How many people die each year of old age in their sleep? (By this I mean you were healthy one day, you go to bed that night, and before morning you are dead. And, upon autopsy there is nothing wrong with you except that you are no longer breathing, your heart is stopped, and your brain waves are absent.)Answer: Not very many (as a percentage of all deaths).
The importance of dying of old age for this discussion is that it implies there were no medical costs associated with an illness or with last ditch efforts to prevent your death. And it implies that you lived your full natural life. That is to say, disease is not natural. Disease is man made. Well, there is dis-ease caused by injuries and accidents.
There are two types of illness: Dis-ease, and Disease.
1) Dis-ease:
Acute injury completely induced by a distinct physical, emotional, thermal, parasitic, or chemical trauma. For example, a car accident where you break your leg, getting held at gun point by a mugger afterwhich you can’t sleep for several days, spilling hot grease on your hand causing a 2nd degree burn, unknowingly drinking water contaminated with parasites causing diarrhea for a few days, or accidentally eating a poisonous mushroom and needing to get your stomach pumped so you’ll stop convulsing.
2) Disease:
Chronic or acute illness induced by many seemingly insignificant and unrelated factors. All the contributing factors are rarely fully known. For example, moderate B12 deficiency, moderate Vitamin D deficiency, multiple moderate trace mineral deficiencies, moderate water deficiency, mild exposure to hundreds of toxic chemicals from plastics to heavy metals to pesticides to food preservatives to smog to mold, lack of exercise, an overbearing boss at work, a grudge against your sister-in-law, a diet moderately high in refined sugar, often skipping meals, a whiplash from a car accident as a teenager that never really healed right leaving you with slightly noticeable, but excessive, muscular and ligamentous scarring in your neck, and repetitive motions of the arms at your assembly line job all leading to the symptoms and diagnosis of fibromyalgia, or heart attack, or chronic fatigue, or carpal tunnel syndrome, or GERD, or Graves disease, or ulcerative colitis.
We have medical treatments for each of these diseases, but none of the treatments correct the multifactorial underlying causes of the disease. For example, Graves disease is when your immune system is attacking your thyroid causing it to make too much thyroid hormone, making you sick.
One medical treatment for Graves disease is to cut out or poison the thyroid so that it stops working forever. Then replace the thyroid hormone with a medication that mimics the same function so you feel normal again. This is a miracle that humans can do this.
BUT, has this treatment addressed the B12 deficiency, the vitamin D deficiency, any of the mineral deficiencies, any of the patient’s dietary habits, or neutralized the effects of the man-made chemicals stored up in the patient’s nerves and organs, all of which has together caused the disease?
No, it hasn’t.
Very high probability this patient will “contract” a second disease before he dies that will also need expensive medical attention. Very likely this patient already had several other “common” disorders like acid reflux, PMS, headaches, sinus infections, high blood pressure, diabetes, that were being “treated,” each with it’s own medication, before the Graves disease showed up. If not, a laundry list is very likely to show up down the road, because the underlying causes have not been corrected.
So, how does someone get so many of the above problems leading to non-accident type disease? The answer is: mostly, by accident.
If you don’t know about B12 deficiency and how to prevent it and you live in a culture whose habits and environments predispose the group to B12 deficiency, and the culture’s doctors are largely blind to it, then you will likely become B12 deficient.
B12 deficiency is easily and cheaply corrected. Graves disease, heart disease, ulcerative colitis, and so on, are very expensive to treat medically and/or surgically.
We generally can’t prevent the accidents that cause dis-ease in section one above. These can at times be expensive to treat depending on their severity. But they are generally singular events.
Since the multiple chronic small accidents causing disease in section two above are rarely corrected, expensive treatment for these diseases is perpetual. It is also widespread, almost inevitably reaching every member of our culture in one form or another.
Since our culture is largely ignorant of how to prevent or proactively remedy the small accidents in our health, EVERYONE is sick. Medical insurance CANNOT monetarily function properly if 99% of the people are either sick or a ticking disease time bomb.
Most people do not get into expensive car accidents. If EVERYONE either totaled his car each year, OR caused a huge 50 car pile up on the freeway right before he died (the monetary equivalent of American’s disease care problem), auto insurance would cost at least 10 times what it currently does, similar to health care insurance. And of course, the older you got, the more expensive your auto insurance rates would be, just like health insurance.
National health care is a great idea. But it will bankrupt America because Americans are ALL SO sick. If you are not ill today, you will be before you die, and it’s going to be a very expensive series of medical treatments.
National health care is a great idea. But not if the nation’s primary health care model is medication and surgery. Medication and surgery are the most expensive forms of health care and should only be used as last resort. PLUS, they often don’t correct the underlying cause of the disease, and they don’t prevent future new disease in the individual.
National health care is a great idea. IF it only covers the diseases in category one above (rare large accidents), AND/OR if it encourages the education of the public through researchers, doctors, and teachers about how to prevent and proactively remedy the small persistent accidents of disease.
Several years ago I was watching Jesse Jackson on Larry King Live. He was talking about the tragedy in America that 40 million or so people have no health insurance.
My naïve brain at first didn’t understand why that was a problem. Maybe these people chose not to have insurance.
One of my teachers in college was in his 80’s and told us that he decided when he was 25 that he wasn’t going to purchase medical insurance for his family. Instead he would put the amount of his premium into an investment account each month and withdraw it if he needed it for medical expenses. He ended up never needing to use very much of it and when he retired he used the money to pay cash for a very nice mountain cabin at Lake Tahoe, California. Maybe he was one of the 40 million Jesse Jackson spoke about.
But then I realized that likely most of the 40 million were poor inner city folks and unemployed and homeless individuals. And perhaps some were single moms working 3 part time jobs.
Another part of my confusion was that I myself had no health care insurance at the time except for accident insurance with a high deductible. My monthly premium was about $38 per month. I was sure that most of the 40 million uninsured could afford an extra $38 per month if they really wanted to. Many homeless earn several hundred a month by begging. But then I realized he wasn’t talking about accident insurance, he was talking about disease care insurance to cover medications and surgeries for chronic diseases. The cost of this at the time for me would have been between $150 and $400 per month depending on the plan I chose. Likely most of the 40 million uninsured could not afford this, and likely if they were older than me (I was in my 20s) then their cost would be even higher.
Thinking ahead to Jesse Jackson’s likely conclusion for how to fix this health insurance tragedy, I easily saw a new national medical insurance program as being his solution.
Familiar with the way congress has spent money that should have been invested for social security and medicare programs, so that we are headed for a huge financial train wreck over it, I quickly saw that, though a seemingly good idea, creating a government program to pay for expensive medical disease care for 40,000,000 people throughout their entire lifetime, not just when they are old, was a recipe for the end of our country financially as we know it.
After several months of brewing in my head, I clearly saw the need for an alternative to nationalized medical insurance, hopefully preventing my country’s bankruptcy. What if I created a free educational video for poor people explaining to them how to prevent disease on a budget so that they don’t ever need expensive medical intervention, so that they can get and remain healthy, dying one day of old age!
If this were possible, then national health care or not, the people would not need insurance, or if they had insurance they wouldn't ever need to use it, thus the country is saved from financial ruin.
The problem I had was there were too many variables. There were too many diseases to prevent and too many actions that might need to be taken depending on each individual’s situation.
Since then I have come across more and more information that has actually simplified my view of health dramatically.
And a miracle has happened in medical science. The wide extent of the health benefits of proper vitamin D levels has become greatly elucidated.
As it turns out, almost all of us have below optimal levels of vitamin D leading to many chronic diseases! This means killing perhaps hundreds of disease birds with the one stone of vitamin D. Oh, yeah, vitamin D is free from the sun in the summer, and it’s dirt cheap as an oral supplement during the winter.
Yet another miracle is the invention of processing the complex mineral zeolite into a potent, effective, and super safe detoxifying agent! It is also relatively cheap compared to most medical interventions.
Stay tuned for my list of how to get and stay healthy so you will never need medication or surgery: all on a poor man's budget!
Dr. John B. Campise, D.C.
www.campise-chiropractor-fresno.com
Fresno, Ca
