The battle over health:
Health isn’t a word that should invoke military imagery. However, the number of Americans dying from heart disease, specifically, President Franklin Roosevelt’s death from heart disease, led President Harry Truman to pass the National Heart Act and fund the largest epidemiological study to date: The Framingham Heart Study. From that data came the understanding that lifestyle: diet, exercise, and measures to mitigate stress were keys to longevity.
With his first heart attack at forty-six, President Lyndon Johnson announced the “War against heart disease” and established Medicare and Medicaid. Over the next several decades, death from heart disease dropped by seventy percent.
Each successive President added his personal touch:
- Carter empowered the originally weak and ineffective Federal Drug Administration,
- With Reagan’s passage of the Bayh-Dole Act, pharmaceutical companies could patent drugs, formerly public domain.
- With successive massive infusions of federal money to fund research, the formerly cottage industry of medicine transformed into big business.
So it’s a battle won, right?
Wrong.
Business and money are closely intertwined.
“The rise of reason did not take power into account.”
The Social Transformation of American Medicine
The twentieth century saw the professions of law and medicine enjoying an extended alliance where medical decision-making was awarded with more and more autonomy by the state and federal governments, such that the profession of medicine was infused with more self-rule than had ever before been granted. This new alliance was deserving of a new concept and new language by the sociologists studying the dizzying speed with which medicine was gaining political and cultural power.
The word profession describes a group of individuals whose knowledge, education, vocabulary, decision-making and yes, even poor outcomes, could be evaluated only by one another. Individuals who lacked specialized training could not reasonably judge the practice of the physician.
Doctors were individuals who were above the common law because their specialized knowledge and expertise placed them outside of the usual human foibles of greed, immorality, corruption and ignorance; only other doctors were permitted to testify for or against physicians accused of malpractice or negligence. Such was the agreement between medicine and law for much of the last century.”
Remember Tom Brady?
Famed quarterback Tom Brady’s claims that soft drinks like Coke and fast foods were poison, along with his announcement that a holistic practitioner, not a physician, helped heal his ACL and MCL injuries, have ignited a new battle. Brady’s alliance is with a holistic practitioner named Alex Guerrero, a quack, liar, and charlatan, if you believe the detractors.
The new battle is sparked by people intent on controlling their health and helping others do the same. Tom Brady and, most recently, Robert Kennedy, Jr. are famed examples.
“I had doctors with the highest and best education in our country tell me that I wouldn’t be able to play football again, that I would need multiple surgeries on my knee for my staph infection, that I would need a new ALC, a new MCL, and that I wouldn’t be able to play with my kids when I’m older….I’ve chosen a different approach, and that’s what I’m providing to other athletes.”
Ten years later, we know what Brady’s health regimen accomplished. The only NFL quarterback to win seven Super Bowls, Tom Brady won his last one at the age of forty-three.
Make America healthy again.
With Robert Kennedy Jr. as head of Health and Human Services, we have an ally in improving our health; all that is lacking is the will and the discipline. The overhauls in his “Make America Healthy Again” may read like Trumpian hyperbole to many. But the data are there.
- The COVID pandemic highlighted the high risks of obesity and diabetes. The incidence of which is soaring, as are deaths from heart disease, wiping out the gains from the last century.
- “The U.S. continues to outspend other nations on health care, devoting nearly twice as much of its GDP as the average OECD country. U.S. health spending reached nearly 17 percent of GDP in 2019, far above the 10 other countries compared in this report. Moreover, high U.S. out-of-pocket health spending per person, the second-highest in the OECD, makes it difficult for many Americans to access needed care.”
- Despite all the money, the American medical outcomes rank lowest when compared to other nations. Our health status is inferior to others’ from birth to an earlier death.
- A quick scan of “Make Our Children Healthy Again” compels our attention.
Stress
When I decided to add a chapter on stress in my textbook, the Chief of Cardiology at the hospital where I was working scoffed. Like too many doctors, he dismissed Hans Selye’s brilliant research, most likely because he didn’t understand it.
“I am so….stressed out right now!”
Usually when we think or say this, our problem isn’t stress but rather frustration, anger or confusion. Stress, however is no fleeting emotion but a condition which when experienced by animals and humans alike, can kill.
The chronic insomnia, loss of purpose in our lives, anxiety about the future, or any of the myriad of reasons our psyches can harm us are tragically underestimated. While in graduate school, I encountered Hans Selye. And then Norman Cousins, before and during the years he taught at the Stanford Medical School. And I learned that the power we have for harming or healing ourselves is almost unlimited.
A story of my personal experience:
While walking rapidly down the hall of the new hospital, in the new city, new state…new everything, three days after the move I had never planned to make, I was delighted to see the face of a good friend from Houston. I never questioned why this physician would be in Massachusetts on a Monday morning in November. Doubling my speed to catch up with him, his name Steve! was about to burst out of my mouth. But the stranger turned to look quizzically at me and extended his hand to say, “Hi, aren’t you the new Hospital Director? Welcome, my name is…” I knew then that my level of stress was off the charts, certainly greater than I had ever experienced.
My visual ‘hallucination’ that day signaled me that I needed to do something. And quickly to deal with the emotions that I had successfully boxed up during the summer my life blew up. Already, I was working out like a maniac. I started my long days with a minimum of an hour workout. And I did several-mile runs on the weekends with the Doberman puppy who was saving my life. I had learned meditation during the few years I had flirted with Buddhism, but I simply could not do it; the mind chatter was loud and unceasing.
So I began to write poetry. As an undergrad English major, poets like EE Cummings, TS Eliot, Auden, and Rilke were opaque to me. I never understood the allegories, my mind far too literal and concrete. Over time, I gathered enough material to compile into a book, which I self-published years ago: Searching for the Sacred.
Someone once called poetry the language of the heart. It is as good a definition as I have ever found.
Certain things are in our control.
Norman Cousins’s fame had been assured as editor of the Saturday Review. But his experiences with American medicine led to a second career: teaching in a medical school. Told he would be dead within six months to a year from ankylosing spondylitis, Cousins researched Selye’s concepts of stress and eustress. He intuited that his hectic travel schedule, along with environmental pollutants, had caused adrenal exhaustion. Cousins reasoned that eustress could combat the autoimmune storm that was killing him, persuading his doctor to partner with him in his treatment.
He published his compelling story in Anatomy of An Illness.
I have learned never to underestimate the capacity of the human mind and body to regenerate — even when prospects seem most wretched. The life force may be the least understood force on earth.
Anatomy of an Illness
Two decades later, Cousins suffered an occlusion of his left coronary artery, the “widow maker.” In The Healing Heart, the author discloses how, once again, he was able to summon his body’s natural healing responses. This time, however, Cousins writes of his inability to create a partnership with his doctor, the Chief of Cardiology at UCLA. The cardiologist did not believe Cousins when told that the incessant treadmill tests were far more dangerous than playing tennis. Playing tennis, Cousins knew, created physiologic relief, eustress, while anticipation of the treadmill caused an alarming sense of ‘pass/fail.’ Despite countless attempts to convey what he’d learned about stress and his own body, the doctor was intractable.
Therefore, Cousins fired him.
These two men, Norman Cousins and Tom Brady, demonstrate that even among elite practitioners, medical judgment can be flawed and that our bodies possess inherent wisdom.
A last caveat
Neither Cousins nor Brady mentions God as the guarantor of our lives, from birth to death. However, this piece would be incomplete without that truth. Stephen White’s What Makes the Man? beautifully explains, “The answer provided by Gaudium et Spes is as complete as any you’re ever likely to find. But the answer is not a what, it is a Who: “The truth is that only in the mystery of the incarnate Word does the mystery of man take on light.”
Meanwhile every man remains to himself an unsolved puzzle, however obscurely he may perceive it. . . .To this questioning only God fully and most certainly provides an answer as He summons man to higher knowledge and humbler probing.”
