Before the epidemic strikes you must read this… by Ray Collins
• Looking ill might just make you worse
• Find out why the latest health scare is pure junk
• Big deal, it’s only your health being put on the bottom line
“Oh you don’t look so well!”
What’s your natural response to someone saying this?
Do you raise yourself up to a swagger and say, “I’ve never been better; in fact I am positively perky.”
Or, more than likely do you say, “Really? Well I have been under the cosh a bit.”
It’s an interesting fact of human psychology that when we are told we don’t look in rude health we tend to feel unwell.
Of course if we are suffering from something major or worrying the very last thing we want to hear is that we look like we’re at death’s door.
Speaking to a GP at the golf club the other day he said that it was an absolute no-no to start telling patients that they looked sickly… even if they were completely green around the gills.
The premise being that by re-enforcing the problem it makes it more difficult to cure.
So, what in the name of all that is holy is going on with the medical profession of late?
Anyone else come across the term pre-diabetic being used?
This phrase has entered the medical lexicon of late to describe someone who may have blood sugar, blood pressure or even cholesterol levels slightly higher than normal.
This strikes me as just plain stupid – and many much stronger words as well.
Pre-Diabetes – the new health scare
Just think about this for a minute.
Right now it is pre-lunch as I write this, which means I haven’t had my sandwich yet and so I feel a little hungry.
No doubt at a dinner party this weekend I may enjoy a pre-dinner drink (or two!) at a point prior to tucking into my meal, bearing in mind that I won’t have even tasted a morsel of it by then.
On my trip to Portugal I expect the captain of the aircraft to make a series of pre-flight checks whilst we are still on the ground and well before we reach our cruising altitude of 34,000 feet.
My point here is that this concept of PRE- happens well before something occurs, and sometimes could mean that the event doesn’t occur at all.
So, PRE-Diabetes doesn’t make any sense at all.
Researchers state that labelling millions of people in this way merely turns healthy people into patients.
John Yukin, emeritus professor of medicine at University College London agrees, saying that doctors would be better off telling everyone to eat better and exercise more rather than putting them into a spurious medical category.
Having been given this moniker doesn’t help, especially when you consider that within a normal population there will be perfectly healthy individuals who happen to have higher readings than the arbitrary ‘normal’.
“Pre-diabetes is an artificial category with virtually zero clinical relevance,” continues the good prof. “There is no proven benefit of giving diabetes treatment drugs to people in this category before they go on to develop diabetes, particularly since many of them would not go on to develop the condition anyway.”
So, why are we seeing this diagnosis being used?
Should we be surprised?
If a state of human health can be given a label it is usually for one purpose only…
…to coral a pool of potential drug users.
By labelling a group and implying that they have a medical need it affords a ready market for the nice boys and girls employed as pharmaceutical representatives to create a glossy PowerPoint presentation for GPs.
Their counterparts in the marketing team can do a similar job for lazy journos by issuing crafted press releases that write their stories for them.
Let me give you an example of how this works –
From: Diabetes – How GSK is making a difference (a promotional leaflet for GP’s)
‘Another area of research is pre-diabetes, a condition where blood sugar levels are higher than normal but not yet high enough to be diagnosed as diabetes. Pre-diabetes is a key stage in the development of type 2 diabetes and more than 300 million people worldwide are thought to have pre-diabetes.’
Just look at how they quickly identify pre-diabetes as a condition and one that heralds full blown diabetes as a result.
You can imagine how the headline writers would take this information to create a major health scare…
‘300 Million at risk as the obesity crisis worsens’
This is the real danger with this obsession of creating a diagnosis, but if we take the information and use it more positively then we can do good.
The real deal on national health
In an editorial in the British Medical Journal they said that rather than turning healthy people into patients we should use available resources to change the food, education, health and economic policies which have affected so many people.
I could not have put it better myself.
For many years I have banged on about the problems caused by the lack of food technology at school, the decline in home grown and home cooked meals and the domination of our food supply by supermarkets and major food companies.
The real food issue is not that we are eating too much, but that we can’t avoid eating badly.
Having access to the information we need to source and cook healthy meals is constantly being denied to us as big bucks come to the fore.
When you pick up any newspaper or watch the TV news the blame is always put on the consumer choosing to eat fatty, sugary fast food – but the truth is that many have no choice.
Bad food education, bad economic policy and bad health programmes have all been made worse by big company profiteering.
If we do look unwell then it is the global money men who have made us sick.
How much pleasure would there be in being able to say to them, “Your business doesn’t look very healthy, in fact I think you have developed a really nasty syndrome from which you’ll never recover.”
Maybe that particular diagnosis was the cause of the head man at Tesco leaving this week…
…he didn’t look well in the newspapers did he!
Yours, as always
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