Robert Paterson's Weblog

When the Corporatists discover how they have been betrayed in health - watch out

This image shows the sale of Indulgences. By paying money to the pope, you got a certificate that guaranteed that the person named would go to heaven. Millions were raised this way. The money was used to pay off the Vatican's debts and to rebuild St Peters. You may laugh at this. How gullible could people be?

The point of this post is that the story  of Indulgences is being played out again right now. Today we pay money to the institution of medicine to make us well. The church did not save our souls and medicine today is not saving us from the epidemic of chronic illness.

In the 1500's when the trick was revealed, the result was the Reformation. I think that the same massive change in society is about to take place again. When the fallacy of medicine as confronted by chronic illness is revealed to millions who will have paid their money to have no cure; when it is seen that this has been a huge confidence trick that has enriched people who had a vested interest in our suffering; then the whole system will come down. 

We are not quite at this point yet. Right now many still put all their faith in medicine. 

Most of us believe that only medicine can save our health. What this means in practice is that most believe that only by paying for drugs, test and treatments have we any chance of getting well. Most of us cannot imagine any alternative. We too have given up all our power to the church of medicine.

But some of us are taking charge. Some of us are using diet and lifestyle to keep us well and even cure us. I had thought that this example might help many others do the same. But I am finding out that this is not true. Many that I know well seem to discount entirely what has happened to me and to Robin and continue to place all their faith in their doctors.

They trust their doctors even though there is no evidence that what their doctors have on offer us making any difference in chronic illness. 

For, who knows of anyone that has been cured of type 2 diabetes by only obeying their doctor? Who knows of anyone who has been cured of MS by their doctor? Who knows of anyone that has had their depression "cured" by drugs? Who knows of anyone who has had IBS or Crohns cured by drugs? Who has had bad psoriasis or arthritis cured by drugs? In spite of the "War on Cancer" cancer rates continue to rise. Taking an overall view, while there have been a few victories, deaths are no less than in the 1950's. Heart disease was all but unknown before 1900. Today it remains the # killer - in spite of the billions spent on statin drugs. But in spite of the vast amount that we spend on healthcare, it has not halted the epidemic of chronic illness and it cures almost no one.

So why do most people still depend on their doctor?

I think the answer to my own question is that not enough have been failed yet. But within 5 years as the boomers go into full on chronic ill health the failure will be felt. The second reason is culture. Too many people cannot imagine that medicine cannot help them. 

Why this cultural blindness?

I think that the answer is cultural and starts in our schools. We are taught over 12 years to submit to the authority figure. Any questioning of her rule is punished. What is rewarded is compliance with doctrine. We are not taught to question or to think for ourselves. 

We have been taught to remain stunted and even infantile in our development.

In the worst case we remain tribal and childlike. Our emotional age might be 6 on a good day. The world is seen as a mystery where only god like beings such as a teacher, a doctor or a boss can help us. In such a world, we are helpless. Even if we were granted freedom we would not know what to do with it. So our poor health cannot be anything to do with us. Our little pleasures of smoking, fast food and TV are all we have. They are us. Without them we would be nothing. So only a pill, the healthcare system can save us and god help the politician that does not see it this way. For we have a lot of votes.

Nearly as bad are those of us who live like teens. We look to our parents to solve the problems of the world while we get on with having a good time. We find shiny toys very important. We seek status symbols. We believe that only the experts know what to do to fix things. We don't have to do any work or thinking because that's their job. Other people's approval is very important. Especially the approval of authority figures such as our boss or a doctor. We cannot possible say, "I won't take that drug - haven't you read about the side effects!" We frown on people who do rebel and tell each other smugly that they are stupid outsiders. We do our own job and we don't care about anything else. That would be someone else's problem. We never think about the consequences of what we do. We support the persecution of innovators. We choose not to explore what is going on because that is not our role. We dare not disobey the leader. He must be right. 

But then there is a growing set of people who share a different culture. We are like parents. We believe that the world demands our participation because it will affect our kids and all the generations to come. We found school awkward. We might have been the kids who got into trouble by asking too many questions. We find watching team sports very boring. We would rather play ourselves. We tend to work for ourselves. We find bureaucracies very challenging. We have learned that the toys do not bring happiness. We do a lot of critical reading and we talk a lot among ourselves about how the world is going. Many of us have gone beyond talking and are now leading our lives quite differently from the rest of the culture. But this group is not very large and has no power and is easily discounted.

The 1% is outside all of this. They are the ones that hold the strings that make us all dance.  The greatest lie that the 1% uphold is the Corporate Dream of "Success". Work hard. Go to school. Take out school debt. Take out a mortgage. Move to the city. Borrow to get a car. Put your kids in daycare while you have a career. "Go on girl you can do it all". When you have health insurance with your job, you will be well. Fit in. Obey. Support the persecution of outsiders.

But as more and more cannot get jobs, have their pensions taken away, get early retirement, lose their homes, sink into debt and get ill and not get better, find that they cannot have it all, this group will start to wake up. And when they do.....

In France it was not the peasants that lead the revolution, it was the betrayed lawyers and bureaucrats. In Russia it was not the peasants but the lawyers and the middle class.

I see the tipping point in chronic illness. Many people I know still have faith in the old system. They are obeying orders. They are being good. They see the alternative but are too scared to act. But they will pay a terrible price. They will lose their health. They will die after enduring terrible treatments. They will go bankrupt because of the costs. They will break up their families. 

They will see that their choice to obey, took them to a terrible place. They will awaken. They who have lost so much will have no mercy.

They will see how they have been used. This is what caused the Reformation. This is what will drive our own. 

The clock ticks.

The FDA and BIg Pharma want us to be ill? - 3 issues this weekend suggest they do

This weekend I saw a number of news items that caused me to think more about the role of the corporatization of health. It is clear to me that there is a a group of people who don't want us to be healthy and who are invested in our being ill. If I am right what can we do?

In this post I make a case for the problem and I offer up a way of dealing with it. 

Breast Cancer and the BRCA1 Gene

First of all, if you wish to test for the Breast Cancer Gene that affects abiut 10% of women but also drives a very high chance of getting Breast Cancer, you will have to have at least $4,000. For this test and the gene are subject to copyright! Link Here

"Unlike routine tests for diabetes or high cholesterol, however, the BRCA gene evaluation — performed by only one company in the United States, Myriad Genetics — is phenomenally expensive, with a “list price” close to $4,000 when a related genomic-rearrangement test is included in the analysis, which oncologists typically recommend."

If you go to 23andme you can get a whole range of gene tests for $99! Testing for genes is no longer expensive. But if you have the copyright and you have a gene and a test that is rooted in a killer problem, then you can charge what you want. What a business!

C Difficile and Fecal Transplants

C Difficile is a major cause of death now. It is caused by a failure of our gut health. Poor diet and the use of antibiotics can kill off the good bacteria leaving us exposed to the bad. THE way of curing this is very simple and works in less than 2 days. It costs almost nothing. It is called a "Fecal Transplant". And yes it is just that. Good poo from a person with a healthy gut is given to the sick person via an enema. Think Blood Transfusion. 

There is next to no risk. The patient is often at death's door and time is critical. But now the FDA want to regulate this. Not by setting a standard that any practitioner can get ready to apply but by demanding a lengthy application for a licence to experiment on a human. More at this link here at Wired. 

This can be a death sentence if there is no time. I have to ask why? I can only think that the FDA are against treatments that cannot be monetized by their supporters.

The FDA is always quick to step in when there is a non corporate idea. 

Alzheimers and Vitamin B

Alzheimers could become the most expensive disease out there as many boomers get it. Of course the real costs are social. Sufferers demand such a high level of care. Big Pharma have been trying for ages to find THE drug and have failed. We are starting to understand though that Alzheimers is a lifestyle disease. It is avoidable. The pathway is diet again. 

High levels of Vitamin B preserve brain power and size. More at this link

"Older people’s brains shrink about 0.5 percent a year from the age of 60, and faster in people with vitamin B12 deficiency, mild cognitive impairment or Alzheimer’s disease, Smith said. If that pace can be significantly slowed before full-blown Alzheimer’s develops, it may delay the disease’s progression so that older people can enjoy better lives until they die from another cause.

“If you delay the onset by five years, you can halve the number of people dying from it,” says Jess Smith, a research communications officer at the Alzheimer’s Society, a U.K. charity."

So here is the Big Pharma issue. More research has to be done. But in today's research climate, unless there is a blockbuster pill that can be copyrighted, there is no money. Research into real health does not get funded.

“We need bigger studies and more evidence that looks at what homocysteine is doing and what is actually going on in the brain.”

A. David Smith agrees. He plans a study of B vitamins in 1,200 people over 70 with MCI and elevated homocysteine. He needs 6 million pounds ($9.1 million) to pay for it. Miller plans another large study and wants to see if folic acid in flour in the U.S. leads to different results there. Meanwhile, the lack of blockbuster-drug potential presents funding hurdles.

“The pharmaceutical companies aren’t going to make any money on this and the supplement companies aren’t going to have enough money to do it,” Miller said. “This would have to be government-funded. I’m just not sure the climate is right for it now.”

The good news is that the American Gut Health project has shown us that we can crowd fund this kind of research. I have sent my poo in already! I also participate in the D Action Study to study the impact of Vitamin D.  I am going to apply to test my genes at 23andme. I want to check out my ancestry which is a major factor in health risk.

I think that my health is up to me. I do my own research. I help others do theirs. I take action. We can all do this can't we?

If gut health IS the core health issue. Then all of us can take control. If you wish to know more about this, Michael Pollan has written a wonderful introduction here. If you want to know even more, Jeff Leach has a short book for $2.99 that is the bible here. 

Health is the arena where we as individuals can beat the system.  

 

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Why there is hope that you can make a living and have a good life today

What is the economy that will give us all hope - real hope that we can have a good life? I think that it is what I call the Networked Artisan. This is a person who makes things by their own hands but uses often the new tools to do this and the network to connect and sell to a community that can be next door or across the way.

It can be a micro farmer like Amy and Verena at Heart Beet Organics on PEI who operate a 2 acre farm using large greenhouses to produce veggies 10 months of the year. 

As part of the pattern for all Networked Artisans, they sell direct to customers and create close personal relationships with them. Farmers markets grew by 17% last year. Food will be at the core of this new personal movement. Trust is at the heart of it.

In the UK there are web hubs springing up that make it easier and easier for customers to become part of this. 

This is Big Barn. Check it out and see how amazing it is. 

Are you a knitter? There are 3 million knitters in an online community called Ravelry. Here they compare projects, help each other and sell things to each other. It is a vast tribe of knitters. 

Here is the link. 

Underneath all of this is a new market. This is the market of the people who no longer trust the corporate offering. They know that they lose control and that they are often lied to. This is why food is a wedge. For as people learn how the processed diet is so bad for them AND how they have been misled as to its safety, they seek food that they can trust.

How big is this market?

2.5% of a population are the Innovators who jump in early. In America that is about 8 million people.

13.5% are the Early Adopters - that is about another 40 million. 

So nearly 50 million people are ready for this kind of offering. That is a huge market for a small artisan. A market that the Big Corporates cannot reach and compete in any more. They will be excluded over time.

Meanwhile, all the technology that is taking away the jobs in that sector, is helping the New Artisan. You have rock bottom communication costs. You have top flight tools. Want an ecommerce tool - Woo Commerce. Want CRM - Paupress. Want to publish a book - pressbooks.  Want make a prototype - 3D printers. Each year, the tools get better and cheaper.

And most importantly as we see in Ravelry and Big Barn, we see the online aggregators getting better. You have an appartment - Airbnb. You make fountain pens - Etsy. 

The next wave are going to be local aggregators like this new one for Portland.

Soon every commnity will have such a site. It will get easier and easier to become part of this.

The future is here now. The empowered person in the empowering network of people who want trust and meaning back in their lives.

So what do you do?

My first book - You Don't Need a Job - explores this shift in detail. If you want to know more abouyt what is going on and how to become part of this, then please give it a whirl. 

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A measure of why we are F**ked

The system is rigged to divert our wealth into the "Casino" - why do anything worthwhile if you can make money by playing the game?

More here

This is also a huge driver of the health epidemic - More here

So what to do?

Disconnect yourself as much as possible from the system which is run as part of the game. For instance look at how the health system itself is run in America:

"Mercy Hospital is owned by an organization under the umbrella of the Catholic Church called Sisters of Mercy. Its mission, as described in its latest filing with the IRS as a tax-exempt charity, is “to carry out the healing ministry of Jesus by promoting health and wellness.” With a chain of 31 hospitals and 300 clinics across the Midwest, Sisters of Mercy uses a bill-collection firm based in Topeka, Kans., called Berlin-Wheeler Inc. Suits against Mercy patients are on file in courts across Oklahoma listing Berlin-Wheeler as the plaintiff. According to its most recent tax return, the Oklahoma City unit of the Sisters of Mercy hospital chain collected $337 million in revenue for the fiscal year ending June 30, 2011. It had an operating profit of $34 million. And that was after paying 10 executives more than $300,000 each, including $784,000 to a regional president and $438,000 to the hospital president.

That report doesn’t cover the executives overseeing the chain, called Mercy Health, of which Mercy in Oklahoma City is a part. The overall chain had $4.28 billion in revenue that year. Its hospital in Springfield, Mo. (pop. 160,660), had $880.7 million in revenue and an operating profit of $319 million, according to its federal filing. The incomes of the parent company’s executives appear on other IRS filings covering various interlocking Mercy nonprofit corporate entities. Mercy president and CEO Lynn Britton made $1,930,000, and an executive vice president, Myra Aubuchon, was paid $3.7 million, according to the Mercy filing. In all, seven Mercy Health executives were paid more than $1 million each. A note at the end of an Ernst & Young audit that is attached to Mercy’s IRS filing reported that the chain provided charity care worth 3.2% of its revenue in the previous year. However, the auditors state that the value of that care is based on the charges on all the bills, not the actual cost to Mercy of providing those services — in other words, the chargemaster value. Assuming that Mercy’s actual costs are a tenth of these chargemaster values — they’re probably less — all of this charity care actually cost Mercy about three-tenths of 1% of its revenue, or about $13 million out of $4.28 billion."

Read more: http://healthland.time.com/2013/02/20/bitter-pill-why-medical-bills-are-killing-us/#ixzz2LpNHXe6u

If you play in the system, you will be squeezed - it is how it all works today.

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Is going to medical school a good bet?

It takes about 15 years to pop out the other side of the process to become a doctor. Years of school followed by years of residency. You will emerge with a huge debt too. 

So what if medicine is very different in 15 years time from the training and the model you invested in?

What if instead of the reductionist model you learned where each part of the body and each class of illness is an isolated specialty, health is now seen as a holistic system? What if few people need to go to a Doctor because they now know enough to take charge of their health? 

What if in this 15 year period the people and the state rebel and stop paying the sums that you will need to finance your debt? How much more can insurance premiums rise in America? How much more can states pay? We are in the last 5 years of their ability to pay to meet your needs.

There can only be a collapse of the existing system. Just as few Universities will survive Hacker U or few media companies are now viable. So the institutions and livings in Medicine will fail.

And for most people this will be just fine. Better than fine.

When Henry VIII cashed in the institutions of the Catholic Church that owned 50% of the wealth of England, was the event startred  England's rise to become a world power. All this wealth got released that had been trapped and diverted by the institutions of the time. And it was not just the money that was released. England was released intellectually too. For the old institutions kept the people and the world stupid. 

Those societies that cash out of the institutions of the Corporate Age, Our Media, Our Universities, Our Health Care, Our Energy and Our Military will find themselves full of the resources that they really need. They will also be free of the stupid ideas that the old system uses to stop people thinking.

So if you were my 21 year old daughter, I would not advise you to go to medical school. You are too late. 

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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.

Run for the Cure - Pink Ribbons - Think more please

I was one of the people who started Run for the Cure in Canada when I worked for CIBC as SVP Marketing. I now regret this. Now I believe the idea of striving for the "Cure" is wrong. What we need to do is to find out WHY WE GET CANCER. When my wife was diagnosed almost 10 years ago this question was never asked, it was all about getting straight to treatment.

Running for the Cure has become a massive BUSINESS. Treatment is a massive BUSINESS. The people involved do very well from our cancer. They hold out the CURE, but say nothing about prevention. Worse are that many are involved in products that are directly linked to you getting cancer. 

I don't believe that Breast Cancer is a lottery, nor that we are condemned by our genes. It is a product of how we live. We can do a lot to reduce our risk.

Here is what my wife wrote a while back. She finds the idea of being a "survivor" inappropriate for her and she finds the lack of discussion about prevention, the failure to decrease the numbers of new breast cancer diagnoses and the lack of publicity about alternatives, very disheartening.

 

 

Are you a freelancer? Lonely? Co-Working? Making a Living!

I read this in the Globe today.

But for a solo freelancer, it can be even more challenging to build your career when you don’t have an organization behind you. You’re responsible for your own networking and creating your own opportunities.

Freelance videographer Rosa Park misses having people to bounce ideas around with, so relies heavily on her social media for interaction.

“It’s kind of lonely not having co-workers,” says Ms. Park, who works out of a tiny downtown office. “I live on Facebook and Twitter. I try to cut it down, but I can’t. It’s the only way for me to be social.”

One of the benefits of Co-Working in a palce like the Queen Street Commons is that you get back into the tribal conditions that we all crave as humans but without the office politics!

Co-Working is exploding around the world as more and more of us work as freelancers and need to be socially connected.

Here is just North America

Here is the link to the world - there is even co working in Saudi Arabia!

At the Commons, as with other co working spaces, we offer a place where you can have a professional environment - meeting rooms etc - AND interact with others who may be in very different fields than you. It is a place to get help and fellowship as well as a good place to work and to meet outsiders.

But next month we are expanding this idea of a place only to a network that extends beyond the walls. 

Fellowship does not mean that we are always in the same place. It can often be the launch pad for a great quest. So what might be our great quest? Might it be to make to make the little meangingful? For who saved the world in LOR? It was a hobbit.

This is who we really are. 70% of business on PEI has less than 5 employees. What if we had a quest to make this powerful? What if we could make this the core of the economy? What if being small meant that you could make a great living? Who might then stay? Your kids? Who might then come? The kind of people who would fit PEI?

So this then is what we at the Queen Street Commons seek to do. We seek to be a catalyst for this kind of Fellowship. We will do our best to help you help yourself and those you care about make it possible to have your own "Living".

We want to make "making a living" the best way to live on PEI.

As with all quests, they start humbly with the kind of people that the Dark Lords laugh at. As with all quests, the power of the Dark Lords is real and immense. Tolkien wrote LOR as a response to the industrialization of the world. That is what we are up against.

But rather than rail against the system, why not build a new one? The Industrial system was strong in Tolkien's day - but it is so weak now. This is surely the time?

Every quest starts with a few people and has to start with a few steps. In the next month, I will tell you about what few steps we intend to take. I hope that you might like to join us.

What went wrong? Why are we in such trouble? Where do we go now?

How did we get here? And where can we work to get ourselves out of this jam? Our food system is the system that drives our society - how our food system evolved in the 20th century took us here - and how we work to change it will take us home.

Here is the chapter in my book The Fractal History of Mankind that shows us how our food system in the 20th century took us to this place.

It picks up after the American Revolution - when a new dream of a just society was enacted that really did offer liberty and freedom. We see how this liberty and freedom was lost by a new food system! When we understand THIS, then we are equipped to see what we have to do to find a better system.

So here is the Pattern of the world that is now dying around us - here is how the process began and here is how it ends.

Why learning to trust ourselves and to know that we can keep ourselves healthy enables us to step off into Free Lance

Some of you have reminded me how hard it is to give up the idea of a Job. Many of us don't have much of a network outside of the workplace. Most do not have access to health insurance outside the workplace.

I want in this post to tell you a bit more about these barriers. And to offer you a real hope that you can overcome them.

No Network - I worked for 20+ years for a financial institution. It asked all of me. I had no energy left for much outside of work at all. My family was hanging on by a thread and I certainly had no network outside my work. I had clients etc but no group of trusted friends who had things on their mind that I shared. 

About 2 years before the bank and I parted ways, a good friend told me that all my signals were about how much I hated being in the system. This was a surprise to me! I was scared and angry to hear that. But after a few months realized that she was right. But what to do? I asked her if I should quit. She told me not to be stupid. "It's an institution Rob - they don't care one way or the other". Instead she advised me to create a new and parallel life outside the bank. I started to do a lot of public speaking about what I had learned about organizational design. I emerged in to the public eye as a thinker and not just another drone at the bank.

At the same time I was working on our healthcare costs at the ban. Why were so many so ill and why was this getting worse? So I began to get involved in the larger issues of health and I started to talk all the time with others who shared my concern. I did mini projects with them on my own time to help us make headway.

So one day the day of reckoning took place and I said the words that killed me. As I spoke them I knew that the bank would have to let me go. Of course they were very nice about it all - after all I was one of the boys - I was like the son who goes off the rails - still part of the club but you know the nutty one. They were very generous and civil.

The next day I started paid work with 2 of the people I had been working with before. I have never looked back.

I offer this story up to any of you who are feeling trapped "Inside". It's not a bad plan. You must create a real network with people who like and trust doing real things. Not your Facebook Friends. Real friends. Do just talking about stuff but DOING THINGS.

Now onto Health. I live in Canada and am blessed by living in a country where Health Care is not a barrier to free lancing. 

But what I have learned now - all connected to my work on health at the bank all those years ago - is that we can have a lot of control over our health. If we live our lives close to our evolved design. That means eat the diet we are evolved to do best on. Have a social and work life as we are evolved to do best in. And to inhabit our bodies and the world as we are designed to do best in.

If we do this - we are naturally healthy, Of course a car accident is another thing. But most of the risk we have to day is from the chronic diseases of the modern world that DO NOT EXIST AT ALL IN TRADITIONAL SOCIETIES THAT DO LIVE IN HARMONY WITH THEIR DESIGN.

This is why I have my other site - The Missing Human Manual and why I work with the Pasteur of our time, Professor Michael Rose.

There is a huge body of science behind this statement. Much of the Food and Pharma world wants you to rely on them. Just as a conventional employer needs you to rely on them too.

Luther changed the world 500 years ago by telling people that they could trust that they on their own could find salvation and God. That they did not have to use the church as the intermediary. Until then all in Europe had taken it for granted that ONLY the church could save their souls.

Is this not the same? If we organize differently, we can work with people we love and trust to do the things we need and offer to each other the things that are essential to life. If we live more like a Free Lancer we actually live more like a Hunter Gatherer. We have 4 million years of experience hard wired into us and we instinctively know how to be this person.

If we do this, we have our health too.

We lived for 4 million years and had good lives without the need for a job. We got out food, we had shelter, we raised our kids, we entertained each other. We can surely find a new way of taking all mof this back into our own hands now?

We are smart aren't we? That is why I post these little gems showing people who are doing this  - like urban farmers, 3D Printing, Pasture Farming etc.

I am not talking about putting on skins and living in caves. I am talking about using our ingenuity to use what we now know of how nature works to partner with her in gaining her help.