Transcend: Nine Steps to Living Well Forever by Ray Kurzweil;Terry Grossman

Author:Ray Kurzweil;Terry Grossman [Unknown]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Published: 2013-04-20T12:51:00+00:00

THE IMPORTANCE OF BEING THOROUGH

Another problem is that most physicians do not do a thorough job of screening their patients. Preventive medicine has never been a priority for most physicians, and it's hard to get a lot done when the face-to-face time of an office call between a physician and patient averages 11 minutes. When was the last time your family physician checked your body fat or measured how many pushups or situps you could do? We know that declining hormones are a critical component of the aging process. Has your physician ever recommended a check of your testosterone, DHEA, estrogen, or progesterone levels? Tests such as these are critical components of a thorough health evaluation. Yet, because of pressures placed by health insurers, doctors are often not thorough and take shortcuts.

This isn't the case for every profession. It is instructive to compare how a pilot prepares before takeoff in an airplane to how a doctor examines a patient. A pilot always uses a checklist and "preflights" his airplane along with his copilot. It might be their 10,000th flight, but they still use the checklist. "Radio," "Check." "Fuel tank," "Check." "Tire pressure," "Check." They systematically go through every system of the airplane before takeoff. This is important because people's lives are at stake and they don't want to make a single mistake-ever. When a doctor examines a patient, use of the checklist is optional. Sometimes they use one, sometimes they don't. Sometimes they check everything on the list, sometimes they don't. People's lives are at stake here too, so what's the difference? When you come right down to it, it's because the pilot is on the plane along with his passengers. If he forgets to check something and the plane goes down, he dies too. If a doctor makes a mistake and forgets to check something, only the patient suffers. This may sound cynical, but if the doctor's life were on the line along with the patient's, we can guarantee you they'd be more thorough.

Another factor that greatly influences conventional medicine is the influence of the billions of marketing dollars behind pharmaceutical drugs. Please note that we're not at all opposed to prescription drugs per se and, in fact, elsewhere in this book we recommend a number of drugs that should be considered by you and your physician for certain conditions. But there are many natural supplements that are also lifesavers that do not have the same marketing muscle behind them. One reason is that our patent system makes it impossible to patent a naturally occurring substance. Without patent protection it doesn't make business sense to spend millions-or billions-of dollars promoting a natural substance that a competitor can market as well. Another reason is that the manufacturer of a new drug now incurs nearly a billion dollars of costs before obtaining an approved FDA claim of efficacy. Since synthetic drugs can be patented, the business model for going through the FDA process can be justified, but for a natural supplement

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