987 was to eat less animal fat and more "healthy" grains. Inside this was the belief that margarine and vegetable oils were better for us too. Neither of which had ever been eaten by humans before and all of which required massive processing.

Here is the skinny on vegetable oils from Wellness Mama:

As an interesting correlation, check out the rates of heart disease and cancer since then. As this article notes:

All one has to do is look at the statistics to know that it isn’t true. Butter consumption at the turn of the century was eighteen pounds per person per year, and the use of vegetable oils almost nonexistent. Yet cancer and heart disease were rare. Today butter consumption hovers just above four pounds per person per year while vegetable oil consumption has soared–and cancer and heart disease are endemic.

Since the 1950′s these vegetable oils and their derivatives have been increasingly used in processed foods and for frying or cooking. They are marketed as healthy because they contain monounsaturated fats and some level of Omega 3 fatty acids.

What’s Wrong with Vegetable Oils?

There are many problems with vegetable oil consumption, and in my opinion, no amount is safe. To understand why, let’s look at a few of the biggest problems with vegetable oils:

Our Bodies Aren’t Meant to Consume Them!

The human body is about 97% saturated and monounsaturated fat, with only 3 % Polyunsaturated fats. Half of that three percent is Omega-3 fats, and that balance needs to be there. Vegetable oils contain very high levels of polyunsaturated fats, and these oils have replaced many of the saturated fats in our diets since the 1950s.

The body needs fats for rebuilding cells and hormone production, but it has to use the building blocks we give it. When we give it a high concentration of polyunsaturated fats instead of the ratios it needs, it has no choice but to incorporate these fats into our cells during cell repair and creation.

The problem is that polyunsaturated fats are highly unstable and oxidize easily in the body (if they haven’t already oxidized during processing or by light exposure while sitting on the grocery store shelf). These oxidized fats cause inflammation and mutation in cells.

In arterial cells, these mutations cause inflammation that can clog arteries. When these fats are incorporated into skin cells, their mutation causes skin cancer. (This is why people often get the most dangerous forms of skin cancer in places where they are never exposed to the sun, but that is a topic for another day!)

When these oils are incorporated into cells in reproductive tissue, some evidence suggests that this can spur problems like endometriosis and PCOS. In short, the body is made up of saturated and monounsaturated fats, and it needs these for optimal health.

 

Me back from the brink - what about you?

In 2009 I was a typical Islander. Aged 60 on my way to Diabetes and being disabled.

In the next year we will find out that the health care system will not be able to look after us the way we thought it would. All sorts of cuts will have to be made.

But before we all panic, I want to tell you why you should not. For only you - not Doug Currie - can make you healthy. If you have a chronic illness, only you can cure yourself.

The issue is did you know this and what do you need to know to help you take charge of your health?

Back in early 2009, I knew what most of us do. I should eat lots of healthy grains, low or no fat and cut back on the sugar. And also take lots of exercise. This is what we are told is the recipe.

Back in 2009 I was doing all the things that we are told to do - especially eat lots of healthy grains. I did not eat much processed food or have much sugar. I did not drink pop. Compared to many who do eat a lot of processed food etc - I was a poster boy.

Some poster boy! I was doing it all except the gym bit and I was getting worse every year. Is this you too?

In the decade since I turned 50, I put on more and more weight and visceral fat. This is my least healthy and most at risk. My knees were shot too and I was looking into knee surgery. I had gurd, sleep apnea and low energy. Low other drives too!

Is this you too?

So what is different? I discovered that what we have been told is wrong. Grains are the worst thing that we can eat and that while we need to be active, going to the gym does very little on its own. Exercise is much leas important a factor than diet.

If you follow the party line as you get over the age of 50, you too will get fat and ill like me.

Giving up grains was the key to my changing my health. I don't eat all the other bad stuff either. I do eat a lot of meat and really a lot of animal fat. I eat NO vegetable fat or oil. I eat no legumes. I eat a lot of veggies but they are not as important as meat and fat. I put a lot of butter on my veggies. I eat some nuts but no peanuts - they are legumes.(Beans) I drink no beer except when I cheat but I drink a lot of wine. (Grains)

I look quite different now. I am still an old fart but I am a slim and healthy old fart. I weigh what I did when I got married 37 years ago. My blood and blood pressure are of a 25 year old. I sleep like a baby. The gurd and sleep apnea are gone. I hardly snore. My knees don't hurt all the time and let's say all the bits work just fine.

So how did I do this?

Years of Robin begging me to lose the tummy did not get me started. I believed that how I was transforming into a fat old man was part of my destiny. I thought that this was normal and that I would have to go to the gym for hours every week to get thin. I hate going to the gym. 

But then a friend put me in touch with a remarkable scientist, Michael Rose, and I saw another path. He told me that we are all designed to be active and healthy for our entire lives. And that to return to my real destiny would mean that I needed only to eat what I was designed to eat. So I gave up grains as well as all processed food (I do cheat now and then).

I am more active now. I have a standing desk and sit maybe for 3 hours a day but I still don't go to the gym. 

I already had a great social life and I do live in a small community - all part of the "design". I do have a lot of control too. But all these other factors I had too before I stopped being a fat old man.

This has been the project of my life. I have proved to myself that I can be in charge of my own health. You can be too. And hey we have no choice. The healthcare system is going to shrink. There are just too many of us old farts. 

So will you be disabled and a burden on your family and yourself - the average Island male is by 65 - or will you take charge?

Here is another story of the same issue - How as we age and eat the wrong thing we have to get fat and ill but if we change the diet and take in some ways less exercise we get fit again - it's a paradox

 

Sleep - Stop Worrying about it - Reassurance here

Lots of people today sleep very badly. I sleep a lot better and more now but I do always wake up at about 2am and fuss for about an hour. I read this today - that tells me that this is quite normal. How about you?

Our anxiety about sleep can stop us from sleeping well - also naps are good and normal!

"The data suggests that if you go back 100 years, people were sleeping an average of nine hours a night," Dr. Naiman says. "People also had a very different relationship with sleep at that time. Sleep patterns were very different. It was routine that people woke up in the middle of the night for about an hour or two. It was called night watch. Everybody did it. People also slept during the day.

Think of the Yin and Yang; the white wave representing in this case waking; the dark Yin wave representing night and sleep. There is a dark Yin sphere within the white wave. This is a place of rest in the middle of waking consciousness and natural rhythms. In the middle of the dark Yin wave, there is a place of Yang, a white sphere suggesting that there is a place where awareness, a kind of waking, awareness in the middle of the night.

When we lose sight of that, we overreact to two things. We tend to overreact to being sleepy during the day, and we tend to overreact to being awake at night. And overreactions cause anxiety."

To Nap or Not to Nap…

According to Dr. Naiman, we're actually biologically programmed to nap during the daytime, typically in the middle of the afternoon. Some European countries still adhere to the daily siesta and close shop for a couple of hours in the middle of the day when the heat is also at its most pressing. Most employers in Western countries, however, do not accommodate daily snoozing, so when the natural tendency to get drowsy sets in, you may try to alleviate it with coffee, or simply fight the urge to take a nap.

The problem is, you're now training your body to resist the urge to sleep, which can then lead to being unable to easily fall asleep at night.

"Also, in the middle of the night, when we falsely assume that any kind of awareness is pathological inside, people get up and go, "Oh crap, its insomnia." I've asked hundreds and hundreds of people over the years… "What's the first thing that comes to your mind when you wake up in the middle of the night?" The most common answer I've gotten over the years is, "Oh, shit." People wake up and they curse their wakefulness."

However, as Dr. Naiman explains, occasional waking in the middle of the night, perhaps as many as five times, is actually completely normal. You may pull up the covers or fluff your pillow, then go back to sleep.

"[But] when we learn this automatic judgmental reaction to wakefulness; as soon as there is a spark of it and we judge it, we spin out," he says.

Another common reaction is to look at the clock.

"Patients have actually said to me, "Gosh, I wake up, I get exactly 2:20 every morning." …It's the first thing people—they want to anchor in waking consciousness. They want a sense of control over this ephemeral night consciousness. This addiction to numbers is the problem.

There are nuances with sleep just as there are with waking. There are so many different ways of being awake, different kinds of experiences. Light sleep is fine. Being half awake and half asleep is fine. In fact, I really believe that in any moment in time during the day and at night, it's a mixed percentage. Right now, you and I are talking; we're probably 98 percent awake. I'm just making up a number. There is a restful part of us. We might say we're 2 percent asleep. Closer to bed time it might be 50/50.

What we call being sleepy is being 'part of awake, part asleep.' In the middle of the night when we get up to use the bathroom, we might be 95 percent asleep still and 5 percent awake just to find our way there. We need to allow a mix of these different forms of consciousness."