The study at Karolinska focused on the white blood cells in the umbilical cords of Caesarean babies and found mutations in their genetic makeup. The researchers noted differences in DNA sequencing of babies delivered via Caesarean and those delivered normally. —The Swedish Local

For most of human history, the two primary causes of premature death have been traumatic injury and infectious disease. Mainstream American medicine, with its heavy emphasis on hardcare practices, grew out of the challenge to solve these two problems. To a great extent it succeeded, with at times miraculous results. Yet the development of hardcare — a combination of complex diagnostic technologies followed by treatments of drugs and/or surgery — has come with unintended consequences that have brought American society to a profound crisis.

Hardcare medicine creates a specialized class of experts to administer to the sick while diminishing individual responsibility for the health of one’s body and mind. Hardcare drugs and surgeries can cause serious side-effects, often worse than the symptoms they attempt to cure. Hardcare treatments prove inadequate against a host of modern illnesses, yet hardcare tends to deny and actively campaign against other healing approaches. Finally, hardcare medicine is extremely expensive and thus exacerbates all of our current economic difficulties.

The failings of hardcare medicine have arisen where it has over-reached its ability and over-stated its role within society. Though hardcare medicine provides excellent tools for dealing with the problems of traumatic injury and infectious disease, it fails terribly for most other health problems.

Curing Birth

Risky labor inductions for “convenience” and all the complications associated with them–increased risk of prematurity, C-section, bladder and bowel injury, and maternal death–are now on the rise all over the country. It troubles me that more women don’t realize that a Cesarean section is major surgery. And it carries with it a risk of maternal death that is five to seven times greater than a normal birth. —Christiane Norrthrup, OB/GYN

Nowhere is the hammer of hardcare medicine more recklessly applied, and with such dire consequences, than in the practice of modem American obstetrics. Though most obstetricians are well-intentioned and extensively trained, to the extent that they follow hardcare practices (not all obstetricians do) their chosen tools are inappropriate for 90-95% of the births they oversee.

Hardcare obstetricians approach pregnancy/birth as if it were a life-threatening illness demanding invasive, high-tech intervention. Thus, while birth can be the most natural and sacred of life processes, hardcare medicine turns it into a messy female problem to be fixed. While birth can unfold as awe-inspiring theater, co-authored by the mother, infant, midwife, father and other supporters, hardcare turns it into a futuristic thriller, starring the doctor, and featuring the very latest in techno-controls. And though birth can be a joyful initiation into the human family — Welcome, child, to a world of love and absolute nurturance — American obstetrics turns it into a mechanical, impersonal, and too often violent medical emergency.

Because hardcare medicine diminishes individual responsibility for bodily processes, hardcare-conditioned women typically turn birth over to their doctors. Such women can be sadly uninformed about the nature of pregnancy and about the purpose of and ways to a fulfilling labor. They tend to let the doctors take care of everything, including time of delivery, drugs for the pain, and surgery if labor goes on too long. Unfortunately, the more that women cede responsibility for their bodies and birthings, the more problematic birth becomes, and the more necessary are the “birth-improving” interventions of hardcare medicine.

Well-Intentioned Interventions

Using an obstetrician for normal birth is like using a pediatrician as a babysitter.—birthing specialist Marsden Wagner

Hardcare interventions into birth begin with the mistaken notion that we can expect, and even schedule, birth to happen at a certain time. If it’s late getting started, then the obstetrician may use drugs to induce labor.

If we expected a rose to bloom on a certain day and then tried to pry it open with pliers when it was “late,” it would not surprise us that the flower would turn out poorly. Nor should it surprise us that chemically-induced labors often progress poorly — the mother/infant was not ready. (The ultimate perversion is caesarian deliveries scheduled according to hospital and doctor needs.)

Once labor begins, most American hospitals now require high-tech fetal monitoring. This consists of a wide belt wrapped around the mother’s waist and attached to a bedside machine that makes irritating noise throughout the labor. The belt prevents the mother from easily moving around according to her needs; it also prevents mother, father and midwife from placing their hands directly upon the lower belly or from massaging the lower back. All of this interference comes from a machine that has been proven in several studies to be of little if any benefit in most births. The main reason we continue to use fetal monitors — instead of non-invasive monitoring with a fetoscope — is so that doctors and hospitals have a record to refer to in the event of malpractice suits.

Other common interferences with labor include: the use of the counter-intuitive supine posture (rather than squatting); the lack of a well-informed labor supporter (simply having one such lay person, or doula, who stays with the mother throughout labor is of great benefit); the use of sterile, medical environments for labor and delivery; and the use of statistical norms to judge and direct the mother’s progress. All such interventions and interferences ultimately lead to a poorly progressing labor and, in reaction, to more invasive interventions.

In such cases the obstetrician might perform an episiotomy — surgically cutting the perineum to widen the mother’s vagina. Or might use forceps to mechanically pull the infant down the birth canal. Or might forgo labor and perform a caesarian delivery. (Roughly 33% of American births are now caesarians. This compares with 9% in Japan and Scandinavian countries.)

However the baby makes it out of the womb, we can expect further interventions. Doctors may cut the umbilical cord prematurely — before the baby has initiated breathing — leading to the classic abuse of hanging the infant upside down and slapping it. The infant will most likely be needle-poked three or four times during the first hour of its life (one or two blood tests, a vitamin K shot, and a hepatitis vaccine). The infant might be separated from its mother and placed alone in a nursery (especially if the mother is less than conscious due to drugs and/or surgery). And the infant might be fed ersatz formula food (hospitals and obstetricians have financial incentives to discourage breastfeeding.)

Obviously, all such interventions have been developed with the best of intentions — birth is risky, it sometimes goes poorly, and hardcare practitioners work hard to keep the mother and baby alive and relatively healthy. Yet studies of births in other countries, combined with studies of midwife-directed births in America, show that for more than 90% of births, obstetrical interventions do more harm than good.

The Damage Done

In 1979, [California] appropriated $750,000 for the first scientific study ever made of the root causes of violence. Two years later a first paper was issued, listing the ten principle causes of crime and violence in our nation. At the top of the list was the violent way we bring our children into the world. —Joseph Chilton Pearce

Harm to the mother can include various side-effects from drugs and surgery, and a further diminishing of her sense of responsibility for body and life. Harm to parents and child includes the medicalizing and mechanical-demeaning of what could have been a profound life experience. Harm to society includes vast amounts of unnecessary anguish and expense.

But it is the babies who suffer most, though hardcare practitioners say otherwise. They claim that babies are unaffected by the events of birth and early childhood. Babies don’t remember, we are assured. The infant born into a cold, brightly-lit room staffed with masked technicians; the infant who is slapped while choking for breath; the infant who is poked, jabbed, weighed, measured and then separated from its mother; the infant boy with the foreskin of his penis sliced off: it doesn’t matter, the experts assure us, babies don’t remember.

It is the grossest of misunderstandings, a terrible foolishness, for which we pay dearly. Humans are conscious, growing, learning and developing from day one. Babies are influenced, positively or poorly, by each and every human interaction. To cause unnecessary physical or emotional pain to an infant is child abuse, plain and simple. To do so under the rubric of “good medicine” is a continuing nightmare from which America must awaken soon.

Power to the Midwives

Studies have repeatedly shown that in healthy mothers with no risk factors, home birth is as safe as hospital birth. Increasingly, savvy women who trust their ability to birth normally are opting to avoid the hospital altogether (or at least have the foresight to hire a midwife or doula). —Christiane Norrthrup, OB/GYN

Fixing birth is so simple: pass a federal law mandating power, status and privilege to the softcare practices of well-trained midwives. Hardcare obstetricians can carry on as they have, for parents who want such deliveries, and for the small percentage of pregnancies that present as high-risk situations. But for those who desire safe, natural, and joyful births, let midwifery become a socially-supported option. Take away the legal and financial barriers that now impede midwives throughout America, and let pregnant women choose.

The return of midwifery will give us healthier children and mothers and will save us a lot of money in the process. Moreover, if the first step in our healthcare system is positively transformed, the rest might naturally follow.

Yet when it comes to the care and feeding of my own body, I have become something of a chemistry expert.

Brief background: I was born with digestive problems that persisted chronically throughout childhood. I was constantly sick growing up, with two or three bad colds a year. I missed most of 5th grade with mono. I was hospitalized when I was 14 with ulcerative colitis so severe that the doctors told my parents that nothing could be done and they should prepare for my death.

Two weeks of hospital food and removal from the stresses of my life and I improved enough to be released from the hospital. I had learned two important lessons: first, the doctors didn’t know why I was sick or why I improved; second, my condition changed from day to day depending for the most part on diet.

Even while I was struggling in chemistry class, I had begun a long-range chemistry experiment with the simplest of protocols: pay attention to what I was eating and drinking each day and then, starting with the next morning’s trip to the bathroom, pay attention to my results, including the condition of my hair and skin. If the results were less than ideal, I would consider changing something in my diet.

Or: input chemicals; observe outputs; reassess and make adjustments to inputs. Repeat daily.

This was in the 60s. Rachel Carson’s Silent Spring had just begun to alert us to the dangers of synthetic chemicals in the environment. The natural food movement was only getting started. Advertisements still featured doctors recommending certain cigarettes for the health benefits. No one was talking about nutrition or “good” and “bad” foods.

So my experiment started slow. Coca cola, the beverage of choice in our family, was the first to go. Then alcohol. In both cases, what I came to think of as the “morning reports” could not have been clearer. Avoiding each had immediate benefits, while sporadic attempts to “just have a little” never went well.

And so it has gone for more than forty years. The process has not always been fast — I had such deep attachment to some foods, especially wheat, that I continued eating them for years despite evidence that they were a problem for me. We have an amazing ability to deny the obvious in order to sustain the status quo.

In Search of the One True Diet

American medicine long ignored the obvious fact that diet and nutrition play a major role in human health. But even as doctors and medical researchers have come to accept that diet does matter, they have viewed nutrition through a reductionist lens that badly skews their findings and conclusions.

They begin by reducing every food to its nutritional constituents: a bowl of cereal has this much protein, this much fiber, this much Vitamin A and so on. At the same time, they reduce our nutritional needs to a list of Recommended Daily Allowances (RDA): every day we need to eat this much protein, this much fiber and so on. A healthy diet then becomes a matter of choosing enough of the right foods to meet your RDAs.

Sounds simple enough, but problems arise. Almost daily a new study is announced  that calls into question the previously presumed effects (from earlier studies) of a given nutrient. Likewise, we see a never-ending parade of diet books and nutritional experts explaining why their regimen is the answer for everybody, the one true diet.

Been there, done that, and here’s what I know:

• no single nutrient can be completely understood apart from the food in which it’s found. That’s the point of “whole foods”: nutrients are interactive and the nutritional impact of a specific nutrient changes when studied in isolation.
• no one diet will work for everybody.
• individually, our nutritional needs are ever in flux, depending on season, age, state of physical, mental, and emotional health, daily stressors, and other unseen factors.

Which is not to say that we shouldn’t pay attention to the studies, or read the books, or listen to people when they talk about what works or doesn’t work for them. Any information that can help us to better understand our bodies is welcome, but everything must ultimately be run through the “morning report” to confirm whether it holds true for the individual or not.

Physician, Feed Thyself

The CDC recently estimated that some two-thirds of American illness is caused by a combination of poor diet and sedentary lifestyles. In the past they’ve made similar statements about the role of stress in illness.

Yet despite the fact that most of what goes wrong with us is within our direct power to change, we remain a pharmaceutical-gulping, scary-disease-obsessed culture. We go to great lengths and expense to avoid this or that disease while neglecting our individual responsibilities as human body-minds.

What should be fantastic news — there are time-tested ways to achieve and maintain good health without spending a lot of time and money in doctors’ offices — is taken as some sort of offense, like cursing in church.

Rather than health insurance, which sets aside money so that you can see a doctor when something goes wrong, we need to practice health assurance, taking steps now to assure that doctors are rarely needed.

It all begins with Chemistry 101. Do the experiments. Become an expert.

Michael Sky | CommonHealth

The panel basically said that for women below the age of fifty, regular mammographies do not provide enough benefit to outweigh the risks involved. They made clear that they were not talking about women who were deemed to be at high-risk for the disease, and they strongly advised that such women continue with regular screening, along with all women over the age of fifty.

But for those who are not high-risk and are now asymptomatic — most women — they found that screening detected one aggressive cancer for every 1,900 women tested, while some 190 (10%) would receive false positives. Those women would undergo biopsies and some undetermined number would go on to receive cancer treatment that they never really needed.

As Breast Cancer Action explains:

But the complex biology of breast cancer means that women diagnosed with “early” breast cancer fall into one of three groups.

• One group has very aggressive disease that, no matter how small it is when it is found, cannot be effectively treated with the therapies that are currently available. These women will die of breast cancer eventually, no matter what treatment they are given, unless they die of something else first.
• Another group of women diagnosed with breast cancer has a type of either non-aggressive invasive disease or some presentations of DCIS (ductal carcinoma in situ) that will never be life-threatening.
• The third group has a type of breast cancer that responds to currently available treatments. Finding breast cancer earlier does increase the likelihood that treatment will work for women in this group.

We do not know how many women historically have fallen into each of these three groups. And, while these divisions and the treatments currently available mean that “early detection” only matters for women in the third group, we cannot determine at the time of diagnosis the type of tumor a woman has. The result is that we mistreat or over-treat many women diagnosed with breast cancer.

Since treatment involves some combination of surgery, radiation, and chemotherapy, mistreatment and over-treatment amounts to serious harm. Some women are sickened by the chemo and radiation, some receive unnecessary mastectomies, some ultimately die from the would-be cure.

First, Do No Harm

On one side of this debate are the medical researchers who make clear that they are not anti-testing and that their recommendations were not based on costs. They are simply calling for an evidence-based adjustment of the screening protocols.

On the other side are the medical professionals who play an active role in the testing, along with the strong voices of breast cancer survivors who benefited from early detection. The latter make an especially compelling case: if these recommendations had been in effect some years ago, they say, they’d probably be dead.

However, we don’t know how many of those women actually had non-aggressive growths; such women were more harmed than helped by the screening and resulting mistreatment.

Moreover, absent from the debate are any women who were harmed. Some have died, while others have had their health seriously degraded by toxic and invasive treatments. But it is impossible to document any of these cases because once a woman has received a false positive and enters a treatment regimen there is no way to know what is occurring on its own and what is being caused by the chemo and radiation.

So we have a debate about risks versus benefits that fails to investigate  or even acknowledge the risks.

Fighting Symptoms or Preventing Causes

Some insist that early detection is the only thing preventing them from getting cancer. But of course even when early detection works (finds an aggressive but treatable cancer), it is not prevention. What we really need to do is prevent breast cancer from ever occurring, or at least greatly reduce the at-risk population.

To do that we will need to know what causes cancer in the first place. Yet little of our mega-bucks, 50-year War on Cancer has been devoted to finding and resolving causes. Instead, we’ve spent billions and billions on variations of the breast cancer strategy: high-tech screening to find existing cancers and then more high-tech treatments/weapons to kill it.

Even if such weapons worked — they eliminated cancer without causing any collateral damage — they would still inflict great stress on patients and they would still be extremely expensive.

Instead of teaching women to passively show up for their regular screenings and then, when the news is bad, to passively undergo the latest treatments, we should be teaching women (and men) to actively practice cancer-preventing lifestyles.

The fundamentals are known and well-documented: a whole food, chemical-free diet; avoidance of environmental toxins; and, learning to deal with stress.

If everyone simply practiced the fundamentals, and if as a nation we mandated clean air, water, and soil and required strict industry compliance, including comprehensive testing of all industrial chemicals, we would do better than win the war on cancer: we would discover our innate abilities of self-regulation and self-healing. And we’d save a lot of money.

Michael Sky | CommonHealth

I can remember as a child watching a movie about that time and being struck by one scene in particular: a big man, all dressed in black, drives a cart from house to house, picking up the dead and carrying them off for burial. I remember thinking, “How is he getting away with this?” Here is an incredibly bad bug, killing one out of every two people, and this guy is going into infected households, and handling infected bodies, and somehow still managing to put in a sixteen hour day!

Since the fourteenth century, we have learned a lot about bubonic plague. We fully understand the bug that causes it: what it looks like, how it lives, how it travels, how it affects the human body, and how to kill it, which we have proven successful at doing. Yet we know little about the man driving that cart and how and why he lived on. While we have conscientiously studied the half of Europe that died we have ignored the half that survived.

Doctors now say, “The survivors just had greater resistance; they had natural immunity.” But what does that mean? How did they get it? Was it God’s will? Were they born with it? Were they just lucky? Or could it have been something in their diet, or their manner of thinking, or the way they processed their emotions, or how they prayed, or perhaps some combination of any or all of these factors? More importantly, as we come to better understand the survivor’s experience, can we successfully transfer it to others?

In fundamental ways, Western medical science over the past few hundred years has avoided addressing these questions. We have enthusiastically dissected the dead while showing little interest in the living. We have stayed away from questions of individual immunity and natural healing while focusing our intellectual energies and research on defeating specific disease symptoms, battle by battle, with an increasingly complex array of hardcare weaponry. Rather than a softcare investigation into the nature of wellness—How do some people manage to stay healthy without resorting to doctors or medicines?—we have chosen to wage a hardcare war on the real and imagined agents of disease.

The hardcare medical model posits that every ailment has a specific causative agent (the bad germ) and for every such agent we can and will eventually find a specific remedy (the magic bullet). It is a model that totally ignores the individual involved — is she under stress, is she a happy person, is she motivated to go on living, does she express her emotions, how is her family life, what was it like growing up, is she loved — these questions are dismissed as irrelevant. All that matters is figuring out which bug is causing the problem and then administering the proper remedy.

And yet, we harbor flu viruses for most of our lives without catching colds, and we are exposed to carcinogens on a regular basis without developing cancer. Half of the population of 14th century Europe contacted the plague but did not die. There is more to it than “you catch the bug and it makes you sick,” and much more to it than relying on a “magic bullet” to make things better.

The more to it resides somehow and somewhere within all human beings. Though it can not be captured in a bottle and measured out in clear dosages, nor carefully produced in a laboratory and shot into the body with pointed precision, it is more potent than any such remedies, and can surely heal any and all wounds.

While it is reassuring to know that we now have a cure for the bubonic plague, remember that the man driving the cart had a solution six hundred years ago.

Michael Sky | CommonHealth

Their chief point is that mainstream American medicine is “science-based,” while the anti-vaxers are a rabble of anti-scientific fools, hysterical housewives, and idiot celebrities seeking publicity. They thrust all dissenters into the same camp as global warming deniers and anti-evolution creationists. The science is in, they say, the evidence indisputable, and anyone who disagrees or merely questions should be rounded up and shot full of the latest miracle medicine before they spread their vile condition to others.

No disagreement permitted. No thinking required, except by certified authorities, and no dissension among them from the One True Medicine. Those who express doubts are social pariahs guilty of the most horrible sins.

Medical Heresy

I do not dispute that vaccines have saved lives and played a role in eliminating certain infectious diseases. Vaccines are especially efficacious, even miraculous, in poverty-ridden, over-crowded communities facing epidemics. But they are not the only way to deal with infectious disease, and they are clearly not the best solution in more well-off communities that enjoy the benefits of modern hygiene and adequate nutrition.

In 20th century America, each of the major infectious diseases was in decline (as measured by mortality rates) before a vaccine for said disease was invented. (Go here and scroll down for US mortality charts.) Measles, for instance, killed nearly 12,000 Americans in 1901, a mortality rate that fell to a hundred or so by the 1960s when the measles vaccine was introduced. Diptheria killed 48,000 in 1901, down to less than 500 in the 1940s when its vaccine was introduced. Pertussis dropped from 33,000 in 1901 to less than 2,000 in 1946, the first use of its vaccine.

What was happening? First, as America grew in prosperity its people had access to more than adequate food, clean water, and good sanitation practices. This eliminated major disease vectors, both reducing the growth of infectious microbes and restricting their spread. This will always be the best defense against infectious disease, though lifting populations out of poverty is not as easy as sending them vaccines.

Second, since each of these diseases had been endemic in America for several generations, people had developed natural resistance, passed from mother to child. While such children were not immune to the illness, they were less at risk for serious complications and death. So, they got the measles or mumps or whooping cough, had a rough patch, got better, and then had full immunity for life, no boosters required. And the next generation had even stronger resistance.

Developing Real Immunity

If we had continued in this way without the intervention of vaccines, few people would be dying from any of these diseases, though they would linger as annoying childhood illnesses. Even better, if we had expended our medical genius and resources on how to best live through each disease, rather than trying to kill it, we would now be a much stronger, healthier nation.

Instead, we undermined the individual’s innate healing process by introducing a chemical crutch. Now children have reduced resistance to the disease – because their parents didn’t live through it — and they are at greater risk from complications if they catch it. Which raises the clamor for vaccination even higher, and places an anti-social onus on those who would prefer to deal with the infectious disease in other ways.

It is true that in the “living through” process I’ve described people were still dying in tragic numbers, which more than justifies the impetus to develop vaccines. But while they may have provided a quicker fix in the short term — a miracle for every life saved — as vaccinations became mandatory they eliminated the possibility of more natural healing. Even worse, the advent of widespread vaccinations was followed by a number of modern illnesses, including childhood cancers, neurological dysfunctions, and auto-immune disease; America is both the most vaccinated and the least healthy among developed nations.

The current H1N1 epidemic provides a textbook example of wrong-headed vaccination policy. From the outset of the disease it has been apparent that for the vast majority of people it can bring a bad, even very bad, flu. Live through it, get over it, and enjoy lifelong immunity. (In this case Nietzsche got it exactly right: if it doesn’t kill you it makes you stronger.)

For a small percentage of people the disease threatened serious complications, including death.

The medical establishment decided that the best and only solution was to spend a few $billion developing and administering a vaccine to most everyone. Setting aside the fact that they failed to adequately test the vaccine, and that they further failed to provide it in time — leaving millions of people extra vulnerable because they thought (were taught) that they were defenseless without vaccination — the far simpler, better, and cheaper solution was to teach people how to avoid it and, should they get it, how to live through it.

This would involve some basic lifestyle and nutritional education, neither of which are strong suits for the medical fundamentalists who are in charge in America. Like all fundamentalists, their chief mistake is thinking that their way is the only way.

Millions of healthy, rarely-if-ever vaccinated individuals say otherwise.

Michael Sky | CommonHealth

The doctor didn’t include any details of that outbreak but we can safely assume that if there had been any deaths or serious complications he would have told us. In fact, as the Seattle Times reports: “Most suffered only mild illnesses, but two non-students — an adult and a teen — were briefly hospitalized.”

According to Dr. Fauci, they plan to spend $2 billion on the H1N1 vaccine. They will be recommending it for college students since several of the deaths from the spring outbreak of H1N1 were from that demographic. Fauci implied that it was bad luck for the WSU students that the flu hit before the vaccine was ready.

But they didn’t need it! A group of 2000 contacted the flu and recovered easily and without complications. For far less money than we’re spending on a vaccine we could send a team of medical researchers to conduct interviews of the school population, looking into diet, lifestyle, stressors, environmental conditions, and responses to the flu outbreak to draw out any differences between those who never got sick, those who got sick and easily recovered, and those who developed more serious complications.

At the end of such a study, we would have a clear set of wellness strategies to share with the country, far more effective for most people than any vaccine.

Dr Fauci would no doubt leap on the words “most people” and point out that 40,000 people die of regular flu every year, that hundreds died from H1N1 in the Spring, and that vaccines are life-savers for at-risk populations — children, the elderly, and those with compromised immune systems.

But even when tens of thousands die, millions do not. Even among at-risk populations, survivors outnumber victims.

Yet our medical strategy for infectious diseases is invariably based on the seriously-sick minority. We develop our vaccines and other pharmaceuticals with an eye toward helping the least healthy among us and then we recommend, or even mandate, those medicines for everyone.

This is just nuts. We’ve developed a medical model based on the dissection of cadavers and study of pathologies while ignoring the flesh and blood lessons of the most healthy among us. We devote enormous resources to managing symptoms and show little interest in the innate human capacity for self-healing.

Worse, through the mandating of vaccinations, we are undermining that innate healing capacity, pushing more and more people into at-risk populations.

The more we practice this American sickcare, the sicker we get.

Michael Sky | CommonHealth

He could do himself a big favor by listening to Moyers even better, put him charge of the process.

Michael Sky | CommonHealth

At the softcare end of the spectrum we find such approaches as massage, herbalism, diet, yoga, and emotional counseling, as well as broader social factors, such as public sanitation, sufficient access to pre-industrial food, and income equality.

At the hardcare end of the spectrum we find surgeries, most prescription drugs, acute and traumatic injury care, chemotherapy, radiation therapy, organ transplants, vaccinations, and extreme psychiatric practices, such as electroshock.

The basic premise of commonhealth is that to the extent that an individual, community or nation has over-committed to hardcare approaches, its heathcare expenses rise precipitously, fewer community members have secure access to regular care, and overall outcomes — as measured in such areas as infant mortality, life expectancy, and iatrogenic illness — worsen.

Conversely, when we commit time, money, energy, and attention to softcare approaches, expenses fall, everybody has secure access to quality care, and medical outcomes improve.

An ideal medical system would affirm the importance of both approaches and would utilize mostly softcare, while resorting to hardcare practices only when necessary.

Hardcare: The War on Germs

Hardcare is especially efficacious in cases of acute, traumatic injury and when dealing with infectious diseases in softcare-challenged communities (poor, over-crowded, under-nourished, inadequate sanitation). Hardcare views health and sickness in reductionist terms: every illness has a specific cause, typically microbial, for which medicine strives to find a specific remedy, either via a drug that kills or neutralizes the causal agent, or via the surgical repair or removal of unhealthy organs and tissue.

Hardcare takes a purely “hard science” approach to the study of medicine:

• it eschews all personal experiences of healing, as reported by practitioners and patients
• it ignores all of the softer causes of illness, such as the individuals’ thoughts and emotions, childhood experiences, family and personal relationships, diet and exercise, and status in society
• it discounts the broader issues of income inequality and the proliferation of toxic chemicals in the environment

While some hardcare practitioners will acknowledge the importance of softcare, and while many even ascribe to a “complimentary medicine” that better combines hardcare and softcare, in actual practice hardcare approaches to both diagnosis and treatment tend to trump and overwhelm softcare approaches.

For instance, once a cancer patient begins chemotherapy, they have rendered softcare’s primary approach to cancer — changing diet to strengthen the immune system — a far less effective strategy.

Or, as with the recent swine flu outbreak, we do not investigate the lifestyles of those who died, drawing comparisons with those who contracted the flu, had a mild experience and easily healed. Rather, the flu bug is viewed as an enemy to be killed, and a vaccine is mandated for everyone, regardless of “soft science” factors.

Softcare: The Terrain, Not The Microbe

The ultimate in softcare is doing nothing at all and allowing nature to run its course. Doctors call this the natural course of a disease. Most of our aches and pains, along with many of our more serious illnesses will resolve, in time, with little more than bed rest and adequate food and water.

Softcare affirms the primary importance of the individual body: the human organism has an innate ability to resist potentially infectious microbes — indeed, does so all the time. When a person gets sick, the challenge is not to find and destroy the offending microbe, but to strengthen the terrain — the body and its immune system.

Since unresolved stress and tension have been identified — by hard science methods — as causal factors in many of our illnesses, anything that reduces stress and tension serves as effective softcare. Thus, when a mother kisses her child’s wound “to make it better,” she is practicing the best of soft medicine: the child stops crying, anxiety levels reduce, strong feelings of love start flowing, and the child’s immune system functions at high levels.

Contrary to hardcare practices which often hurt (needles, scalpels, chemo- and radiation therapy), softcare typically feels good. Receiving a massage, practicing yoga, making love, exercising, eating well: the pleasure that we feel at such times is the internal experience of our body — the terrain — healing, or becoming stronger.

Softcare derives from the softer sciences of psychology, sociology, anthropology, and philosophy:

• it affirms and seeks to strengthen the innate healing powers in everyone
• it listens to and learns from the individual stories of patients and practitioners
• it sources the responsibility for healing in the individual, not in the doctor

Softcare is ultimately more a lifestyle than a medical system. Rather than view sickness and health as a complex mystery that can only be solved by doctors and medical researchers, we must each take charge, becoming our own personal medical system.

Whither the American Way

While America’s healthcare crisis is in part due to its inane aversion to “socialized medicine,” even if we remove the insurance companies from the equation and adopt the single-payer system that works so well for other nations, many of our problems will remain. Indeed, the proponents of “anti-socialized medicine” may be proven right: there’s way too much hardcare in our current system to fund with a tax-based approach, so there would definitely be long waits and/or rationing for hardcare treatments.

Whether we manage a shift to a single-payer system or not, America must undergo a total rethink of its medical practices. As we lessen our reliance on hardcare and commit to a softcare lifestyle, we’ll all feel a whole lot better.

Michael Sky | CommonHealth

The healthcare debate of the past few years must have Einstein nodding sagely from the grave. For all the volumes that have been written, for all the legislative starts and stops, for all the heated discussions of experts and pundits, little has been said about the medical thinking that underlies our current healthcare crisis. We have fixated on the secondary concerns of administrative bureaucracies and payment systems, when we should be exploring long-overdue changes in societal attitudes, lifestyles, and healing practices.

American medicine grew out of and remains mired in the Industrial Age. The “kind of thinking” that characterizes an industrializing society is reflected throughout our current healthcare system:

• the turning of “healthcare” into a mass-produced consumer item;
• the imbalanced relationship between so many doctors and their patients;
• the overuse and abuse of invasive drugs and surgeries;
• the shifting of power and prestige from general practitioners to high-paid specialists;
• the discounting of mental, emotional, and nutritional causes of illness;
• the over-medicalizing of the should-be sacred events of birth and death;
• the granting of ultimate authority to distant, profit-driven bureaucrats;
• the fundamental dis-ease of the modern hospital;
• and the continuing failure to see polluted air, water, and soil as vital public health issues

These are all symptoms of a medical-industrial-complex that has become as dangerously outmoded as the smokestack factories of a hundred years ago. Yet, contrary to the prevailing mythology of constant medical progress, America’s healthcare problems will not be remedied with “new and improved” technologies, drugs, or bureaucracies. This is just more of the same kind of thinking. What is needed now is a genuine revolution in the ways that we think about our bodies, about the nature of illness, and about the role of healers within the community.

Hardcare — the American Way

Until the middle of the 19th century, most people died of traumatic injury and/or infectious disease. Infant mortality was very high, and the median age of death was in the thirties. Two key developments changed all that, ushering in the modern era of miracle medicine and ever-extending lifespans.

First, and most important, came major improvements in public sanitation. As sewage and water systems were established, especially in urban areas, much of the underlying cause of infectious disease was eliminated. To this day, access to decent food, clean water, and good sewage is a far better predictor of a nation’s overall health than its medical system. (For example, the high infant mortality rate in America is not a failure of medicine, but a consequence of the malnutrition and environmental toxicity that afflicts its poorest citizens).

Second, came the scientific discovery and understanding of infectious microbes. This began a medical revolution as countless microbes were identified, for which miracle medicines were developed. This in turn allowed for the advancement of surgical techniques, as it finally became possible to operate on people without infecting them (though, here again, a key innovation was the attention given to sanitizing the surgical environment).

The approach to healing that has since evolved, which I call “hardcare,” is characterized by a reliance on drugs and surgery. Illness is viewed as coming from beyond the individual’s control — an invading microbe or a traumatic injury (or, these days, a faulty gene). The doctor intervenes on the patient’s behalf, working to defeat the invader and/or fix the ill effects of the injury.

For most of the 20th century, hardcare has performed one life-enhancing wonder after another. Diseases that plagued humankind for millennia can now be eliminated with a single injection or a handful of pills. The most horribly injured trauma victims can be saved, mended and returned to the living with nary a trace of their injuries. The blind can be restored to sight, the lame can walk again, failing organs can be replaced. It has all been truly miraculous and any future healthcare system will certainly make use of some elements of such medicine.

Still, harcare derives from a kind of thinking that is now causing more problems than it heals.

The Limits of Hardcare

As people were saved from the ravages of infectious disease and traumatic injury, individual lifespans increased, and a new set of illnesses began to inflict men and women. Chronic, degenerative diseases — such as heart disease, cancer and arthritis — became the major challenges to medicine. Cancer, for instance, became such a frightening threat that an all-out war was declared against it. Hundreds of billions of dollars were channeled through an enormous medical-industrial apparatus, regularly sustained by the promise that a cure for cancer was just around the corner. It never happened.

Hardcare has proven to be mostly futile, if not recklessly dangerous, against most modern illnesses. While the surgeries have grown ever more heroic (dangerous and expensive), and the drugs ever more powerful (dangerous and expensive), the human suffering caused by chronic, degenerative illnesses has steadily increased (including among children).

At the same time, the suffering caused by medical practices (such as when too much chemotherapy destroys a patient’s immune system, or when a surgical patient dies from secondary complications) has also increased, as hardcare treatments have grown ever more invasive.

Even some of the greatest miracles of hardcare are reaching their limits. Antibiotics are proving to be less and less effective against each new generation of invading microbes. Moreover, it is becoming apparent that our overuse of antibiotics and vaccines has undermined the integrity and innate healing powers of the human immune system with the appearance and rapid growth of a whole new category of illness — auto-immune disease. Ultimately, we failed to understand that all drugs have side-effects; after a century of relying on ever more powerful medications, we are now experiencing a plague of medicine-induced illness.

Likewise, many common surgical practices — such as caesarian sections, hysterectomies, and heart by-pass surgery — have been carelessly overused. As with antibiotics, an over-reliance on surgery seriously undermines the body’s own healing mechanisms. Surgery delivers a quick-fix of symptoms while ignoring, and often exacerbating, the underlying causes of an illness.

Finally, it must be said that hardcare is inevitably expensive. Both drugs and surgery demand large cash infusions at every stage of their development and use. The vast research facilities, the long and intensive training of practitioners, the high-tech tools and hospitals, the complex administrative systems, the steep malpractice payments and the high profit margins at every step of the way: To the extent that America remains committed to hardcare, we will never get healthcare costs under control, nor can we hope to create a fair and equitable system for all of our citizens.

Reclaiming Responsibility

The most serious failing of harcare is its shifting of primary healthcare responsibilities away from the individual. Just as illness is thought to be caused not by the person, but by a nasty germ, a traumatic injury, or a faulty gene, healing is thought to be caused not by the person, but by the doctor, the drugs, the technology, the insurance company. The net effect of such thinking is a nation of people desperately searching for health in all the wrong places.

This is an unfortunate but logical result of hardcare’s great strengths.

After so many years of miracle drugs and surgical heroics, it’s reasonable that people see themselves as being healed by others (and that those others, the doctors, attain a god-like status). As I’ve said, there will always be a place for such medicine; in the course of a lifetime, we may all occasionally find ourselves acutely ill and unable to heal without the outside help of powerful drugs and/or invasive surgery. For such times, harcare may long be a blessing.

But hardcare becomes a curse when it institutionalizes the notion that sickness and healing come from outside of ourselves. That is precisely the kind of thinking which must change if we are to bring about a genuine healthcare revolution.

Because harcare has shifted responsibility away from the individual, it has also largely ignored (or argued against) the major causes of modern illness and health: our thoughts and beliefs, our emotions, our dietary habits, our bodily practices (ie, posture, movement, breath, sleep, exercise, and sex), our use and/or abuse of intoxicants, the relative health of our environment, the nature of our relationships, our societal stresses, and our personal experience of spirituality. Any vital and effective healthcare system must address all of these factors first, teaching healthcare as a lifestyle which must be vigorously practiced every day of one’s life.

Michael Sky | CommonHealth

But when I worked in the emergency room, I felt I was saving people just before (or sometimes after) they were washed DOWNSTREAM and over the waterfall to their death.

I began to wonder what led them to this point — what happened UPSTREAM in the process of disease and illness. What were the real causes of disease? If I could answer that question, then I thought I might be able to help prevent disease in the first place.

Harmon addresses the many signs of a failing heathcare system:

Chronic diseases affect 133 million Americans. That means in the average family of three, at least one person has a chronic disease. We are seeing an epidemic of autoimmune (24 million Americans), allergic (50 million Americans), and asthmatic (30 million Americans) diseases in this country. In addition, 20 percent of Americans (about 60 million people) have irritable bowel syndrome.

In fact, the rates of nearly every modern disease — autoimmune diseases, allergic diseases, digestive problems, heart disease, cancer, obesity, diabetes, and dementia–are increasing. One in three children born today will have type 2 diabetes. One in two people over age 85 will develop dementia.

Then he outlines 7 principles of functional medicine:

• First, we must understand how everything in our environment interacts with our genes to create health or disease, especially our diet and nutritional status. Air, water, microorganisms, exercise, trauma, psychosocial factors, environmental toxins and radiation also affect our genes and our health.
• Second, we must understand how our hormones and brain chemistry influence nearly every aspect of our health, why they get out of balance, and how to get them back in balance.
• Third, we must understand how most of us have smoldering hidden inflammation that will kill us until we learn how to control it.
• Fourth, we must understand that our digestive system is at the core of our health, why it breaks down, and how to repair it.
• Fifth, we must understand how toxins and problems with our detoxification or waste management systems lead to chronic health problems and how to optimize this detoxification system.
• Sixth, we must understand the importance of energy — how we make it, why we lose it, and how to create more of it.
• And finally, we must understand how the mind interacts with the body and how the body interacts with the mind to influence and affect each of our other systems.

This is an excellent foundation for understanding what I call CommonHealth or soft-care. The only thing that I would immediately add is the social dimension — the ways that individual health is affected by other people, by one’s relationships and one’s standing in society.

Michael Sky | CommonHealth