Physician, Heal Thyself
The Root of the Rot in American Healthcare
The mainstream media once again missed the mark after Luigi Magione’s assassination of UnitedHealthcare CEO Brian Thompson. They were silent about the massive groundswell of social media support from denizens of the right and left of the political spectrum.
The killing united many in a country that’s more divided than ever.
Murder is wrong, whether that means shooting a CEO in cold blood on the streets of New York, or the technically legal killing of untold thousands by using AI to deny rightful health insurance claims.
The media focused exclusively on the lesser of these two evils.
Why?
Because the pharmaceutical industry is the mainstream media’s golden goose. The money must flow.
“Show me the incentive and I'll show you the outcome.” - Charlie Munger
There’s a very simple explanation for why healthcare is so bad in America: a perverse incentive structure.
The sicker we are, the more money they make.
In traditional Chinese medicine, the incentive structure was reversed. You would pay the village doctor a monthly fee. If you fell ill, that fee would go down. If you became very ill, you paid nothing until you got better.
One system incentivizes sickness, and the other incentivizes wellness.
Our healthcare system will not improve until the incentives change.
But the rot runs even deeper than that. Our culture doesn’t understand the root cause of chronic illness.
Nearly every doctor in America reads the above quote during medical school, in the world’s best-selling physiology textbook. But how many of them have talked to you about lack of oxygen at the cell level as the root cause of chronic diseases?
And yet lack of oxygen is only the root cause of chronic disease at a material level.
At a deeper level the root cause of illness is psycho-spiritual, which in turn leads to disturbances at the energetic level. The material cause is downstream of the spiritual and energetic levels.
Because Western medical science denies the reality of the spirit realm, they can never directly address the root cause of chronic disease.
Eastern medicine has understood this multi-dimensional health dynamic for thousands of years, treating spiritual, energetic causes, as well as lack of oxygen at the cell level.
If you’re interested in reading more about this, I highly recommend the following book:
Western medicine is excellent if you have a traumatic injury like a gunshot or a broken leg, but most people in our culture suffer and die from chronic diseases.
Because our system is so terribly inept when it comes to treating chronic disease, you are responsible for your own health, and if you don’t assume that responsibility, you will likely end up with the same outcome as everyone else: chronic disease.
If you want to live a long and healthy life you must master your own body and mind, through research, trial and error, and dedicated psycho-spiritual practice.
“If you are not your own physician, you are a fool."
- Hippocrates, Father of Western Medicine.
In closing I’ll leave you with two very effective practices that addresses all three levels of health: spiritual, energetic, and physical.
The first practice was taught to the Zen master Hakuin, who was suffering from a severe case of Zen sickness, by a Taoist hermit living in a cave. The Soft Butter meditation addresses one of the primary energetic causes of disease in our culture, too much chi stuck in the head.
The second practice is a very short, but very complete form of qigong known as primordial qigong, qigong is similar to tai chi, but simpler, and with an emphasis on healing as opposed to martial application. It is easy to do and takes only five minutes to do. Making it part of your daily practice would be a major contribution to your long-term wellness by addressing all three levels of health.