Modern medicine is considered as essential to life as food and water. Everyone feels the right to and the need for unlimited access to it.


CONSCIENCE, NOT MONEY
That's because illness, pain, and suffering require compassion and empathy. Most who go into medicine are particularly driven by this.

Health care should have nothing to do with money. It should flow from the conscience we all have, and society and government should reflect.


PROFIT IS NOT THE SOLUTION
Insurance and modern medicine are for-profit industries that require and seek growth to survive. Hospitals need beds to be filled, and doctors need patients lined up.



GOVERNMENT DOES NOT SOLVE THE PROBLEM
The Food and Drug Administration (FDA) does nothing about costs. Nor are drugs no longer under patent, or non-drug alternatives given consideration.

Going soft with regulation can land government regulators lucrative positions in the industries they regulate. Conversely, industry leaders can get appointments to lucrative regulatory positions.


THE WRONG MEDICAL PHILOSOPHY
Modern medicine takes a materialistic/mechanistic approach to the body as if it were a mere assemblage of pulleys, pipes, levers, valves, proton pumps, and chemistry that can be manipulated without consequence.

Quick fixes with surgery and symptom management (allopathy) ignore the body's innate complexity, balances, and repair mechanisms. Despite technological advances, chronic degenerative illnesses--cancer, heart disease, arthritis, etc. continue to plague people.

They are the result of people's wrong life choices. Medical interventions can't fix how and why people make the decisions they do.


DOCTOR ENIGMAS
Most doctors, after time in the trenches of day-to-day practice, come to understand that most illness is self-inflicted through improper lifestyle. However, systemic pressures -- time constraints, patient expectations, and fear of legal repercussions -- make it difficult to emphasize effective self-care messages to patients.

After a costly education, long hours, lawsuits, malpractice insurance, and dealing with an endless procession of patients who will do nothing to help themselves, doctors feel entitled to a large economic reward. In some cases, growing that reward becomes the primary objective.


PROFITEERING STANDS IN THE WAY OF COMPASSION
The medical standard of care (what doctors are taught to do to avoid liability) encourages more of almost everything: more lab tests, longer hospitalization, more diagnostics, more drugs, and more surgery. All of which fuels more profit.

Although in many cases the best advice to a patient is to go home and make life changes, doctors are often inclined to do what is safe for their career and income. Defensive medicine (an escalation of services to avoid out-of-control malpractice litigation) just so happens to be the most profitable, and what patients have come to expect.

If patients had to pay out of their own pockets, many would decide to stay home with their chicken soup (a statistically good idea anyway). If doctors had to face the real-life financial circumstances of patients, they would do and charge less.

(This is exactly the situation in veterinary medicine, where clients and doctors must face financial reality. As a result, less intervention occurs, and medicines and surgeries, identical to those in human medicine, are at a fraction of the cost in subsidized and insurance-supported human medicine.)

The net result of a pay-as-you-go system would be less unnecessary medical care and more responsibility for health, where it belongs-- on the individual.


Health care should be self-eradicating if it were accomplishing its real purpose of health and healing. But the opposite is the case--burgeoning growth and unlimited profits.

The ancient Taoist doctors, guided by the Huangdi Neijing medical text, were paid only if the patient was well. If they became ill, payment was stopped, and the doctor was considered ignorant. But that's too rational.

Modern medical practices result in it being one of the leading causes of death and injury. Although not intended, this results in the perfect profit model: charge for treatment, charge for treatment of the harm created, charge for the treatment of that harm created ... in an endless chain of profitable treatments.

Profitable enterprises don't want change. For example, the billionaire Bill Gates has said that vaccines are the most profitable venture he has found.

There are trillions of dollars flowing through the medical industry to over a hundred million people worldwide. None of those beneficiaries wants change.


THE SOLUTION

1. Drugs and procedures must be proven safe and effective with long-term studies using placebo controls.
2. No government regulatory employee can be allowed to profit in any way from or be employed by the companies being regulated or profit from any medical device or medicine.
3. Costs of pharmaceutical and other health products must be stringently controlled to be affordable to the average citizen.
4. Medical fees must be controlled in the same way.
5. Doctors must be on a salary only.
6. Insurance must be provided that is affordable to everyone.
7. Aggressive educational programs must be put in place in schools and on airways, teaching people self-care and healthful living.

All of the above problems are so embedded that they will not change unless money is dried up or public health continues to deteriorate. Only then will the profit-driven medical status quo collapse.

You don't have to wait for that. The keys to health are obvious and accessible to all for free. Learn to optimize health by giving yourself the lifestyle and food it was designed for.

Money is not the solution. Not only can it make possible unhealthy indulgences, it makes it too easy to obtain lots of the best that modern medicine has to offer.

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As detailed in my answer, pets have had a greater increase in lifespan than humans. Should people start using veterinarians rather than MDs?

The suggestion that people go to DVMs rather than MDs is tongue-in-cheek.

Yet consider this, which is not a laughing matter--

• Medicare beneficiaries with heart failure see an average of 16–23 different physicians annually.

• Ischemic heart attack deaths have decreased, due primarily to the decline in smoking. At the same time, hypertension and arrhythmias have surged by as much as 450% since 1970.

• From 1996–2020: Direct health care costs jumped from ~$130 B to nearly $400 B annually.

• Total medical costs have increased from about $74 billion to over $5 trillion in the last 50 years.

Money is not buying us better health.

MDs and DVMs are fundamentally educated and trained the same. In some locales, they even attend the same classes in their first two years in medical school. That's because there is little anatomical or physiological difference between humans and most other mammals. Both professions rely on the same core sciences and have access to the same pharmaceuticals and surgical techniques. However, once graduated, DVMs have to pay for their facilities and personnel. MDs have their infrastructure and personnel costs subsidized by institutions, insurance, and government.

Other remarkable differences include the fact that, as referenced above, up to 23 MDs can be involved with and bill a single patient. By contrast, usually only one veterinarian is used for pet health problems. An MD can refer difficult cases to any number of specialists. A DVM is expected to be a jack of all trades--surgeon, diagnostician, dentist, druggist, orthopedist, business owner, employer, financer, dermatologist, ophthalmologist, urologist, proctologist, anesthesiologist, oncologist, nutritionist, parasitologist, microbiologist, radiologist, counselor, euthanasia provider, and every other malady … for every nonhuman critter from gold fish to gorillas to elephants.

MDs earn $340-$560 thousand per year. DVMs earn about $120 thousand per year. There are a million practicing MDs in the US and 125,000 practicing DVMs.

The money incentive drives people to become MDs. There may be compassion, but over time, huge paychecks can skew that incentive. On the other hand, compassion is the only reason for people to choose veterinary medicine.

Only 10-15% of applicants can get into veterinary schools, whereas about 40% get into medical schools. Higher grade point averages (GPAs) are required for admission to veterinary schools.

Suicide rates for both MDs and DVMs are higher than the general population. Female DVM rates are the highest. For MDs, suicide is due to burnout, long hours, liability fears, loss of independence and creativity, and emotional detachment. (Sources: Medscape Physician Suicide Reports; American Foundation for Suicide Prevention; NIH / NCBI publications on physician mental health) The risk of suicide for DVMs is due to compassion fatigue, financial pressures, debt, isolation, euthanasia stress, frequent exposure to death and suffering, and the inability to use knowledge and training to help animals due to the inability or unwillingness of animal owners to fund it. (Sources: CDC report (2019): "Suicide Among Veterinarians in the United States from 1979 through 2015"; AVMA (American Veterinary Medical Association mental health studies)

Veterinary costs to pet owners are 0.8% of what is spent on human health care--even though there are 400 million pets and 347 million people in the US.

In the past 50 years, the lifespan of humans has increased by about 9% and the lifespan of pets has increased by about 30%.

Many variables must be taken into account when arriving at such numbers. Also, correlation does not always prove causation. But there is a heavy bias in the literature and media creating the impression that human medical care is greatly beneficial. Human medicine is financially tied to big pharmaceutical, government, and media financial interests, which drive that bias.

Ignored is the fact that for 0.8% of the cost of human medical care, pets, under veterinary care, have a 20% longer life span than humans.

The reason for this is the systemic financial bloat in human medicine due to the bottomless vat of money that patients and MDs can draw from. This creates a bottomless opportunity for medical interventions and patient dependence.

The result of that is that modern human medicine is the number one killer. Mortality decreases when doctors go on strike. The profit-driven, materialistic, allopathic (symptom-based, not preventive and health-based), reactive medical approach does not increase population health. The sicker people are and the longer they stay that way increases the bottom line of everyone feeding off of a failed, self-serving medical industry.

Veterinary medicine follows the same allopathic medical approach. However, pet owners have to pay for veterinary care out of pocket. There is no endless money spigot for DVMs and pet owners to draw from. That's why MDs outnumber DVMs eight to one, and there is more medical intervention for humans than animals.

The more favorable longevity stats for pets are, therefore, because DVMs are greatly limited in allopathic medical interventions proven to decrease, not increase longevity. Remove money from the equation in health care, and longevity stats for pets and people would likely be the same.

The lesson we are taught by comparing veterinary to human medicine is that less medical intervention is more. Other than in emergency and catastrophic situations, health is not something that can be purchased or delegated.

It's up to us individually to take responsibility for our health. Teaching that should be the primary focus of both MDs and DVMs.

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