April 5, 2005 , 2005
Kamloops Daily News



We spend billions of dollars annually on medicine and
relatively little on preventing what kills us.

The top killers of Canadians are largely preventable and the
result of personal choice - - heart disease, cancer, stoke,
accidents, diseases of the respiratory system, type 2
diabetes, suicide, and cirrhosis of the liver.  We hope that
medicine will make up for our unhealthy lifestyle and
destructive behaviour.  It only prolongs the inevitable.

"Good health requires more than good medicine," says Dr.
Andrew Malleson, a specialist in internal medicine and
consultant to federal Health and Safety in an article
published by the Canadian Centre for Policy Alternatives.

The causes of disease can be broken down into five groups -
- infection, environment, society, politics, and lifestyle.

The rampant deadly diseases of the past stopped being major
killers before modern medicine.  Long ago, governments
realized that public health could be improved through
chlorinated water, nutrition, personal hygiene, housing, and
sewage disposal. Refrigeration and pasteurization were made
available to all through industrial society.

Medicine had some role to play in the elimination of some
killing diseases like measles and smallpox.  But malaria is
endemic and bacterial diseases are on the rebound.  There is
no vaccination against AIDS.

"It was social factors and not medical care that transformed
our health statistics," says Malleson.  Those statistics
include longer life and fewer infant deaths.

As a statistic, life expectancy has improved primarily
because of reduced infant mortality.  The outlook of infants
has improved immensely while the outlook for the middle-aged
has not.   Middle-aged Canadians continue to die from
unhealthy lifestyles, bad choices, and the chemical soup
that we live in.

Three million people die each year from air pollution alone
says the World Health Organizations.  Most deaths result
from poor indoor air.

We hope that medicine will save us from ourselves.  Our
faith in modern medicine and the infallibility of the
medical establishment is a relatively recent phenomena.  The
golden age of medicine that started in the late 1940s came
to an end in the 1970s.  All the easy cures had been found.
The antibiotic drugs that were once miracles are now loosing
their magic.  

We still blindly support massive expenditures on health care
even though better results could come through social
spending.  Part it is selfishness - - we know that our bad
choices will eventually require expensive medical
treatments.  But we are reluctant to spend money on social
programs that will improve the health of undeserving others.

Health care is an inconvenience as long as we are not sick. 
Busy Canadians willingly hand over the responsibility to
someone else.  

We entrust our health care to professionals and hope that
they will find effective ways to keep us healthy and treat
us when we are not.  In turn, health care professionals
spend billions of private and public dollars to do just
that.

This arrangement results in a certain bias in health care -
- control of expenditures are in the hands of those have the
most to gain.

Other countries spend less on medicine and health care and
have better results.  Japan spends the least on health in
the developed world and has the highest life expectancy.

The U.S. spends the most on health in the world with not
much to show for the expenditure.   Life expectancy is 37th
in the world and infant mortality is 25th.

Power to control health care results in a conflict of
interest.  Everyone from Big Pharma to little herbalists
convince us that we are sick, or about to become sick.

Pharmaceutical corporations spend profits on questionable
ventures like minor changes in existing drugs and
deciphering the human genome.  The genome project was a
technical marvel but it has produced little practical use.  
"Are they entangling us all in costly but unusable chains of
DNA?" worries Malleson.

And genetic illnesses, with a few exceptions, are beyond the
help of medicine.  The best cure to genetic illness is to be
born to the right parents.

Finally, death consumes large amounts of our medicare
budget.  Death is a consequence of life.  So why do we spend
more on health care in our last months than in our entire
lives?

Death is not a preventable illness.  Once death is seen as a
natural end, not a failure of medicine, then more money can
be put to the quality of life and not the expensive and
futile escape from death.

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