Money Can’t Buy … Love … Happiness … or Health

What does health insurance buy anyway?  Does health insurance move you toward being healthier?  Of course someone will always bring up the argument around needing care for a traumatic injury such as a broken leg or the emergency care needed for some life-threatening condition such as a heart attack (although in 40% of all heart attacks, the first symptom is sudden death, so that’s money down the drain).  

Someone might also say, ‘What if I get diabetes?’  What if you do?  Does medical care reverse or cure diabetes?  Or does it simply manage the manifestations of the condition?  By the way, diabetes itself is a manifestation of inappropriate lifestyle choices (primarily a sedentary life combined with poor food choices).   I guess what I’m hung up on is that the vast majority of health conditions or diseases that people perceive health insurance will prove valuable or manage for them are in reality, lifestyle diseases – heart disease, cancer, diabetes, and the “all the above” conditions and more that obesity causes.  

Or here’s another way of looking at it:  If everyone had unlimited access to health care – doctors, drugs, and surgery – would we be any healthier?   Yes, people would have access to the doctors, drugs and treatments to mitigate the effects (symptoms) of their improper and unhealthy lifestyles, but would those people actually be healthier?   Would we have less diabetes, cancer, heart disease, or obesity?  No way.  Let’s be honest – we’re just treating bad lifestyles!  Even worse, we’re insuring them.

For example, if a person takes medication to lower their high blood pressure, does it make them healthier?  Yes, the drug will lower their blood pressure, but does that make them truly healthier?  The medical or allopathic paradigm will tell you yes because your blood pressure readings are within ‘normal’ limits; but does that make you healthy?  What is health?  How do we define this thing called health?  (In that example, studies show that people who take high blood pressure medication die at the same age as those who don’t – they just die with lower blood pressure. Go figure.)

What is health?
Health is when all your cells of your body are functioning at an optimal level.  When those cells become dysfunctional, our health suffers and some ‘condition’ manifests itself (by the way, it usually takes decades of improper living to reach a point where a disease will reach a stage where it’s symptomatic or diagnostically detectable – and all that time, you’re paying your insurance premiums. Imagine if you’d been paying instead for a gym membership, personal training, nutritional coaching, a personal chef – something that actually made you healthy).  For example, taking insulin for Type 2 diabetes, provides an exogenous supply (an outside source) of the insulin your cells should normally produce, but it doesn’t cause the cells of the pancreas, which were functioning abnormal, to become healthy and start functioning normally and produce insulin.  Does it help manage your blood glucose levels?  Yes.  Does it make you become healthier? No.

What would make the cells of the pancreas healthy and produce insulin?  I’m so glad you asked.  Science has determined what makes ALL the cells of the body, including the insulin producing cells of the pancreas (called the Islets of Langerhans for you trivia buffs), and that of course is a lifestyle incorporating proper nutrition, regular exercise, and proper rest.  Did you know that Type 2 diabetes can be reversed within 30-60 days with lifestyle changes alone?  It’s true.

Do these Blue Shield plans offered provide you with a healthy diet, consistent exercise and adequate rest and stress reduction/avoidance?  I wouldn’t bet on it – your life’s at stake.   Eat right, start moving and get to bed earlier.

You can do it!

Yours in health, Dr. Paul