How to Be Your Own Doctor
Without attending medical school
Maybe you’ve been diagnosed with diabetes, which currently affects 1 in 3 people, or maybe you’d like to lose some weight. Certainly you want to live as many years as you can, while being healthy enough to enjoy them. Like me, you may have seen several doctors over the years. Each time you came away with one or more prescriptions, and perhaps an admonition to lose weight.
You may have visited Dr. Google in the hope of finding helpful advice. That would likely have led you into a click bait maze, ending in pages trying to sell you magical supplements: “Just take this before bed each night, and you’ll lose that stubborn belly fat in a week.” I get it. I once bought a bottle of colloidal silver from a health food store for an absurd amount of money. It was supposed to resolve a digestive problem. It didn’t.
For more than 60 years I was obese. Seasonal allergies caused misery every spring and fall, leaving my immune system vulnerable to colds, flu, and bronchitis. I saw many doctors during that time. Even the specialists considered allergies to be the result of bad luck in the genetic lottery. None of the treatments helped, and the prescriptions kept me in a zombie state for most of each season.
I’ve given my medical history to many different doctors. There is one question that never gets asked. I’ll bet you’ve never been asked it either. The question: “What do you eat?” This question is critically important because most of the diseases that people go to the doctor for are metabolic, meaning that they are linked to diet. This includes type 2 diabetes, Alzheimer’s, Parkinson’s, heart disease, and even cancer.
Your doctor will dispute this, but it’s true. You really are what you eat, and the diet of most people in the civilized world is largely carbohydrates. This has only been the case for a few thousand years, after the beginning of farming. Our bodies have not evolved to thrive on this type of diet. Evolution has equipped us for a lifestyle that revolves around hunting. When food is scarce, stored fat keeps the body going. When your hunting is reduced to pushing a shopping cart around a supermarket filled with carb-heavy foods, your metabolism suffers.
The problem of health care is huge, and no amount of political promise or money ever gets close to fixing it. It starts with the farms that grow the food. The advertisers would have you believe that farms are family-owned with happy farmers growing wonderfully healthy crops. Family farms are all but extinct, having been replaced by huge corporations. Massive amounts of chemicals are used to force soil that is nearly exhausted of nutrients to produce crops. The food grown this way is engineered to be easily packaged and shipped, with little regard to the nutritional value or flavor. Most of it will be processed, again with more chemicals, to wind up in cans or packages on the supermarket shelves.
Most animals grown for food on factory farms are not raised humanely, or even in a healthy way. All emphasis is placed on getting the animal to market as quickly as possible, while keeping the cost to raise it at a minimum. Food animals are raised on foods that are not necessarily appropriate for their digestive system. For example, cattle may be pasture-raised, but then get sent to feed lots to be “finished”. There they are fed grain, which fattens them up quickly just as grain-based carbohydrates fatten us. The vitamin and mineral content of the meat suffers in the name of profitability.
Supermarkets fulfill the role of hunter-gatherer in our culture. They offer up thousands of different packaged foods. Though there may be dozens of brands of a given product, often they are from the same giant corporation. By making food under many different brand names, the processed food companies conceal the fact that they are all huge monopolies. These corporations pay the supermarket for shelf space, allowing them to control what products are available to you.
Much of the food in the supermarket is not good for you, perhaps as much as 80%. Packaged products are loaded with sugar and chemicals to enhance flavor and encourage consumption. Seed oils are used for fat, even though they become toxic when heated. Vitamins may be added to create the illusion that a product is healthy, but over time you are damaging your body.
When the problems start showing up, you go to your doctor. Tests will be run. These are not done to determine why you got sick, but only to decide what medication will be appropriate to deal with the symptoms. This is an advancement over the early days of medicine, when leeches were used to resolve most problems on the belief that they stemmed from having too much blood.
Now we are in Medicine 2.0, with a cornucopia of drugs for every conceivable illness. Doctors are taught to diagnose problems and prescribe treatment. If you ask “Why did this happen?”, you will likely be told it’s because you’ve gotten old and things are starting to break down. Or maybe that it’s just bad luck, and you had no way to avoid it.
Once you start on the prescription treadmill, you’re a patient for life. Many of the drugs prescribed require monitoring. This plays well for large practices, and in some of them a doctor’s performance is not measured by how many patients she helps, but how many prescriptions and revisits she generates. Because of this cycle, patients must have insurance to cover the outrageous costs. Employers have to provide that insurance, adding to the cost of the products or services they provide. The huge insurance corporations increase their profits by buying large medical practices, and partnering with drug companies. This completes the cycle, and leaves patients as virtual sheep, to be sheared over and over until death.
The solution to this grim cycle is simple, perhaps too simple to be of interest to politicians. It starts by eating a healthy diet, though that’s a lot more than just buying organic food. You need to learn what happens to the food you eat, and how to use food for the benefit of your body. If we all did that, the gigantic food corporations would have to start making real food, or die. Medical schools would have to start teaching doctors the importance of food, leading to doctors that could actually treat diseases at the source, instead of just the symptoms. We would no longer need huge pharmaceutical companies constantly trying to build new drugs for problems that should never have happened in the first place. Best of all, health insurance would no longer be essential, and the cost of it would decline rapidly.
None of that is likely to happen, at least in what’s left of my lifetime. So we have to come up with another plan. We become our own doctor. Start by buying or borrowing one or more books from the list that follows. All of these books were written by doctors that are experts in metabolic diseases, and how to avoid them. The cost of their books is likely less than the co-pay you had to pay at your last appointment. You don’t need a degree in organic chemistry to understand what they say. Any one of them will tell you what you need to know. No matter how old you are, there is still hope. I was in my late 60s when I got the message, and I’m healthier now that I was at any other time in my life.
I’m not a doctor, and I’ve never played one on TV. I don’t have any affiliation with any of the doctors of these books, or from any book seller. I’m just a simple guy who has learned how to put off dying from some avoidable disease. If you present any of what you learn from these books to your doctor, expect push back. I don’t argue, but I do decline things like statin drugs and any treatment that I don’t see as beneficial. My doctor has grudgingly accepted this, since I continue to be one of a very small group of patients she calls “the healthy ones.” I’ve read all of these books, but if you pick just one, it will change your life. Be healthy!
The Books
Lies I Taught in Medical School by Dr. Robert Lufkin
Deep Nutrition by Dr. Catherine Shanahan
Dark Calories by Dr. Catherine Shanahan
The Fatburn Fix by Dr. Catherine Shanahan
Unlock the Keto Code by Dr. Steven Gundry
Metabolical by Dr. Robert Lustig
Nature Wants Us to Be Fat by Dr. Richard Johnson
Outlive by Dr. Peter Attia
thanks, Jim! I've got several of the books on the list and have started reading. Slowly shifting my diet, which has never been terrible but has relied on carbs like oatmeal for breakfast for many years. That's the single hardest meal to shift, at least for me.
Appreciate the reading list!
I'd like to see your source for the assertion that Alzheimer's and Parkinson's are diet-related.