Editorial

This past August, I was in Edmonton, Alberta, Canada, for that city’s marathon during the same week that the Canadian Medical Association was meeting in Victoria, British Columbia. The Globe and Mail, Canada’s excellent national daily newspaper, had a reporter at the medical gathering. On the left side of its front page the newspaper carries a column that digests the stories inside. The lead digest on the front page of the August 20, 1997, issue went like this:

Doctors Fear Emphasis on Prevention

Some doctors at this week’s annual meeting of the Canadian Medical Association feel threatened by the health-care system’s emphasis on prevention of illness. They fear that governments will take away money from health care and spend it on creating a healthier society. One doctor went as far as suggesting that the meeting vote that medical care is the only way to ensure good health.

Honest, this is what the report said. I’m not joking. You can look it up.

Medicine is Big Business, and its escalating cost has gotten out ofhand. For too many years, sickness has meant wealth to a growing medicalindustrial complex. Unfortunately—

or perhaps fortunately—the greed involved in medicine has outraced the resources upon which it suckled.

During this period of fiscal freefor-all, hospitals expanded, and added beds, and new technology arrived on the scene with great ballyhoo. Pharmaceutical companies developed new drugs that they encouraged doctors to prescribe at astonishing rates. Elderly patients who, in the natural course of things, would have died natural, humane deaths, were kept marginally alive in nursing homes.

The days of the kind-hearted, general practitioner making house calls became obsolete. Medical students (and their families) invested hundreds of thousands of dollars to become medical specialists, which rationalized increased charges.

Medicare and Medicaid fraud went unchecked. Double billing skyrocketed; some doctors charged for services rendered to patients who had been dead for years; and some doctors even billed more than 24 hours in asingle day, atime/space accomplishment that would have bewildered Einstein.

Greed was turbocharged. And in many cases, the greediest culprit was the patient.

Unrestricted access to medical miracles was seen as a God-given right, even a Constitutional right. Ifa medical procedure ora “miracle” drug

was available for an ailment, the patient felt entitled to receive it. Smokers who burned out their lungs expected a new set when the first pair stopped working. Sedentary lumps believed that when their fat-globbed hearts gave out, a doctor would provide a pill to clear it up, or pop in a new heart. People with the blues who could have taken a positive step toward getting rid of them by going on a walk instead took a pill.

We became lazy, and we became victims—victims with the expectation that when we got sick due to our own abuses or misuses, we’d be cured in the best possible fashion for the least amount of money.

On the other hand, medical folks who promoted fitness and wellness as the way to good health were prophets staggering through the wilderness. In some instances they were pariahs to the public and within their own profession. Revolutionaries like Jack LaLanne preached the gospel of “Use it or lose it,” and the medical bigwigs came down on him. He promoted women exercising, and the medical community screamed that this was an outrage and that women who exercised would look like men and damage their delicate internal organs.

Small outlaw groups of medical professionals banded together to conduct research into the good effects of fitness. The American Medical Joggers Association formed, as did the American College of Sports Medicine. These two groups promoted health through aerobic exercise. Mavericks in the medical profession stepped forward to reverse the “wait- *til-it-breaks-’en-we’ ll-fix-it” approach of the medical-industrial complex.

Dr. Ken Cooper preached aerobics. Dr. Jack Scaff had heart patients running marathons. Dr. Thaddeus Kostrubala preached better health and longer life through running and wrote The Joy of Running. William Morgan, Michael Sachs, Bill Glasser, and others promoted the idea that running could make you feel better psychologically. George Sheehan, Peter Wood, Dave Martin, and others showed the practical application of running to health. A small army of orthopedic specialists and podiatrists stepped forward to help runners train better, safer, longer.

But this band of outlaws was more pesky than practical. It was as though the medical-industrial complex wanted people to get sick so they could getricher quicker. There certainly was no great push from the medical-industrial complex for people to take their health into their own hands by exercising regularly and eating wisely. To have encouraged that would have crippled the golden goose.

The point is clear: If you’re fit and healthy on your own, you’re a threat to the medical-industrial complex’s money machine. The very nerve that you would take control of your own health and fitness instead of conspiring to get sick so you could make a contribution to the medical-industrial complex!