I blogged earlier that a guiding principle of our health care system is first, let them get sick. Show no interest in prevention or environmental causes, thus ensuring that people will get sick and become desperate for remedies, which you (health care provider) can charge lots of money for. An example of the disinterest in prevention is that schools of public health, which do considerable prevention research, get a tiny fraction (1%?) of the money spent on medical schools, which never do prevention research. As they say, an ounce of prevention is worth a pound of cure — and the government and other powerful players invest exactly the opposite of what this common-sense wisdom implies. You know the term war profiteering. Modern heath care is sick profiteering.
It is profiteering, not ignorance, because another guiding principle of modern health care is no cheap remedies. Along with zero interest in prevention, there is zero interest in cheap remedies, such as dietary ones. Doctors usually prescribe drugs or surgery. Both are expensive. Surely doctors are intelligent, but this principle makes them look stupid: They ignore or dismiss cheap remedies, no matter what. At Boing Boing I wrote about two examples. Sarah suffered from frequent migraines. Her doctors wanted to try one drug after another and do expensive tests. No matter how useless the tests and drugs — Sarah tried 30 drugs — her doctors acted unaware of other possibilities, such as looking for environmental triggers. Reid Kimball, who had Crohn’s Disease, found a diet that worked. He told a UCSF doctor how well it worked. I don’t think you can manage Crohn’s with diet, said the doctor. As if he hadn’t understood what Reid had said.
My self-experimentation is a reaction to this state of affairs. It is a way to test cheap remedies. I started self-experimentation about sleep (I woke up too early) because I knew a doctor would simply prescribe a drug. I didn’t want to take a drug for the rest of my life. You cannot easily do self-experimentation on prevention (e.g., compare how many colds you get with Regimen A versus Regimen B) but, no surprise, there is great overlap between cheap remedies and prevention. I found various cheap safe ways to sleep better — and I stopped getting colds. Not only does omega-3 make my brain work better, it prevents gum disease. I eat butter to make my brain work better, and I suspect it prevents heart attacks. What’s that? Someone told you butter is evil? That’s another consequence of our deeply messed-up health care system: When the people at the center of the system, the ones with the most power and prestige, promote twisted self-serving ideas (e.g., Harvard psychiatry professor Joseph Biederman and his advocacy of giving powerful drugs to six-year-olds), these ideas spread outward to everyone else, who believe and repeat them. I was no different. When my self-experimentation starting reaching conclusions utterly different than what I’d been told (e.g., I found that breakfast is bad and sugar can cause weight loss, I was stunned. I’d heard a thousand times that breakfast is good and sugar is fattening.