The Catskill Chronicle

By Mort Malkin

On the House floor in Congress, the Speaker pronounces the US as number one in the world in health care. We must be – we do more CAT scans, MRIs, PET scans, echo-cardiograms, angioplasty, by-pass surgery, stress tests, osteoporosis bone scans, lipid profile blood tests … and we prescribe enough drugs that we then excrete to sterilize our lakes and rivers with antibiotics and roil the waters with antidepressants. In recent surveys of senior citizens groups, the Gadfly Revelry and Research gang found that over 95% take multiple prescription meds regularly.

If we’re number one, why should we bother to change our ringelevio capitalism system of health care?

Shhh — the US is not even in the 25 highest nations in healthy life expectancy (DALE – Disability Adjusted Life Expectancy), or in the lowest 25 nations in infant mortality. Nor is medical care free in the land of free-for-all capitalism. And so, we have around 50 million people without any medical insurance. For them, it’s a faith-based system – faith that they’ll stay healthy.

As to health care itself, the medical profession is superb at testing for disease. In fact, if you have a complaint, they will test you ad infinitum until they can attach a name (often in Latin) to your condition or disease. Sometimes it’s just attaching part of the the word pathology to the anatomical structure or process, as in cardiomyopathy or labeling the patient a sociopath.

Once the diagnosis is established, treatment can be prescribed – generally medication (drugs) or referral to a specialist who will champion the benefits of surgery. The medical profession is becoming good at keeping people alive but managing their various diseases and conditions.

Health care? Nowhere does anyone address keeping people healthy by preventing disease. Nor does any insurance company cover the cost of primary preventive medicine. Oh, a few medical practitioners will advise you about nutrition if you have diabetes or renal disease, fewer still about exercise, and virtually none about meditation. Yet, nutrition, exercise, and meditation – if done in an ideal fashion – can prevent most chronic disease from ever occurring. 70% of chronic disease – coronary heart disease, diabetes type 2, chronic respiratory disease, osteoporosis, chronic low back pain, mild to moderate mental depression, cancer of various types – can not only be prevented, some of the diseases and conditions can actually be reversed. The testing for and diagnosis and treatment of chronic disease account for about 85% of the total cost of medical care in the US. The 70% prevention figure attributed to healthful lifestyle comes from CDC&P (Centers for Disease Control & Prevention), which just reports the facts, ma’am, regardless of pressure from the White House, Congress, or the health insurance industry. CDC&P’s “healthy lifestyle” includes no smoking, a nutritious diet, and exercise.

The government, therefore, thinks it needs only to tell the people to have more fruit and vegetables, and exercise most days for a half hour.

So, how come there’s an epidemic of obesity, diabetes is as rampant as ever, more coronary artery stents are being inserted, more medication than ever is being prescribed, and cancers are killing wantonly despite the most modern drugs that Big Pharma can patent for use in chemotherapy?

The answer is that there’s a great deal of detail to effective nutrition and especially to effective exercise. We can also add a third component to healthy lifestyle from the ancient Buddhist tradition of northern South Asia that addresses brain chemistry and emotion health using a simplified medical model of meditation that has been tested by American researchers and reported in the scientific literature.

Part Two of this miniseries will offer chapter and verse of the Book on Health officially known as primary preventive medicine. For now, we can outline the rationale for each of the three components of a Wellness Triad.

First we need, for adequate nutrition: protein, fat, and carbohydrate, plus 20-odd vitamins (A,B, C, D, E, etc) and 80-some minerals (calcium, magnesium, potassium, iron, iodine, silicon, and most other members of the Periodic Table — just no lead, mercury, and strontium 90). We also require phytonutrients such as carotenoids, polyphenols, saponins, lycopene, linolenic acid, and 5,000 others. You can’t get the total of 5,100 nutrients your body needs just by eating burgers and fries, not even by adding supplements of broccoli, asparagus, pomegranate, and Kombucha juice. There is no magic food — only the magic of a wide variety of foods.

Exercise needs less variety than does diet, but more truity to principles. Start by considering the five basic types of exercise: strength training, aerobic exercise, stretching, skill training, and just for fun. Strength training involves contracting individual muscle groups against resistance (usually gravity) for a limited number of repetitions. Strength training helps calcium metabolism, strengthens wrists, and maintains muscle mass. Aerobic exercise works in mysterious and wondrous ways by beneficially changing the chemistry of our bodies and brains and upgrading our various metabolic processes (lipid metabolism, sugar metabolism, immune system function, blood pressure stability, mental equilibrium …). Stretching exercises will prevent cramping of muscles at night (“nocturnal claudication” for the neurologists) and supply suppleness. Sports for fun are good for mental health, just like chocolate is.

Inasmuch as health requires a first class aerobic exercise, we ought to set down the definition and then see which sports and exercises fit said definition. A true aerobic exercise, according to the DDYD (the don’t delude yourself dictionary), is a rhythmic, weight bearing exercise that uses large muscle groups and is carried on far enough, fast enough, and often enough. It is not sufficient that you have a favorite sport — that will not suffice to make it aerobic. The two exercises that set the standard are running and cross country skiing. The how far, how fast, how often prescription is: 40 to 50 minutes at a pace between moderate and strong, 3 to 4 times a week.

Walking is a rhythmic, weight bearing exercise, and it’s free, safe, convenient, and needs no special facilities or equipment. So, why can’t it be aerobic? Because the power for walking comes from the calf muscles — not so large. As well, it’s hard to reach the how fast threshold. Enter, anatomy & biomechanics and a slightly changed technique. Voila —aerobic walking! Aerobic walking is, at once, powerful with less perception of effort and light & smooth with less stress on the back and leg joints.

The third component of the Wellness Triad may have started out long ago in the 1st millennium BC in northern India, but Gautama Buddha was on to something. Meditation more recently has been tested in western research laboratories and has been found to have many metabolic benefits. It deserves a place in the Wellness Triad lifestyle.

Tune in to Part Two of this mini-series for details. We may still need the medical profession upon occasion, but it’s better to need sickness care only occasionally. Health care is mostly up to us.