USA versus UK healthcare – eat shit and die

I played backgammon with a friend from Tel Aviv in NYC, then had a very drunken night out with the nephew of Wallis Simpson, before touring Pennsylvania with a gang of bikers, finishing with a very drunken week of secret gambling in South Carolina a few years back.  I was just as shy then, I just played a lot of backgammon.

The bikers wanted to know how I liked America, wouldn’t I want to live there?

“Definitely could not live in a country where people die from lack of healthcare because they are poor.” was my response.  I was as surprised as they were.

It is amazing how many Americans are indoctrinated into the idea that nothing bad will ever happen to them, if you are poor it is your own fault, and everybody else’s comparatively civilised system of public healthcare is daylight robbery.  It beggars belief at times, the lengths they will go to to justify a clearly rotten system.

So, from the perspective of a lady who failed to complete writing a very comprehensive book for Wolfe a few years back – here is how the system works, and I believe Wolfe may actually agree with me, for a change:

The USA is set up on the principle that money tops anything.  People are not very important compared to dollars.  Hence we see a government with a full complement of lobbyists who hand out money to dictate public policy. ie.  Coconut oil bad, because it is produced elsewhere, vegetable oil good, because it is produced in America, even though twenty minutes of research would tell you the opposite is the case.

This nurturing of corporations worked for a few decades, but companies are so large now that the system has entirely broken down.  It was not until I saw the Eli Lilly/Walmart deal to supply cut-price, reduced quality diabetes medication for the victims of the American diet, that I realised quite how rotten it had become. ie.  you shop at Walmart for food, buy your frosted flakes and your doughnuts etc.  Then, when you discover that your shitty diet has given you diabetes, you simply go back to Walmart to pick up your meds.  Win-win, as long as you happen to be a corporation rather than a person.

In the UK, we have a parallel copycat system where we have doctors who are paid by major food companies to sit on the Board of Nutrition – Hannah Sutter’s book Big, fat lies is a nice short introduction to how this works.  Again, you are given shitty nutrition advice so that large food companies can continue to sell you food.

The difference in the UK, is that the public pays for this corporate domination of judgements that we are told are gospel.  The so-called obesity crisis has also been invoked to attract yet more funding to the NHS.  If you had complained to your doctor that you were fat in the nineties, they would have told you to go raffle yourself, but now you have a wealth of useless advice to ensure that you spend your life worrying, or dieting, or both between enjoying your increasingly large portions of standard British fare, approved by corporate interests on the Board of Nutrition.

Of course, in America this situation is amplified by the fact that there are more middle men with interests in the eat shit/get sick/ die market.  Large insurance companies also want to ensure that private medicine stays private.  Providers want to make money by providing lots and lots of care etc etc. In short, no interest in served in America by your being healthy. Therefore, let us have McDonalds provide school lunches to get the ball rolling. Go forth and get nice and sick.

The public interest in the UK would be served far better if people were actually healthy, so we see a relatively small quango style operation shyly asking us to maybe, sometime manage five portions of fruit and vegetables a day.  However, the large number of medical staff would prefer to see money endlessly pumped into the NHS, so even the five a day message is pretty quiet.  I had quite an argument with a senior pathologist several years ago.  He wanted more money for doctors.  My response was that what we really needed was better health.

So, from a British perspective, we are copying a corrupt and mad system for the benefit of some food companies and a few thousand doctors, at the expense of public health.  Nobody gives a shit about this.  Nobody cares about nutritional research, nobody cares about the numbers of people becoming ill.  All they care about is more money to pay more staff ad infinitum.

So, stemming from this, we have this idea that science is good, nature is bad.  If a man in a white coat said it was so, therefore it must be so.  I have news for you, that man in a white suit was paid by a drug company to say so, just like the people telling you what to eat are paid by the food industry.  An eminent professor of nutrition from an American university was once asked what we should really be eating.  She readily admitted that she did not have a clue.

The WHO recommends 9-15 portions of fruit and vegetables every day, not five.  Statistics suggest that the benefits tail off after 7, but you can see from this that reading the newspaper does not cut it when it comes to staying healthy.  You really have to put the work in yourself.  Trusting in your government’s idea of what is good is not likely to provide you with a winning formula.

In terms of the harshness of the American healthcare system, Americans are fucked over in numerous ways, especially if shock, horror anything bad happens to them.  These people who scream about personal responsibility and not paying for other people’s healthcare clearly have no social conscience, and they will defend this to the death if you bother to engage them in conversation.  God forbid they should have a child with an expensive health issue.  God forbid they should realise that other people deserve to live, even if they disagree with them.  I am sure it makes perfect sense for a militarist country, but in terms of common decency it represents a very peculiar degree of poverty of spirit.

In the UK, meanwhile, we are looking at greed and stupidity.  Nobody genuinely cares about your health when they are handing out this incorrect advice that they have accepted from the USA.  As a peachy example of this, John Yudkin’s Pure, white and deadly, a book which identified sugar as being a source of heart disease, was ignored in favour of Ancell Key’s study showing that saturated fat was the culprit.  The noisy Yank must be correct, we were told, because we were processing about half of the world’s sugar at the time to flatten the prices and benefit our colonies.

So, now that you know this, please accept two things:

You are not important to capitalism.  You are a unit, and you are entirely expendable as long as someone else is in work and someone else is taking the money.

You are being lied to.  Every day, to maintain a system that will fail you throughout your life.

Eating David Wolfe’s hat

I don’t think I have an appropriate hat to eat, so I think I will have to eat Wolfe’s hat instead.

This week, as a result of the constant bitching about my mother’s diet, I re-introduced meat in the form of a cooked Scottish breakfast.  This made the NHS nurses very happy.  I was having to ensure that my mother had a full mission jar of supermix before and after it to counteract the injection, of course, but in the middle I presented them with a picture of a woman stuffing her face with a variety of animal products.

Imagine my surprise when after only three days of this, her urine test, which I now do daily, came back with a positive for a UTI.  She had been clear of these for two whole months, which is something of a feat, whilst consuming her supermix diet plus eggs and some smoked salmon to balance her electrolytes. (sorry, Wolfe, but I just don’t see the point in fish oil tablets when she could just enjoy some fish with her salt.  She gets both anyway.)

So, it seems we have a fresh and unexpected addition to the many validations I have bestowed on Wolfe over the last few years.  The tiny bit of inflammation caused by eating meat and raising her acid levels by only a small fraction was enough to suppress her immune system and bring on another infection.

Needless to say, I stopped this immediately and put her back on Supermix only.  She has now, for the first time in a decade, beaten her infection.  She had her supermix with the juice of 20 peaches yesterday, consumed the lot and is doing fine.  Clear-headed, and pissing like a fountain.

So, after many years of wrestling with low carb versus raw, I am now of the opinion that although you can get away with alkaline foods alongside your raw diet, meat is indeed the devil’s work and damages you slightly every time you consume it.  It probably won’t stop any committed meat eaters.  I should know, I was one for years before I tried being raw in the first place.

That is not to say that this is the only diet that is worth doing.  I have not yet experimented with kim-chi or fermented foods, and I am not sure I want to.  However, I think the raw ‘vegans’ (they aren’t really vegan in many cases, but it is a useful way of telling people just to give you a salad rather than try to fit you around their dinner party table) are somewhat vindicated in terms of an almost complete diet (B12 is too important to omit when you are 90)

Otherwise, I am happy to say she is doing very well.  She is having Black Forest Gateau flavour supermix today, and I am sure she will continue to enjoy whichever flavour I choose to evoke tomorrow.  Mine of course, is cucumber and spinach, and considerably less glamorous.

The social worker came today, and asked about the dietician.  I explained that she did not know very much and that the NHS apparently believe that nutrition and medicine are separate things, which does not make it easy to explain my mother’s diet at present.  I know it is expecting a lot, but they could at least try to understand.

The last four months has seen me persuading the eleventh doctor that I had asked about my mother’s leg to put her into hospital for a much-needed urgent scan, persuading a consultant to scan her because they had decided not to bother after an intestinal bleed, persuading the GP that she did not need four medications and re-formulating her diet to ensure that she would not require further interference, which at this point means that anyone prescribing to her is likely to put her at risk.

We have always followed a policy of ‘the less medications the better’ as my parents were brought up pre-antibiotics, when two of our family doctors were also trained homeopaths who in their later careers still avoided prescribing antibiotics.

Our lives are no longer private.  From a peaceful existence in which we made our own decisions and managed despite the lack of help from so-called-professionals, we are now at the mercy of people who did a course a couple of decades ago and think they know how we should live.  It is frankly a miracle that my mother made it to 90, I am considered so incompetent.

In any case, I can no longer sew in the same room as her, for fear of being accused of making a mess or neglecting her by not standing over her bed.  I cannot leave the room when the nurses appear to give her a five minute injection.  If anything changes overnight I am responsible for it, and if anything improves I am obviously nothing to do with it.  As you can imagine this is intensely annoying.

In the meantime, the longest meeting in history is still being held about my mother.  The system is such that ten people that do not know my mother and who could care even less sit and try to make decisions based upon no relevant information.  I have to tolerate endless visits from people I do not wish to see, and if I try to input any relevant information it is to be used against me, as per the policies of the social work department.  It is not helpful, and it is not very pleasant.

So, as you can imagine, I cannot get much work done at the moment, and since my mother is at risk, I have had to take on some more conventional work in case I end up having to pay for the house.  I am behind with some administrative tasks due to threats made by the ‘professionals’ and I cannot really do anything without someone else knowing about it, which I object to.

Taking care of other people involves giving up control over your life in order to improve somebody else’s.  When you are able to make some decisions this is tolerable, but when these decisions are put in the hands of a random stranger, life becomes less bearable.  I have managed to prevent some of the worst implications of the intrusion into our life, but inevitably something has to suffer.

Particularly with sewing and textile work there is no point in even starting if you are in any way stressed.  Since she came home I have been unable to get to the studio, as I am now keeping it firmly locked, unable to work with chemicals, in case it affects her, and unable to sew because I am so tense that nothing will sculpt correctly.  So, I have taken a sub-contract with Microsoft which does not involve the same level of dexterity.  This is depressing in the extreme, as it means that all future project completions are on hold.

I can only hope that the misery of having to do this will spur me on to finish the games and get them out.  As all the work I did on my own health is now effectively being used on my mother I cannot really afford to keep working on me.  I am very tired, to the point of sleeping if I lie down at all, and I am experiencing headaches and sore limbs because I no longer have any freedom at all.  The room I used to sit in and sew with my mother is now devoted to medical equipment, and so you really want to avoid it if you can.

Even this has been used as a weapon, they tried to insist that I put the furniture back in it before the equipment arrived.  They prevented me from getting her out of bed, and every time any progress is mentioned, somebody has a negative comment to make about it.  Depressing in the extreme.

As my birthday is coming up it is time to take stock, and as such I find I have not done as much as I wanted to do this year.  There are at least three books on hold, two games, the collection for Boris, and the courses I was doing in an effort to create something much bigger for Wolfe.  Nothing is as it should be.

So, my conclusion is to work for a few months, put some money aside to render us a bit safer, and if I am still well enough after that I will recommence what I was doing.  Who knows, perhaps being bored out of my mind doing a job I don’t want to fund our lives despite the interference of a bunch of bitching strangers will spur me on to achieve more in terms of the courses.  Who cares about my health anyway?  After my mother dies nobody.  Nobody considers the loss of control involved in caring for other people, and nobody points it out.  It is a blame game, in which the carer always finishes last.

Mother’s drink incorporates over 80 superfood and wholefood ingredients from all over the world. It includes ingredients to improve mental performance, efficient energy use, the construction of proteins to improve her skin, hair and veins. It is antacid, alkaline and anti-inflammatory. It is designed to use blood to repair using the body’s own defences, and therefore contains a very high level and range of antioxidants. It is very expensive for me to produce.

It is the result of years of observing and testing the ingredients on myself. It is extremely safe and is regularly checked against her medication to make sure it does not clash with her current medication. It incorporates traditional ingredients from all over the world related to the brain in addition to a worthy boost in macro and micronutrients. She is currently getting around 1500 calories per day, and smooth transit is assured via a detox mechanism contained in the drink to dispose of unpleasant elements contained in anyone who has ever been on a ‘normal’ diet.

It replaces Ensure, a disgusting plastic food which the NHS has on contract, which supplies 250 calories from a mixture of salt, sugar and 24 vitamins and minerals (inclusive)

It is also sufficiently powerful to replace the double dose of Omeprazole, a drug which was leaching magnesium, causing pain,confusion and hallucinations. It has also saved her from unnecessary painkillers, which would have hastened her end.

Further, there is no need for the double dose of laxative which accompanied the 500 calories of Ensure supplied to allegedly sustain my mother from the hospital.

As my mother’s appetite recovers, she sometimes wants ice cream, which is supplied from the freezer in the form of a Cornetto, eggs, brioche or trout. She only wants to do this every second day, but this is OK because her nutritional needs are more than being met by taking three of her drinks per day. She is also getting around 8 portions of fruit and vegetables in her drinks, and I have discussed all of this with the dietician who called three weeks after her return from hospital on the off-chance that she was still alive. She was very happy with what I had to say. Likewise the doctor was extremely impressed with her blood test results.

If you don’t like or understand it, I frankly don’t care. She does, and she is doing very well on it.

In the event that you still have a problem, I suggest that you find a senior consultant nutritionist and ask them if they can come up with something remotely comparable that a 90 year old will readily tolerate. When they say no, feel free to drop dead of whatever unspeakable disease your ‘normal’ diet gave you.

I have made this sign for my kitchen, they are still trying to say there is something wrong with it.  Her oedema is gone and she is now able to stand up.

Sigh