[NYTr] Disease Economy: How the US economy runs on "treating" chronic disease

[All the News That Doesn't Fit]

sent by Tom Simonds (activ-l)

News Target - Jul 28, 2007
http://www.newstarget.com/019337.html

Disease Economy: 

How the United States economy runs on "treating" chronic disease

by Mike Adams

This is an article about the disease economy. That's a term I coined
because I could find no other existing term to describe what I'm
observing in our economy today. I call it the disease economy because
such a huge percentage of the economic activity and economic growth I
see in this country is based on the manufacturing, marketing and selling
of products and services based on disease. That is, products and
services that either cause diseases or "treat" those diseases.

How do I know we're in a disease economy today? You can see it for
yourself. Just drive around any city or town in the United States and
you can see what's happening. Take a look at the new construction.
What's going to be there? If it's an office complex, chances are it's
going to be a medical office building. If it's on a street corner, it's
probably going to be a pharmacy -- maybe a new Walgreens or CVS Pharmacy
or a new drive-through Wal-Mart pharmacy. You even see pharmacies in
grocery stores now, because they are so profitable. When you go into
grocery stores and look at what's being sold there, you're getting a
good look at the economic activity in this country. You mostly see
products that promote disease, thanks to their disease-causing
ingredients.

Of course, the disease economy promotes Big Pharma companies. These are
the pharmaceutical manufacturers in this country, and they are huge
global corporations. The selling of pharmaceuticals is a $1 trillion
industry. It's an amazing statistic. Here in the United States, some of
our largest corporations are drug companies. In fact, as I've stated
before, the top 10 pharmaceutical companies in the United States earn
more money than the remaining 490 Fortune 500 companies. Just recently,
I heard the Bush administration was very excited about the news that we
are experiencing economic growth in this country. The economy is up,
more money is changing hands, and that's all that economists really look
at when calculating gross domestic product or gross national product.
They're just looking at the total number of dollars that changed hands.

An economy based on paying for disease treatment
However, if you look at the quality of the products and services that
are being exchanged for these dollars, you'll realize something is amiss
here, because what we're doing is basing our economic growth on the
growth of chronic and degenerative disease. We're basing our economy on
the idea that we can treat more and more people with drugs and medical
services and keep selling them soft drinks and fast food while calling
it economic growth.

This leads me to the most important point of this article, which is that
we cannot create abundance in the United States or in any country by
selling each other increasingly expensive products and services that
promote disease. In other words, we cannot create abundance by poisoning
ourselves. The very idea is absurd. The whole point of economic growth
is to create economic abundance, and if you look at the classic
definitions of economic growth, they are about providing more goods and
services to people in a more efficient manner. Those goods and services
are supposed to improve the quality of life for those people.

In the old days, the arguments for the invisible hand in the economy
were that if you let entrepreneurs compete in a free market, they would
devise clever and efficient ways to create, produce and deliver goods
and services to consumers that would ultimately enhance their quality of
life. That part is absolutely true, and the United States has done that
very successfully. The free market does work in accomplishing that, but
what we're seeing now is something beyond what those old-school
economists could have ever conceived. We're seeing an economy that is
increasingly based on goods and services that do not add to the quality
of consumers' lives but rather take away from it. We're seeing
entrepreneurs and creative, clever people finding new ways to market
products that harm people and calling that profitability or economic
growth.

We see this quite blatantly in the drug industry, where creative
marketers keep coming up with new, absurd ways to sell drugs to people
through direct-to-consumer advertising on television. Some of these ads
are absolutely idiotic in what they are promising. Yet, they are
effective in creating demand. They sell products, but these products do
not help consumers.

We also see a lot of products being marketed and sold to consumers that
may give them very short-term benefits -- such as the taste of a
hamburger or the taste of french fries, which lasts about 10 seconds --
but has long-term detrimental consequences, like obesity, heart disease,
brain disorders, cancer and diabetes. These diseases largely come about
as a result of long-term consumption of nutritionally depleted foods.

Without question, the U.S. economy is heavily invested in disease.
Retailers like Walgreens have mastered the art of selling products on
both sides of the equation. At the front of the store, Walgreens sells
junk food products, soft drinks, candy and a lot of food that really has
no nutrition. At the back of the store, they sell prescription drugs --
drugs that treat the symptoms of diseases that are ultimately caused by
people's poor dietary choices and their consumption of junk food.
Walgreens has really mastered this. They will sell you the problem and
the treatment, all in the same store. One reason Walgreens is so
incredibly successful as a business is because it has mastered the art
of selling products to consumers as part of the disease economy. It is a
flagship company of the disease economy, perhaps even more so than
pharmaceutical companies.

Illusions of wealth in the disease economy

One of the funniest things about the disease economy is that the
consumers who are diseased think they're doing well because they own
stocks in the companies selling the products that harm them. This
fascinates me. A guy dying of cancer or suffering from heart disease,
because of the products he has been consuming for years, believes he's
doing well because he owns stock in large food manufacturing companies
or large pharmaceutical companies. Maybe he owns stock in a new medical
technology, or maybe he's a partner in a local medical clinic. His
investments are doing great, but he's dying, and he's dying from
preventable degenerative disease.

This is what's happening across the country, not just to one person, but
to millions of people -- perhaps hundreds of millions -- who think the
economy is looking up and think that maybe they have a good job because
they work for a pharmaceutical company. They think they have good
investments now because they have stocks in the junk food manufacturers.
They think they're doing well financially, but guess what? They're
consuming the product themselves, and they are dying. They're dying from
a degenerative disease at a rate that has never before been witnessed in
human history. This demonstrates my entire point: We cannot create
abundance by selling each other increasingly expensive products and
services that harm each other.

By the way, I don't mean to leave out all those chemical companies
manufacturing pesticides, herbicides, fungicides, toxic household
cleaners and toxic personal care products. A lot of those skincare
companies are really just chemical manufacturers with sexy marketing and
lots of women in lab coats selling you products that actually harm your
health; that literally contain ingredients that cause cancer and liver
disease. People think our economy is booming, but we're all dying of
chronic disease. Why is it that 50 percent of our senior citizens in the
United States have high blood pressure? Why is it that 40 percent of our
senior citizens are now clinically obese? I'm willing to bet that a
similar percentage may have nervous system disorders or early stages of
dementia or Alzheimer's disease. Most of them are probably metabolizing
some form of cancer right now, even though it may not have been
diagnosed yet.

We are a nation of diseased individuals, and that disease starts very
early. There are 12-year-old children who have atherosclerosis. There
are teenagers with osteoporosis, and teenage children with obesity are
now common. In fact, diabetes has gotten so bad in young people that
they had to change the name. That used to be the name. Now they just
have to call it diabesity, and that applies to children, teenagers and
adults alike.

Returning to health would bankrupt the economy

We have created so much disease in this country, and we have based our
economy on it to such a degree that, frankly, we cannot untangle this
situation without causing economic distress. If there were a cure for
cancer, diabetes or heart disease tomorrow, where a person could wave a
magic wand and instantly eliminate those diseases, and if every person
in the country did that tomorrow, the sobering truth is that our
national economy would collapse overnight. It would collapse because
there's so much money, so much real estate, so much education and so
much expertise and research invested in disease that we could not
financially survive in an economy based on health and abundance, at
least not the way things are configured right now.

We could not economically survive in an economy based on real health. We
are so invested in disease in this nation that we truly have a disease
economy, and in order for that economy to grow, you have to expand the
number of people with disease, expand the definition of disease or
expand the coverage of people who are treated with high-profit
disease-masking products. All three of those things are happening right
now.

Corruption in the Disease Economy

Drug companies have experts on their payroll who are part of the FDA's
drug safety decision panels, and who don't disclose their conflicts of
interest. They are making decisions that expand the definition of
disease. A classic case of this was when cholesterol numbers were
lowered from 130 to 100 to instantly make 10 million more Americans
diagnosable with high cholesterol so they could be treated with statin
drugs.

We have the ridiculous (and scientifically dishonest) expansion of
psychiatric disorders or so-called brain chemistry diseases, which
really have nothing to do with chemistry, but everything to do with
expanding the marketplace of psychiatric drugs. The way you expand the
marketplace is not to sit around and wait for people to become mentally
disturbed. What you do is change the definition of mental disorders and
make up new ones.

One of the biggest questions right now is the marketing of adult
attention deficit hyperactivity disorder, or adult ADHD. It is a made-up
disease. What are the symptoms of this disease? You have too many things
on your mind, you can't keep track of everything you need to get done
and you are easily distracted. What adult doesn't meet those criteria?
We all do, because modern society is a busy place. According to the drug
company definition, and even the definition offered by the psychiatric
community, we are all suffering from mental illness and must be treated
with drugs.

This is one way to expand the disease economy. This is one way you keep
those profits flowing and those shareholders happy that they've invested
in your company. Most of us here in America are invested in a disease
economy, one way or another. Take a look at your own retirement
portfolio, if you're fortunate enough to have one, and you're likely to
find that you own some percentage of some company that's invested in
disease. Interesting, isn't it?

Transforming the Disease Economy into a Health Economy

Enough about the problem; what about the solution? How do you solve the
disease economy, challenge it and turn it around into a health economy,
a healing economy or an abundant economy? To do that, you first have to
figure out a way to make health profitable. How do you make healthy
people profitable when there's so much money in treating disease and
chronic illness and so much money in addicting people to lifetime
requirements for prescription drugs? How do you generate profits off of
healthy people, as a nation?

Let's face it: If people are healthy, especially well into their old
age, they are no longer customers of those clinics being constructed all
over this country. They are no longer customers of Walgreens, CVS or the
Wal-Mart pharmacy. They are no longer customers of surgeons, physicians,
foot specialists or Alzheimer's doctors. This is why I believe there is
absolutely no genuine investment in disease prevention in this country.
There's really no investment at all, because preventing disease is the
last thing that this disease economy wants.

How do you make it worthwhile to keep people healthy? The answer to that
comes down to education, and here's why: When a person is educated,
whether it be an education in the arts, the sciences or in any other
realm, they live longer and healthier. They maintain their brain
function, and they remain productive members of society, no matter how
long they live. They can be producing something that benefits other
members of society well into their 70s, 80s or even 90s. Healthy
individuals can age gracefully and maintain healthy cognitive function.
They can directly produce things, such as writing a book, or they can
help teach others. They can even be mentors to young entrepreneurs, who
can benefit from experience in learning how to manufacture, market or
sell something useful.

An uneducated individual, on the other hand, tends to be more of a
consumer than a producer of things of value, because they don't have the
background, education or experience to be productive members of society.
If you don't educate the population, they all become consumers and not
producers. It is when people are stuck in the consumer state that they
can be profitable to the disease economy. But when the public is
educated, it becomes far more profitable to keep people healthy. You
could add 20 or 30 years of creative productivity to an individual's
life, which means you could boost the productivity of the entire nation
by perhaps 15 to 20 percent, which is a huge number. You wouldn't have
to base it on disease anymore. You could base it on health. We need a
health economy that's based on disease prevention, tied with genuine
education.

Think about what we produce in the United States versus other countries.
While we are toiling away in our disease economy and inventing new super
extreme nacho Doritos and coming up with new prescription drugs that
alter brain chemistry in children, genius-level students in other
countries are actually doing something useful. In Japan, for example,
they are inventing a whole new industry, which I believe will dominate
the world's economy. It will be bigger than the computer industry and
automobile industry ever was. It's the robotics industry.

In the next 20 or 30 years, the robotics industry will be absolutely
huge. Japan is at least 10 years ahead of the United States in this key
industry. Why? It's because Japanese students are well educated. They
also tend to have a lot better health than students in the United
States. In India, they're inventing new computer technologies and new
customer service systems that are siphoning labor away from the United
States because they do it faster, cheaper and with similar quality but
for less money and far lower health-care costs.

Globally, our disease economy simply cannot compete with global
economies that actually produce something useful. You want proof of it?
Just look at what's happening to General Motors. General Motors is
shutting down. General Motors is probably headed for bankruptcy. One of
the largest corporations ever produced by the United States is about to
go bankrupt. Why? In my opinion, the answer is that General Motors is
spending more on health insurance than it is on steel. They're operating
in a disease economy, and in a disease economy, it costs way too much
for workers because workers are diseased, and you have to cover the
costs of treating all that disease so you can have health insurance for
all those workers. The United State's health insurance costs are the
highest of any nation in the world.

Not only do we have workers who are under-educated in the United States,
they are also over-diseased. We have a disease economy, so we think
we're creating abundance by selling each other expensive treatments,
products and services for disease. The real industries, like automobile
manufacturing, are disappearing. Toyota is smart. Toyota is going to
dominate the auto industry. Personally, I won't drive anything other
than the Toyota. Toyota is the best mainstream vehicle in the world.
Interestingly enough, Toyota is going to be making robots soon, too.
Japan does not have a disease economy. Japan has an economy with a good
dose of innovation. In fact, innovation is thriving throughout Asia.
They don't have a disease economy. They have an innovation-based economy
where they actually have to produce something useful to get paid.

Smart nations will invest in prevention
Now, at some point these nations, as they adopt the Western lifestyle
and become richer and start to consume more beef animal products, as
well as junk food, may very well become disease economies. But some of
these nations will be smart about it and start investing in prevention.
For example, any nation right now in this world that allows cigarettes
to be sold to its population is committing a form of self-destruction.
It's like national suicide. What nation would want its citizens to smoke
cigarettes so that they would halve their own lives, create huge
health-care costs and at the same time reduce their long-term
productivity?

Then there are nations like Singapore. Singapore is doing some very
intelligent things, and education is one of them. Singapore has a very
smart population and a booming economy based on actual abundance and not
disease. Of course, people say, "Singapore is almost like a police
state. What about personal rights?" That's a huge argument. Should
people have the right to smoke themselves to death? Should they have the
right to drink soft drinks until they're so obese that they need a knee
replacement and demand to be covered by Medicare? Should people be
allowed to eat junk food all day, avoid exercise and then get heart
disease and need a heart transplant that's paid for by other taxpayers
or other participants in their insurance company? These are questions I
can't answer in this article. All I can say is that any nation that
bases its economy on "diseasification" of its citizens is ultimately
doomed to economic collapse. That's exactly where the United States
economy is currently headed, to certain economic collapse.

We are losing our health. We are losing our minds. We're losing our
genuine economic base. We're losing our manufacturing. We're losing our
scientific edge. We're losing our education, and we're losing the
inherent value of our money supply as the U.S. dollar continues to slip.
What do we have left? Well there's always the Wal-mart and the
Walgreens. Give me a Snickers bar. If you can't sleep, you can always
buy sleeping pills. If you can't wake up in the morning, you can always
drink some coffee. It's the disease economy.

The disease economy is all around you
You're probably participating in it, and if you think you're not, check
again, because almost everyone is. It takes an act of great
self-determination and courage to extricate oneself from the disease
economy and be a productive member of society. It is a rare thing to
witness. Very few people I've ever known, or know today, are actually
productive members of society doing something useful for the benefit of
other human beings.

Do you know who some of those people are? Organic farmers. These are
people I greatly respect who are actually doing something useful for
others. It is something difficult, something laborious, something a lot
of people wouldn't want to do. There are people in society that are
productive, and if we're going to succeed as an economy -- or even as a
nation -- into the future, we're going to have to expand the number of
people who are making a living doing something useful, not something
that is just based on disease.

You see, thinking that money spent on disease treatment is economic
productivity is actually an economic fallacy. Here's an example: If you
just want to create jobs in the country, I have a brilliant plan for job
creation. First, hire half the nation to be window breakers. Give them
all hammers. Their job is to go around the entire country and break
windows. Then you hire the other half of the nation to be window
replacers. Their job is to go around and replace all the windows that
were broken by the window breakers. You do that and you will have full
employment! Sounds insane, doesn't it? But that's what's actually
happening today with health.

We have people who are health breakers. They work for pharmaceutical
companies, and they work for junk food companies and medical facilities.
We have relatively few people who are healers. We've got to change that
ratio so that we have fewer health breakers and more health healers in
this nation. That's why I'm very happy to see the rising popularity of
massage therapists, herbalists, nutritionists, acupuncturists and
naturopathic physicians -- people who are true healers. That's what
we've got to do in this country to turn things around. We've got to base
the economy on healing, disease prevention and the education of our
population so that as people live longer they can contribute to society
in a meaningful way.

I realize this plan would require our national leaders to actually have
vision. We need leaders who have vision beyond this generation. We need
to be thinking about the next hundred years or beyond. I don't think
anybody in Washington is considering the next hundred years. They're
just looking at the next election.

Vote with your dollars
You can remove yourself from the disease economy. You know how you do
that? You vote with your dollars. You stop funding these drug companies,
junk food companies, toxic personal-care product manufacturing
companies, pesticide companies and petroleum companies. You stop giving
them your money. You starve them of economic growth by voting with your
dollars. You go somewhere else.

You buy food from organic farms at your local food co-op or farmer's
market. You buy honest personal care products made with natural
ingredients, like Dr. Bronner's soap. You reduce your dependence on
fuels. You start riding a bicycle rather than firing up your car all the
time. You can change your behavior, and you can change the effect of
your dollars. You can help reverse this disease economy and turn it into
a healing economy.

You, me and the hundreds of thousands of people who read this article
have got to change this world one buying decision at a time, because
money is the only way we're ever going to change it. By changing the way
we choose to spend our money, we reshape the corporate landscape. We
reshape this economy and move it away from a disease economy. Pay
attention to your actions when you're at a cash register. Look in your
grocery cart. Ask yourself, "What am I invested in here? What am I
supporting?" Commit yourself to making positive changes so that you
support the companies, organizations and individuals that are actually
doing something positive.

If you're currently working for a drug company, quit your job and find
something productive to do. Find something that actually benefits
humankind and isn't just based on scientific fraud and over-exaggerated,
hyped-up marketing.

All content posted on this site is commentary or opinion and is
protected under Free Speech. Truth Publishing LLC takes sole
responsibility for all content. Truth Publishing sells no hard products
and earns no money from the recommendation of products. Newstarget.com
is presented for educational and commentary purposes only and should not
be construed as professional advice from any licensed practitioner.
Truth Publishing assumes no responsibility for the use or misuse of this
material. For the full terms of usage of this material, visit
www.NewsTarget.com/terms.shtml