If you can wade through this slightly muddled little essay without giving-up half-way then you'll get a glimpse at how two apparently conflicting sections of the economy cause millions of people to suffer (at great financial cost to us all: £multiple-billions) just so a few rich investors can get a lot richer:
I guess it's a bit of a cliché to say 'We're all dying!' An obvious fact if ever there was. What's key, though, is the rate at which we're all dying. More people than ever now are reaching the BIG C - 100, and feeling fit with it!
While making a stupendous financial killing, the pharmaceutical industry might be keeping many of those centenarians from the grave, but I wouldn't bet on it. Quite probably, I'd wager, longevity (to reach that BIG C) has increased in spite of and not because of expensive medicines - the most life-saving of which, for any age-group, is probably antibiotics.
It's true that drugs and techniques are fast improving, extending lifespan. Great news... frequently, though, an ailment and/or the treatment of it causes disability and/or discomfort at least. Far better, surely, to prevent rather than cure.
Recently, it was discovered that type-2 diabetes can be permanently cured by sticking to a strict diet for a few weeks. Maybe this wouldn't work for everyone? But don't tell the pharmaceutical industry - since it's disorders like this that keep their profits up - and they'll stop at nothing to steer us away from self-cure. Their prime function, after all, is to generate wealth, not health. If we were all super-healthy BIG pharma would go to the wall... or almost would. And if the drugs they produce slowly kill us then what do they care so long as they don't get sued?
And if you reflect on the causes of most illnesses you'll discover - surprise, surprise - that they're more-or-less all down to lifestyle. That's to say: consuming too much of this, not enough of that, too little or too much of certain activities, spending too long in some hostile environment or at some mentally or physically wearing task... and/or generally neglecting certain aspects of one's overall welfare... diet, exercise, relaxation... stress, etc.
Some of these things are not easy to control in a society where most have to work - or feel they should (or indeed prefer to rather than remain idle like me), but from which various associated pressures arise that conflict with a healthy lifestyle.
I never really admired Steve Jobs (not with a surname like that!) mainly because of his reputedly arrogant obsessive controlling nature. But I have to concede he was some genius in taking the technology he was focussed on to its limit of perfection. I wonder, though, if he'd have gone down with cancer had he focussed half as much on his health? Maybe he did and was just bloody unlucky - it seems odd that anyone of his intelligence could be so stupid as to neglect something so crucial as their health. But the same question could be asked of many high-achievers who die relatively young, just as it could be asked of the millions of ordinary folk who feel 'trapped' in some occupation or other which depletes their psychological or physical energy and limits how they are able to look after themselves.
I put 'trapped' in quotes because unless they're in jail no-one is really trapped - though they might be trapped in ignorance: of how to escape their predicament, and properly take care of their mind and body.
Although school was about the biggest turn-off I ever experienced, I wondered for years why health-care was never on the syllabus. Then one day it dawned on me: of course, if doctors or medicines were rarely needed then a BIG slice of the economy would go redundant - greatly annoying a substantial section of the elite... how many £billions is it the government dish out on health each year?
Just as cars are supposed to rust so we keep buying new ones, people are supposed to get ill so we keep buying medicines. Otherwise - a large chunk of the economy folds. Stop looking after yourselves out there; make a few oligarchs happy!
And it doesn't stop there. When it takes several decades for smoking to do its damage, they shove health warnings on baccy - to placate some over-cooked public angst (which is always absurdly 'conservative' and extreme, exemplified in its views on capital and corporal punishment). Yet for crap food and crap lifestyle (as frequently required of office/factory/shop slave-workers), which usually has faster and more disabling consequences than the weed, such warnings are virtually taboo... even when merely voiced. Yet to sit in an office or factory all day, every day, year-in year-out... how good is that for anyone's health? (No-one seems bothered, and what do shareholders of those outfits care?)
After indulging for 4-decades (age 15 to 55) it's now more than 6-years since I chucked baccy, and it's two whole decades since I abandoned the 'working' lifestyle - which for me wasn't so bad (a very favourable shift-pattern with loads of time off). It could be a fluke, but so far: no ill effects - all that baccy seems to have been pretty innocuous. (Maybe I'll keel over tomorrow after writing that.)
But the smoking issue strikes me as ironic after all the fuss and hassle it caused when I was a kid - and causes these days even more. Back in the 60s, when those self-appointed sadistic maniacs who called themselves teachers and headmasters regarded it as their chief role in life to cane or otherwise inflict cruelty on any hapless kid they caught puffing smoke, or just in possession, back then smoking - except in a school - was accepted without question everywhere, just as consuming junk food is now. Well, as I say, no health warning is required for crap food - which is a bit odd - no: astonishing - after the guy who made the 'Supersizeme' film proved how by stuffing yourself with it for a mere month can seriously duff-up your life support - to within a few days of liver-failure and actual death... just one month!!!
Anyone could be forgiven for concluding from this apparent anomaly that government is guilty of negligence or at best crooked thinking... until you take a peek at the enormous profits made by the junk food industry. And I don't just mean McDs...etc. there's all the biscuits and crisps outfits and producers of other processed trash, solid with fats and weird-additives, crap-loaded snacks, so-called chocolate which is actually flavoured sugar, pap-bread heavy with salt and moisture and puffed-up with air (or CO2?)... vast quantities of weird margarines, plus butter and sugar, everything loaded with sugar to please the sugar industry, and all strongly promoted in commercials, etc. and shifted in huge quantities daily... I won't even attempt to touch on the scrag end of the meat industry... Ugh! See food processing company share prices, see their profits and dividends...
It's well known how these products damage health - which, BIG pharma is only too happy to 'correct' for a substantial fee (see their share values too) - yet, absurdly, there's no public outcry. And that same public (doubtless driven by propaganda, as ever) criticise junkies, drug abusers, alcoholics... etc... How's that for sheer, monumental hypocrisy?
When people get ill they might reflect on past indulgencies and begin to regret their shortsightedness and vulnerability to media propaganda: adverts and peer pressures and partaking in whatever food-fad or drug-fad is fashionable. Try anything once, maybe twice, but long term is another issue.
Do I have regrets? Of course. For one thing, I regret not slinging the hook a long time earlier - though it's a very small regret since, as I've said, life treated me well in those days; I actually enjoyed the 'treadmill', or maybe (I suspect), programmed myself to. And I regret instances when I've been deliberately horrible to someone - these, as I reflect, are amazingly few, and most are a very long time ago, when I was practically a kid. I remember them all, every detail. I don't regret consuming crap - because, by some fluke, I always seemed to see it for what it is. And I've always avoided medicines - except antibiotics. I definitely don't regret failing to make money - not when one can fly around the planet for less than the average monthly income (even if the real cost is vastly greater - but that's someone else's problem, sadly). So who needs loadsamoney? It's piss-easy anyhow to make money if you study closely for a few weeks the machinations of a handful of outfits in the corrupt yet amazingly predictable (on a short-term basis, at any rate) FTSE100.
Which is just another way of saying that it's ALL down to corporate interests - that is, everything. In this instance, the food industry. together with BIG pharma and that familiar, blind, agonisingly 'conservative' public demand... the same kind of twisted reasoning that governs most mob decisions and is the result of clever propaganda instead of rational independent thought or evaluation.
So is it conflict, or is it in fact some kind of reciprocal co-operation... between duff food and the curing of illness (somewhat incongruously called 'healthcare'... why not just prevent ill-health in the first place???). Truth is: anything involving vast sums of money inevitably evokes corruption with all the associated furtive manoeuvrings. Ask yourself: What arms manufacture would vote to prevent war?
THE SOLUTION: sod BIG-food and BIG-pharma; stuff the bastards. And sod (propaganda-driven) public opinion. Just stay the hell out of it - all of it - is my advice. The result: you stay fit and well and contented.... and quite probably you'll stand a chance of hitting the BIG C intact!
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.......October 2011