Good morning, folks! I am Jin with Morning Mindfulness Podcast. Hope you are having a fabulous day in your corner of the World! Let’s start it with a deep breathe and internal smile I was talking about in my second episode.

Do you like being healthy and happy? Listen to this!

Listen here or Subscribe on iTunes or Stitcher or TuneIn or via RSS

Well, we made it to number 100, so I will make this episode just a bit longer than usual 2 minutes. First of all, I’d like to say thanks to all of you who have been supporting me, listening to my monologues, or reading the notes on my web site. I am grateful for your feedback!

Second, I will make this 100th episode a bit controversial. Huh, like I’ve never done it before. I have a feeling that this episode may not make somebody happy. But I don’t really care what somebody thinks. I have a total right to have my own opinion and to express my feelings. Is everybody all right with that?

Here’s a statement. But wait, sit down first. Strap yourself. Hold on to something. Pull over if you are driving. No, I am joking about pulling over. But the statement is quite serious. Here we go:

Conventional medicine in the US has less and less to do with helping people to be healthy. Oh, am I stepping on somebody’s toes right now? Sorry, but let me repeat it again: conventional medicine in the US has less and less to do with helping people to be healthy.

Let me clarify a couple of points before you fire your arguments at me.

First of all, I am not talking about doctors as humans. I am not saying that they don’t care. I met a lot of doctors of various specialities, and many of them are wonderful people. They care. So please don’t take it personal. I also met quite a few sloppy medical professionals. I think this will be true about medical care in any country. So this is not a characteristic of American healthcare.

Second, advanced technology makes it possible to save people’s lives in such ways that 20-30 years ago doctors would not even comprehend. That is amazing, I salute them. They are able to get people up and running again.

However, remember about Yin-Yan in everything. Remember in my last episode I was talking that everything has a price. Well, there’s a price for this type of medical care as well.

Like I said, doctors keep people alive and they get people up and running again. The flip side of this action is that doctors keep people alive, and they get people up and running again. No, no, I am not just repeating myself. I am trying to tell you that that’s basically the only thing doctors do.

In their defense, I’d say that this is not doctors’ fault. The system itself is set up the way that basically only supports life threatening conditions and pain. If you have a headache, you will get a pill. If you get some side effects from the pill, you will get another pill to neutralize those side effects. They treat symptoms, not causes. Remember, their goal is just to get you functional.

Pharmacology professor told us one time that patients who receive 4 medications, have 25% chance of incompatibility of at least two of them. And patients who receive 8 medications have 100% chance of incompatibility at least two of them. Scary stuff, huh?

Doctors often do not prescribe what is good for the patient, they prescribe what pharmaceutical companies offer them as new cool medication. Then a couple of years later you see an ad on TV: “Call this number if you are a victim of such and such medication.” Are you still not convinced?

Doctors often send patients to the labs to take the whole bunch of tests because insurance companies require that, and this is how doctors are getting paid. Insurance companies, not doctors, are often a decision makers about what treatment the patient will get.

I am not blaming doctors. They are not setting the rules. They are just puppets of the system. How do I know? I’ve been a patient for as long as I remember myself. And I became a doctor, first in Europe over 20 years ago, and later in the US. And I have been practicing within the conventional system until last year, when I chose to step away from this madness and become a health and wellness educator. So, basically I have an insight into the healthcare, or I’d rather say, sick-care system in the West. Well, that’s enough for today. Medical cases could really make some nice Halloween stories… if they were not about real people suffering from so called medical care. Anyways, just take my ramble today as my personal opinion, nothing else.

Fortunately, there’s another area of medical care that becomes more popular today. It is called Naturopathic medicine. This is all about finding the cause and natural ways to treat the problem, not just killing the symptoms. I think there’s hope for humankind. We’ll come back to this topic more than once.

Hope this makes some sense.
Thanks for tuning in! You can subscribe to my podcast on my site HPLN.org.
Now let’s breathe and smile. I will talk to you next time.

PEACE!
Jin

Listen to other Morning Mindfulness Podcast episodes here