Healthcare is the biggest industry: a check-up is sure to make you a patient forever
“Much of your pain is the bitter potion by which the physician within you heals your sick self.”— Khalil Gibran
I had predicted, some time ago, that if the Alma-Ata definition of health is applied to the entire population, there will be no one who will be, well, well. All will be ill! It makes lot of sense as sickness is the biggest industry in the world today. If one goes for a check-up when one is apparently well, one will have to come out as a patient, by the present definition. We have to feed the corporate technocracy at any cost because the latter provides employment to people. An analogy can be drawn with American military preparedness. They have built a fighter plane which cost them two and a half trillion dollars. Now, they have found that it cannot fly in the rain! Does not matter; they have the capability to have such a plane anyway. So is the story in health arena. We have built a huge sickness fighting industry based on technocracy worth trillions of dollars. Audits now show that that industry is the leading cause of death and disability.
Health is defined as absence of physical, mental, psychological, environmental and even spiritual well-being. This is impossible to achieve in life. We had defined health as ‘enthusiasm to work and enthusiasm to be compassionate’. Now, see the difference. To comply with the Alma-Ata definition, one needs to undergo all screening tests to be declared ‘healthy’.
Although I am happy that my predictions came true, I am sorry, as people have to face the music of being labelled ill and treated for no fault of theirs, for the benefit of the industry. A study had said that absence of senior cardiologists resulted in a fall in patient mortality (Moneylife, 11 June 2015). Moral: Those divine interventionists were causing more harm than good to patients. This will hold good across the board, if similar studies are conducted. This worries me a lot.
One country introduced a quarterly dental check-up free of cost for its citizens of all ages, some years ago. A decade later, audit showed that the country had the highest dental illness in the world! Unwarranted interventions made life miserable for their citizens. The Lancet study did show that almost a third of the world population has at least five diseases at any given time. This number would go up when the screening machinery becomes more sophisticated. For example, when we get to detect a new rogue cell in circulation, we will have a few cancers starting in every one of us; rogue cells are those that escape apoptosis at their appointed time, a natural phenomenon. Most, if not all, those rogue cells will die out; but there are a few circulating daily. Imagine the anxiety and fear such a scenario would bring on the already anxious people.
There is also a hidden danger inherent in all our screening methods. There is nothing normal in the human body; all parameters are just the average of a cohort of people. We change the average for normal and, when such a trick is applied to a healthy population, 5%-25% are declared sick. Anyone who sees a doctor for check-up will be declared a patient. Rarely do they revert to normalcy. Once a patient, always a patient! Additionally, many of them get iatrogenic illnesses added on! I am sorry for society, but happy for myself that the truths that I had been warning about are being proven right, almost on a daily basis. This is the reality.
At least for our country, we should invent a new sickness care policy taking the best in many systems of treating diseases put together; shall we call it ‘Bharat System’?
(
Professor Dr BM Hegde, a Padma Bhushan awardee in 2010, is an MD, PhD, FRCP (London, Edinburgh, Glasgow & Dublin), FACC and FAMS.)
"Health is defined as absence of physical, mental, psychological, environmental and even spiritual well-being. "
should be Sickness is defined as...
Isn't it?