As you’ll see here, the ADA allows a drug company sponsor to get in the way of publishing results by a doctor that (…get this…) uses proper nutrition to have his diabetic patients no longer require their medications.
You’d think that if a medical doctor were doing this with as much success as Dr. Fuhrman is (rather than just throwing costly medications at their patients, which is what most doctors are doing), the ADA would want him to be his poster boy. Sadly, you’d be wrong.
Dr. Fuhrman is seen here speaking at the Healthy Lifestyle Expo in 2007. He is also one of the persons being interviewed for the documentary: Processed People, that I mentioned is coming out very soon.
“… the ADA allows a drug company sponsor to get in the way of publishing results by a doctor that (…get this…) uses proper nutrition to have his diabetic patients no longer require their medications…..”
This basically sums up the entire problem with the health system. It is not about making people healthy, but all about PROFIT!!
It’s not really too surprising.
I know of one doctor who was found guilty of professional misconduct (by the College of Physicians and Surgeons) for prescribing vitamins and another who was forced into retirement for treating Lyme Disease with antibiotics (this treatment is available in the U.S.)
The lesson: Don’t fuck with the drug companies, medical associations, etc…
I’ve said it a couple of times. My mother, diagnosed with cancer and diabetes at the same time. They cut the cancer out of her, and then gave her access to a dietician for a few weeks. Three months out of hospital she was 100% off of her medicines. Consider that, in only three months, she had to change her diet and exercise a bit, and trust me the exercise was minimal as she was recovering from surgery. It’s not massive change that is needed.
Sadly, Beagle, most people would rather just pop a pill. The next time you go shopping, watch people keep driving around, waiting to find a really close parking spot rather than have to walk an extra 10 feet. We are a nation of sluggards who would rather be confined to a wheelchair because we’re too fat to walk than walk around the block once a day.
Along the same lines as Dr. Fuhrmann (sorry, I’m on dial-up and don’t have the patience to download the video) is a book called “The Schwarzbein Principle” which I may have mentioned on this blog before. Schwarzbein is an endocrinologist who was seeing her patients get worse on the standard diabetic diet, and switched them to the plan she eventually outlined in her book. It’s common sense: Get off the processed crap and eat REAL food. It was a real eye-opener for me, and I don’t even have diabetes.
This is ridiculous. Keep people unhealthy for the sake of profit. That’s a friggin awesome idea (insert sarcasm…now).
Digital Dame has a good point, but we have been conditioned to be sluggards. Making people sluggards help keep the powerful people in power. When will people wake up and realize that poor health has more implications than determining what size clothes you wear?
However, there is debate over how much exercise really keeps a person slender. Certainly it plays *some* role, as it seems to improve insulin sensitivity, which by definition would ramp up the metabolism, but aside from that it’s not a sure thing that exercise does anything but improve cardiac efficiency and increase the tone and strength of other muscles. So it’s not exactly fair to say that people get fat because they are “sluggards.”
People *have* been misled about what is and is not good for us in our diets. They don’t always know where to look for the right answers; they often don’t know there *are* right answers that they’re not hearing. There was a term for this that I ran across recently… um… information cascade? I think that’s it. Certainly the national discourse about diet and health has taken the form of an information cascade, in which a few people declare (for instance) that one must eat six to eleven servings of grain foods per day in order to be healthy, and because those people have professional credibility, everybody around them goes, “Oh, those people know what they’re talking about,” and the misinformation spreads rapidly that way.
It’s going to take another information cascade to get the right information out, and we’ve got an uphill climb. And diet is at least 90 percent of the problem in most people, I think, where obesity is a sign that something is physically wrong with them. (It isn’t always.) Where diet is tied to metabolic slowdown, simply changing the diet will often rev things back up again. I’ve noticed this in my own situation. If I eat right, I don’t have to exercise strenuously to lose weight. Just as well, because I don’t think I’m evolved to behave as though tigers are chasing me twelve hours a day. *shrug*
[...] [...]