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Transcript:
Welcome everyone to another episode of the Esoteric Wellness Blog. I am your host, Coach Kyle. So today I wanted to talk about some major issues in health and wellness, and I think while there are other solutions out there that would take like collective action from all of us or a lot of us to make wide sweeping changes, I want to focus today on what I think is the best solution in the meantime, which is education. Just helping people understand why things are the way they are, why these issues exist, and how can we navigate all this. And that power is a power that we all have individually that doesn't have to be given to us by anyone. We just have to utilize it.
So what I want to talk about is specifically is a couple systems being healthcare and our food system, our food supply, and how these are set up in a way that doesn't have our best interests as far as health and wellness goes in mind.
So we're going to start with healthcare. And many of these we're fully aware of, but what stands out to me as far as issues in healthcare is affordability, accessibility, availability of treatments that actually address root cause and make people better. These are the big three, as far as I'm concerned. There's other issues as well, butum But I'll just make the point I'm trying to make up front is that the healthcare system is a for-profit business. And when you want to look at this whole problem as a whole, look at the incentives.
What are the incentives of healthcare? The incentives within healthcare is to make money and to make as much of it as possible. That's how business works in this world we have today. The incentive of healthcare as a whole is not to make you better. It's to provide you and sell you healthcare.
Let that sink in for a second. The incentive of healthcare is not to make you better, it is to sell you healthcare.
So I just want to start off here with making the statement, I am not here attacking individuals within the healthcare system. I am not here saying that doctors don't have our best interests in mind. They're somehow sabotaging our health or anything like that. 99.9% of doctors truly care about their patients. They want to help their patients get better. Same with nurses and any other healthcare professional. Within that system, they care. They want their patients to get better. They want you to get better. So I'm not attacking any individuals here or anyone's character. I'm attacking the system as a whole and how it's designed. And when a system is set up in a way in which the incentives are misaligned with what's best for their customers or society as a whole. even though you have high quality, very good people within that, working within the system, it still leads to less than ideal outcomes.
So I won't spend much time talking about affordability, 'cause that's something we're all extremely aware of. We feel it every time we go to a healthcare office of any kind, that it it costs too damn much. So I won't spend any more time talking about that, 'cause that's obvious, we all see it. And there are many, many factors that go into that, but again, keep in mind what the incentive is here to make money.
Accessibility, again, a lot of this is again, when you look at the incentive to make money, it explains the situation. This is why low income Individuals in poverty-stricken areas have limited access to healthcare because those people don't have money. They can't pay these high costs of healthcare, so they don't provide it. You know, a healthcare system, for-profit system isn't going to go out of its way to provide its services to people who can't afford it. It's as simple as that, OK? And that's a tragedy because these are often the populations that need it the most and they're just not being provided with it.
Now, I work primarily around chronic symptoms of various kinds, and this is where I think healthcare that's designed as it is now really falls on its face. It's It's failing miserably to address chronic conditions, chronic symptoms. And what's really showing through here is the inability to address root cause.
You know, before I worked as a coach, I worked as an engineer within the business corporate environment, and like anytime you have a meeting about a problem, what's the first question that's that's asked is what's the root cause and what are you doing to address it? Yet we have this entire business built around healthcare in which somebody comes in with chronic symptoms, is given a diagnosis or not, butNo one's spending time and effort looking for the root cause. And And very often that root cause is known and quite well known and obvious even, yet nothing's being done to help people address it.
So for example, type 2 diabetes, you know it's no mystery, we know what causes type 2 diabetes. It's essentially a less than ideal diet. that's stressing the insulin system in the body and it stops working like it should. We know this, we've known this for a long time. And we also know how to fix this by changing the diet to something healthier, something that's not stressing that system in that way. And there may be other like genetic predispositions and things like that, other conditions that would make somebody more likely to,develop type 2 diabetes. I mean, that's it's never that simple, but even in those situations, if adequate changes were made to diet, type 2 diabetes is completely reversible. We can cure it.
However, when someone who's developed type 2 diabetes seeks healthcare,They get drugs and insulin to manage their symptoms. They're often told that they need to, you know, they should probably improve their diet, eat better. They may be even given information as to what that would look like. And then they're sent home. But as anyone who's tried to make sweeping changes to their diet knows, that's freaking hard. That's not easy. And what people really need is support and help and guidance and making those changes in their life actually happen and making those changes sustainable over the long term. But that's not what we're giving people in healthcare.
And again, when you look at this, while keeping in mind what the incentive of the healthcare system is, is to make money, you can see howYou know, it could easily be done, and it is being done in some places, but this could go much differently. You know, this this person could go and see a doctor, be given a type 2 diabetes diagnosis, given drugs to help manage those symptoms in the short term, but also be given access to support to make the changes necessary to address the root cause. So you could send, you know,team them up with a health coach, team them up with a dietician, or something similar like that, and literally in a matter of months, they could have that condition cured. And that's what it would look like if the incentive was to make people better as quickly as possible, but it's not.
So instead, what often happens is they try to change their diet, they fail, it's too hard, they give up on it, and they just spend the rest of their life managing their symptoms withExpensive drugs. And when the incentive is to make money, that's an ideal outcome. Well, a lifelong customer is the best customer to have, especially a lifelong customer who feels like they have no other option. I mean, how could you have a better possible outcome when your incentive is making money? It doesn't get any better than that.
So how is this happening when, like I said before,We have doctors that do care, that do want people to get better. How is that being allowed to go on? Well, think about how much time you get to spend with your doctor when you go to a doctor's office or a hospital or a healthcare center. How much time do you actually spend face-to-face speaking with your doctor? Not much, right? Most studies I've seen on this, you know, it's somewhere less than 10 minutes. Less than 10 minutes. I don't care how good they are. Nobody can support you adequately to change your diet and lifestyle in less than 10 minutes. It's not possible. I mean, when I meet with people on that exact subject,you know I do an hour long session multiple times to provide that level of support that's necessary. So no, nobody's gonna be able to do that in less than 10 minutes. I don't care how good you are.
So that's really the problem is doctors are very limited in the ways in which they can help their patients because they have such a limited amount of time to spend with them. And again, this is reflective of that money making incentive within the system is,It's just simple math. The more patients you get in and out of that office in a single day, the more money you'll make. So doctors are pressured more and more to see more patients in a given day, so they have less time per patient. And many doctors are extremely frustrated by this. They see the issues, they see their patients not getting better. They're just trapped in a system that. has misplaced incentives.
So what do we do about this? Well, let's move on first to our food supply. Let's talk about that a little bit. Because here again, we have the same situation. We have an industry with the main incentiveagreeing to make money and to make as much of it as possible. So we end up with what we have. We end up with a food supply of unhealthy food that's easily and readily accessible, that's cheap, you can find it anywhere, engineered to be delicious and addictive, yet it's terrible for our health. Meanwhile, finding healthy, ideal food,It costs more, it's harder to find.
So again, why why is this? And it's simple economics. The incentive is to make money, and this is where things develop when the goal is making money. I mean, just think about it for a second.
Let's start with you know a simple, an apple. Unprocessed, natural, just an apple off a tree. Selling apples does not make you millions and billions of dollars. It just doesn't. It's an apple. Your apple's the same as anyone else's apple. It might be a different variety, whatever. But an apple's an apple. And to a customer, I'm going to purchase whatever apple's there. If I want an apple, I'll go buy an apple. I'm not going to drive all over the place to find the specific apple I want because an apple's an apple.
So the challenge when the incentive is to make money is you can't really market your apple as being extraordinarily different from anyone else's apple because you didn't design it, you didn't process it, you didn't, you know, no one, give it time it might happen, but no one's selling packaged apples or anything like that, you know. So it's difficult to market and separate your product from someone else's. So you can't gain control of the market in that way with healthy, natural food.
However, you cut that apple up, you process it into some other form, with a bunch of other ingredients, you come up with a brand name, all this marketing, commercials, endorsements,And now suddenly you have a product that you can market, and you can market as unique and separate. And through mass production, you can produce it cheaply, sell it cheaply, and completely dilute the market with it. And that'll make you very, very rich.
However, that food ends up being garbage. It's not good for our health. Because of all the processing, you have to factor in things like shelf stableness. You know Is food able to sit on a shelf for months while it works its way through the logistics of getting from production to shelf without going bad? So essentially, you take out all the good stuff in the food and you replace it with chemicals and other preservatives and things like that, whicharen't good for us. But again, the incentive here is to make money. The incentive is not to provide us with healthy food that's affordable and accessible. It's not the incentive.
And when you start looking at the situation, the connections in healthcare and the food industry, and you look at who's primary investors in certain companies and who's sitting onBoards of investors and things like this, you start to see connections and it it totally makes sense that somebody could simultaneously get rich from selling you crappy food that makes you unhealthy and makes you seek out healthcare that's also making them rich. But again, that's the incentive. So this is what happens.
So what do we do about this? What can we do about this? Is it just the way things should be. And we're not going to delve into the politics of all this and what the right answer is here, but I want to focus on what we as individuals can do right now.
And I think the biggest thing we can do is really understand the situation we're in, understand that these systems do not have our best interests in mind. That's not their incentive. Their incentive is to make money. And that's why it is the way it is. So what that means is we as individuals need to educate ourselves. We need to be aware of this issue and how can we navigate these systems in a way that provides us the best outcome.
So I think the food supply is is simpler and just we we need to be seeking out healthier food and that that's on us. You know, I I hope for a day where I can go in any store and and find affordable, healthy food. I hope to see a day when the garbage food is just non-existent, but that's outside of my individual control. The control I have is the control over what I buy. And that's not always easy, you know I'll admit that. Sometimes we're in situations where there is no healthy option, some reason. But we're in control of our choices, our decisions, and we have to take ownership of that.
And also educate us into what foods out there are healthy and which are not. And again, keeping the incentives in mind, we can't use marketingas a way to educate ourselves on this. We can't believe what we're told by a system whose incentive is to make money, that's trying to sell us something that's healthy. We can't take that at face value. We have to investigate that on our own. Read the ingredients, do our own research. And I know this is a lot of work that's a heavy burden to bear when we're already busy people. But that's the only real way we can deal with what we have at the moment.
Now, when it comes to healthcare, again, education is key. We need to empower ourselves to take ownership of our own health, because our healthcare system is not gonna do that for us. It's there to sell us healthcare, it's not there to make us better. And we need to understand that. And we need to focus onThose interactions with our doctors who do care about us getting better and engage them more. Spend more time, force them to stay in that room for more than 10 minutes to answer our questions. Don't just take the prescription and go and accept that as your fate. You don't have to do that. You can ask questions. You can get more involved with your doctor and in your healthcare as a whole. You don't have to just simply go where they point you and do what you're told. You're the customer. Would you walk on to a car lot and just buy the first car they showed you? No. You would look at each one. You would see what all the options were. You would do your research before you even showed up. And we need to treat healthcare in the same way. We need to do our research, we need to look at our options, and we need to make the choice that's best for us. And understand that the choices we're presented with might not be the best for us.
We need to be pushing for that root cause, identification and addressing it. If you're going seeking healthcare for some chronic symptom and you're just prescribed a prescription drug, that's where we should be asking questions by. To our doctor, like what's causing this symptom? You need to be pressuring them to investigate that, to look for that answer. And once it's identified to help you address it, what resources can I can I seek? Can you recommend that would help me in giving me support and guidance and addressing this? If you don't feel prepared, if you don't feel supported, speak up.
And I see this all the time that. Many people have this high, super high level of trust in the healthcare system that they believe everything they're told and they don't question it. And that really gets a lot of people in into trouble. That's how we get locked into just being on medications the rest of our lives. It should not be this way. Medications should be temporary. They have their place. They're wonderful. It's amazing that we have this capability to. create drugs in this way that really do save lives. But they're not vitamins that we take every day, they shouldn't be. But that's often the way they're being used.
Two, with prescription drugs, please please please inquire. Make your doctor explain to you the potential side effects, potential drug interaction. What could taking this drug cause in the way of other problems for you? I can't tell you how many times I've worked with people who are dealing with problems caused because they've been on some prescription drug for so long, and they were never given any choice in the matter, any understanding of that potential. And that's just, that's a shame. That's That's a huge failure in healthcare that we aren't educating people on the drugs that they're taking. If you suffer from a side effect, from a drug you're on, and it comes as a huge surprise to you, that's a huge failure in my mind. You should know about that before making the decision to take it.
And a lot of times this is what I help people do, is I help people to take more control, more engagement in their own healthcare, to have these difficult conversations with their physicians, to be the squeaky wheel that gets the grease in many ways. You have to speak up. You have to stand up for yourself and you have to say, hey, I need more information. I need more support.
So that's where we'll end it today. I think there is hope. I think our current healthcare system can help people get better. It's just we have to learn to navigate it in a better way.
So that's all for today. I look forward to the next one.
You are beautiful, you are loved.
Until next time.
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