10 New Health Concerns for Americans, Obamacare, American Health, Ebola, People, FDA, Medical Issues, Doctors

FDA

Shutterstock.com

The FDA and natural health ought to concern you. For many reasons, the FDA and natural health do not get along. The two systems are not so much flawed individually as they are antagonistic. The FDA is set up to regulate big medicine, meaning it is geared to work with large pharmaceutical companies that can shell out millions of dollars for drug development and approval because they can patent their products and recoup their investment. Natural health relies on natural things, which cannot be patented, so there is no financial incentive (or ability) to spend millions of dollars to gain approval for treatments that are already available. The FDA is set up for modern medicine, which treats sickness. Natural health tends to emphasize wellness. Look for more clashes until these two important entities figure out they’re not talking the same language.

Attack on Academic Physicians

The increasing attacks on academic physicians ought to keep you up at night. An academic physician is an MD who teaches, researches, and lectures on medicine. Many academic docs consult with drug and device companies. This is very sensible. Most drug companies do not need electricians or accountants or journalists teaching about their drugs. They need doctors. Yet there are numerous attacks by journalist watchdog groups that make it seem like an academic doctor is some kind of crook for working with a drug or medical device company. Watch out—the day may come when we have drug companies and medical device manufacturers who are not allowed to hire medical professionals as consultants!

Mental Illnesses

The increasing pharmacological therapy for mental disorders ought to concern us. The DSM-IV, which defines mental illnesses, ought to be reclassified as a work of fiction in that disorders come and go based on whatever popular culture holds to be true at the moment. For instance, depression used to be a period of prolonged sadness in people who could not name its cause. In other words, if you were sad and knew why you were sad, you weren’t depressed. You were sad. Maybe you were grieving. Today, you’re clinically depressed if you’re sad for more than a brief time, and the clinically depressed get medicated. Not to mention giving powerful drugs to kids who cannot sit still for hours on end in school on a diet of a sugar. We have to stop medicating grieving widows, lonely people, rambunctious kids, and others. When everything is a mental illness, then nothing is a mental illness.

Obesity

Obesity is a huge concern, no pun intended. Obesity is not just an American disease; the epidemic is going global with obesity a major health issue in such disparate places as India and China. Human beings weigh more now than ever before in history and extreme obesity (the super-morbidly obese) such as never existed before is now common. Hospitals now routinely are widening doorways, reinforcing toilets, and ordering extra-super-wide surgical tables to accommodate the obese. (There was a time when only obesity clinics ordered such specialty furniture and equipment—now it is routine for most hospitals.) Obese people suffer functional disability, are more at risk for all kinds of illnesses, and can be very tricky to treat in the hospital. For instance, it is much harder to perform emergency surgery on a 700-pound woman than a 120-pound woman.