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Is our current health care system driving us towards extinction?

Writer's picture: Dr. Doug PooleyDr. Doug Pooley

[Note: This may be long, but I promise you it's worth the read.]


I am sure that many would view this notion as preposterous and the ranting of a lunatic. I mean, how could something as sacrosanct as our Canadian health model be anything but purposefully directed and totally benevolent in its execution? Well, in truth, I believe in many ways it is, but that doesn’t mean it’s not failing. Let’s make this a little more personal. Before going any deeper, allow me to broach this question with you...for all the investment and manpower involved in its operation, are you convinced that the current paradigm of care is making us any healthier? For most of us, this is not something that we would normally think about, but due to its critical importance, one should. Unfortunately, you do not have to drill down very far before realizing that statistically the system is unravelling around us. Although those in command would like us to believe otherwise, there is legitimacy fueling the growing concern revolving around the efficacy of our current medical services model. (2023 Angus Reid survey found…” only 26% of Canadians consider our health care services to be in excellent or very good condition.”) The inability to access critical services in a timely fashion, lack of skilled manpower, increased costs of non-insured services/medications, and the growing apprehensiveness surrounding the prevailing approach’s abilities to satisfy the existing, much less emerging needs of an ever-aging population are top among the well-founded concerns facing today’s health care consumers.


Let me continue to engage with you a bit by asking to now think about this. From a purely pragmatic perspective, stand back for a moment and objectively scan the health delivery landscape from your existent perch in life. Do you find yourself a bit sceptical as you evaluate the current offering’s potential for effectively improving our collective health profile and perhaps a little leery that the chosen trajectory just might not demonstrate the best “bang for the buck?” Does even pondering this make you just a little uneasy? It should! Now, drive those thoughts a little bit further along combining them with the voracious service consumption associated with our ever-aging demographic and the unbridled costs associated with funding the existing model for health provision. Regardless of what the talking heads in Ottawa and the other provincial capitals profess, let me put forth the stark reality nobody wants to acknowledge --- we are an aging society committed to a failing medical service delivery model which continues to escalate in cost while becoming more and more distanced from its constituents. Now here is where the rubber hit the road: unless a substantial change in direction occurs, we are not far from a critical tipping point which could abruptly usher in the collapse of our healthcare systems. The continued provision of health care services using our current paradigm is not unlike continuing to fuel a blaze that is out of control by feeding it more wood in the hope that doing so it will somehow become less voracious. It is not hard to future project that any collapse in the provision of health care services could in turn trigger a series of catastrophic domino effects across life as we know it. No matter how hard those in control try to justify maintaining our current course, the reality of it all points towards an unimaginably horrific outcome, which circles us back to the title of this article. For all the research and monies spent on attempting to find a cure for disease, this reactive dogma currently driving health delivery in Canada may in many ways be heading us down a path towards extinction. I see this not by intent but rather through negligence in ignoring the obvious approaching chaos, in favour of more convenient and profitable pretenders. Let’s look at the facts.


Over the last 50 or so years, levels of illness have risen exponentially. In fairness so has the demographic responsible for the greatest consumption of medical services (those of us over the age 55). There are more Canadian seniors living with diagnosed illness requiring one or multiple forms of clinical intervention than ever in our history. For all the effort and costs dedicated to solving the riddle of disease, we just seem to be getting sicker and sicker, again begging the question: When it comes to evaluating the path of our existing model for health provision, are we heading in the best direction?” For many readers, at first blush, this appears as a profanity. Sadly, it is anything but, and someone needs to starting asking the uncomfortable questions.


My experience has shown that, even among those working in health care, few really wish to contest the efficacy of the existing paradigm. Although they may quietly question otherwise; due to the stigma attached to challenging the status quo, it is simply much safer to keep your head down and move along. In today’s world, all practitioners are acutely aware of the consequences of being branded an outlier by peers or press. Now, combine this “failure to execute” with the dramatic rise in collective paranoia surrounding disease in general, (fueled by the recent pandemic and mass fear-based marketing), and the result for many is an intolerant paralysis of attitude towards anything outside the present model for the provision of health services. The average “Joe” has become scarred to death of becoming sick, and with that, sadly convinced that he/she no longer has effective inherent capacity to respond to even the most benign threat of illness or injury. In fact, we have become obsessed with disease and in that, seemingly lost any belief in our innate capability to get and stay healthy. This flawed ideology could of itself be heading us towards a tragedy of staggering proportions.


Any contention that the keys to health and longevity are to be found in the treatment of disease are preposterous and fly in the face of close to two million years of successful human evolutionary development. Mankind did not arrive to the 21st century by accident. Through trial and error, we have (for the most part) been successfully adapting across time, becoming in many ways, a consummate health machine. Through successive generations, nature has successfully engineered you to be well and live longer. That is, we were, up until the latter half of the twentieth century. At that point, progressive modifications to our work environments, leisure and lifestyle, started us down a very different path than that tread by any previous generations. In western society most of us were no longer forced to worry about survival, personal recreational activities consume more of each day, work has become increasingly less physical, the widespread use of pharmaceuticals touted as normal, and diet has turned into a buffet of readily available manufactured choices. To build for a second on this latter point, ironically, we no longer consume food for survival, and for many, eating has become the new contact sport. In short, we started to do less and consume more, take more drugs, and naively failed to appreciate that all of this has not been without consequences.


Regular physical activity was replaced with televisions and then computers/phones and what we ate became a matter of taste and convenience rather nutritional common sense. The negative consequences of these changes showed up almost immediately with the World Health Organization reporting that the number of people with diabetes rising from 108 million in 1980 to 422 million in 2014 to 537 million in 2021. According to Silverberg and Holleb in their superb work “Major Trends in Cancer: 25-year survey”, during the past 25 years, cancer incidence increased 125 percent for lung; 27 percent for colon (males); 23 percent, prostate; 21percent, pancreas; 21percent, bladder (males).Where it gets more relevant to this writing is revealed in a report by the National Institute of Health that states: “Only 5–10% of all cancer cases are due to genetic defects and that the remaining 90–95% are due to environment and lifestyle.” During this same period of time, the consumption of medical services mirrored and more than matched the mushrooming of perilous lifestyle changes and demographic re-structuring experienced in western society. According to the Canadian Institute for Health Information, medical related expenditures in this country rose from $14 billion in 1975 to $331 billion in 2022. During that same period, the population of the country increased from just over 23 million to 38.5 million. A grade five student can do the math on this one. The population hasn’t even doubled during that time, but the costs of health provision went through the roof.


There is absolutely no denying that we just keep getting sicker, requiring more interventions and costing more money. Everything is changing, except for the system for health delivery charged with managing the problem. This becomes strikingly evident when dialling into age related health service consumption for the big-ticket items such as cancer, heart disease, diabetes, arthritis, alcohol related illness, obesity and smoking related sickness. Here the ideology appears entrenched in a paradigm with few wins, crippling costs and escalating levels of dependence, disability, and mortality. Yes, science can certainly demonstrate some spectacular advancement in the treatment of all the above, but the real problem is found in the fact that more and more people are requiring treatment for one or more of the above afflictions. Somebody needs to grab a different mitt and get into the game.


For all the posturing to the contrary, the keys to current and future health enhancement and vitality can only be found in the following approach; the exploration of methodologies to create better humans while continuously enhancing the health potential of today’s population.

We must take at least some of the focus off fighting disease and aim it squarely at finding ways to make humans healthier and more resilient. As the evolutionary process has proven, the fundamentals of longevity and vitality can only be found in making the species stronger. The roots of this are embedded in our evolutionary footprint through improving the key foundational components that define health and support the efficient metabolism of energy to enhance vitality and effective immune function.


All life forms have been engineered over time to function as perfectly as possible within their prescribed environment. Whether it be an eagle, mouse, cheetah, or any other species, each has evolved through constant adaptation to be perfectly suited to the demands for survival within its intended habitat. This includes man. The health of each species is for the most part a direct reflection of the effectiveness of its ability to meet the operational demands associated with its viability. Again, the same principles apply to humans, and this again circles us back to the title of this article. From an evolutionary perspective, our path over time has consistently served to improve the vigor of the species. With a few exceptions (such as the bubonic plague), for the most part, we kept getting bigger, stronger, and more robust from generation to generation…until the last half of the 20th century. As previously mentioned, this is when the tide started to turn. Over the last 50 or so years, we have in fact become weaker as a species and more susceptible to disease, with the lifespan in North America (which had steadily progressed for generations), now showing evidence of sliding back. In general, the health profiles of the average person have most recently, started to devolve with direct correlation to the many pathological lifestyle changes which have become so commonly accepted over the last half century. Here there are two over-arching offenders, one dietary and the other inertia based. Both fly in the face of eons of successful evolutionary adaptation, which in all its various forms aimed to make the human body and mind stronger and more resilient.


Through investigation of the primary components of life itself, it became clear that there are just six physical features and processes consistent to all life and without which death or extinction are inevitable. To remain alive, we must all assimilate nutrients, breath, hydrate, discharge waste, move and reproduce. Failure in any of these areas is ultimately terminal to the species. Consistently found within each of the above is one pivotal over-arching feature…movement. When systematically broken down, the efficiency of each of the above pillars of life is a direct reflection of the quality of movement found within each process. Every function at its base level is nothing more than intelligently directed action. This, in its most elemental form is the energy that characterizes life. Whether it be acts of digesting foods, absorbing fluids into our systems, the discharge of waste, effectively bringing oxygen into our bodies, or reproduction, all are just purposefully directed movement. No movement, no life. From the perspective of logic alone, finding methodologies to enhance the quality and effectiveness of activity within each of the above noted foundational pillars would serve as a core component in the genesis of a healthier human and certainly enhance the potential for rebuilding those of us already compromised by disease. Upon reviewing the science on the impact of consistent activity to health and the prevention of disease, there is absolutely no question that the foundational roots for effectively warding off illness and fostering longevity are contained in purpose driven activity. The more consistently and efficiently the human body moves, the healthier it becomes. This is in absolute step with our evolution as a species. Now, lets dive a little deeper into more uncomfortable waters.


No matter how much the facts are ignored, the explosion of lifestyle related disease is a clear demonstration that we have lost the ability to successfully govern our health and lifestyle behaviours with any degree of propriety. That delicious freedom of choice, which we all demand as a right, has turned out to be a luxury that is abused with impunity. There are no punishable lifestyle boundaries (beyond frank crime), no rules governing what are acceptable health generating behaviours, and therefore no consequences for their violation, independent of the inevitable advent of disease and the expense of associated its management. It is here that we must confront the menacing and ever-growing elephant in the room.


The very essence of a working democracy should be governance for the good of the majority in all civilized collectives or processes One of the greatest demonstrations of democracy at its best was the advent of our universal health care system (1st launched in 1949 in Saskatchewan). It was instituted at a time when individual accountability to the collective good was accepted as fair and reasonable behaviour that could be depended upon. It was believed without reservation that consumers would be sensible in the consumption of services and that providers would be reasonable in the provision of services. The historical data in both cases would unfortunately suggest otherwise. There is little in our current western lifestyle that demonstrates accountability to the best interest of the community. Now here comes the uncomfortable part.


No matter how easy it has become to ignore it, the failure to sensibly manage your lifestyle and personal health comes with consequences and costs. The burden for which should never be shouldered by those who demonstrate reasonableness and accountability in the management of their own wellbeing. Apart from the consumption of health care services, in what other facet of life can you live with impunity without eventually paying the piper? None! In this country with its myth of free health care, a person can live a life of total self-abuse and repeatedly lean on the current health care system as a perpetual get out of jail free card, with zero consequences. To dwell outside the boundaries of propriety and not be subjected to repercussions happens rarely, except when it comes to the consumption of health care services in Canada. Without accountability there is chaos, and this is what we are witnessing today. The lifestyles and habits of these (often oblivious) transgressors ultimately results in the massive dollar expenditure with little or no potential for resolve, and certainly no thresholds for enforcing accountability. Medicines are often used as a panacea to allow offenders to continue destructive lifestyles and behaviours, resulting in the consumption of ever-more services at a burgeoning cost. This should never have been allowed to happen and must be reasonably curtailed immediately if we have any hope of surviving beyond this century.


The following eleven recommendations have the potential to reverse our current slide and start the process of building healthier and more self-reliant humans.


  1. The institution of a department of wellness as a fully independent entity charged with constantly exploring new opportunities to improve the functional integrity of the species.

  2. Create a pool of government funded monies for allocation to deserving research and study into supporting the above initiatives.

  3. Take immediate steps to institute a two-tiered medical system to take pressure off the public system. Contrary to what some may think, this does not create a privileged consumer stratum. In fact, the failure to do so, punishes those without the resources by forcing Canadians with the means, to draw from the collective pool of available health care funds. This reduces the potential for those less fortunate to access medical services in a timely and efficient fashion. This is just logic. The smaller you cut the pie, the less pie there is available for everybody. You bring in a second pie…well the answer is obvious.

  4. The establishment of scientifically based mandatory “well-being” screening conducted every two years based upon an encompassing approach to health and wellness.

  5. The development of natural strategies that focus on maximizing innate health repair to rebuild damaged vitality. Game plans that work with the body’s internal mechanisms for repair, restoration and energy production.

  6. A restructuring of health care premiums where those who are conscientious and demonstrate responsible lifestyles and health habits are rewarded. Conversely, those who fail to meet certain baseline criteria for reasonable health maintenance shoulder a greater financial burden as a reflection of their potential for exceptional health service consumption.

  7. The development of bona fide programs for health reclamation that provide the compromised individual with certified health care coaches and scientifically structured programs designed to reasonably enable those in crisis to reclaim their health.

  8. For those who fail to comply, or voluntarily decline the above services, the privilege of health provision should be limited to supportive care in those cases where the statistical likelihood for quality-of-life improvement or life extension is not demonstrated.

  9. An accounting of the yearly costs to the system incurred by every citizen presented to the individual at the end of each calendar year.

  10. Mandatory daily proactive physical education and exercise programs from junior kindergarten through to the end of high school.

  11. Banning of all ultra-processed foods from any educational environment, hospital or long-term care facility.


Obviously, there is an abundance of fine-tuning required to institute each and all the above, as well as humanitarian and compassionate considerations to be entertained. Aside from this, change is most certainly doable, with the ultimate quality of life improvements for the individual and cost savings to the system potentially astronomical. This may be seen by some as conjecture, but the suggestions are not without logic.


One thing is certain, change must happen, and it needs to start with accountabilities and consequences. If you want to draw from health care funds, your lifestyle profile should demonstrate that you are deserving or are at least committed to making the changes necessary to potentially reduce your burden to the collective. This now becomes fair and reasonable. Combine this with new and innovative approaches to heath and vitality designed to build better humans, and from all angles, the result must be a win.

About the Author: Dr. POOLEY has been in practice for over 46 years, is a former champion bodybuilder and author of the book the Un-Diet Diet.

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