Whichever way you cut it, modern medicine seems to have very little to do with health. Countries with more doctors don’t have less disease, nor do countries that spend more on health care. The reason our healthcare systems are failing is that no-one is talking seriously about the F word – food – and how to change the 21st century diet and lifestyle that’s killing us – because we are literally digging our own graves with a knife and fork.
Which brings me to pharmaceutical drugs and Big Pharma. Before the discovery of antibiotics, people died in their millions. When penicillin became available in the 1940s it literally saved hundreds of thousands of lives. The next blockbuster drug was cortisone in the 1950s. It miraculously cured people’s arthritic pain and other inflammatory disorders. Thus the myth of a drug for a bug, a pill for an ill, was born and the pharmaceutical industry started to flourish and become a billion dollar industry that it is today.
Doctors are taught a lot more about drugs than diet and the actions of Big Pharma often go unquestioned, and it’s this imbalance that I seek to address, with the analysis in this section.