I deeply respect doctors, but I want to be very clear on something: at every hospital in the United States, many doctors are doing the wrong things, … - Casey Means
" "I deeply respect doctors, but I want to be very clear on something: at every hospital in the United States, many doctors are doing the wrong things, pushing pills and interventions when an ultra-aggressive stance on diet and behavior would do far more for the patient in front of them. Suicide and burnout rates are astronomical in health care, with approximately four hundred doctors per year killing themselves. (That’s equivalent to about four medical school graduating classes just dropping dead every year by their own hand.) Doctors have twice the rate of suicide as the general population. Based on my own experience with depression as a young surgeon, I think a contributor to this phenomenon is an insidious spiritual crisis about the efficacy of our work and a sense of being trapped in a system
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Additional quotes by Casey Means
But the medicalization of chronic disease in the past fifty years has been an abject failure. Today, we’ve siloed diseases and have a treatment for everything: High cholesterol? See a cardiologist for a statin. High fasting glucose? See an endocrinologist for metformin. ADHD? See a neurologist for Adderall. Depressed? See a psychiatrist for a selective serotonin reuptake inhibitor (SSRI). Can’t sleep? See a sleep specialist for Ambien. Pain? See a pain specialist for an opioid. PCOS? See an OB-GYN for clomiphene. Erectile dysfunction? See a urologist for Viagra. Overweight? See an obesity specialist for Wegovy. Sinus infections? See an ENT for an antibiotic or surgery. But what nobody talks about — what I think many doctors don’t even realize — is that the rates of all these conditions are going up at the exact time we are spending trillions of dollars to “treat them.
The second is that our food is being transported over large distances, causing degradation and damage to nutrients. The average distance that produce travels from farm to plate in the United States is approximately fifteen hundred miles. During this journey, some fruits and vegetables can lose up to 77 percent of their vitamin C content, a critical micronutrient for ATP production in the mitochondria and antioxidant activity in the cell. You may have thought that “eating local” or shopping from farmers’ markets is frivolous, but it is actually a critical step to ensure you are getting maximal helpful molecular information in the bites you take to build and instruct your body. The third is that most of our U.S. calorie consumption is ultra-processed foods, stripped of their nutrition. About 60 percent or more of the calories adults in the nation consume is ultra-processed garbage. You’re looking at just a fraction of that seventy tons meeting the cells’ functional needs.