Have Our Worst Diseases Already Been Cured?
How to improve your odds for avoiding disease and staying healthy
"What? We've already figured this out? OK, where are my glasses?"
On our relentless (and tiring) quest for physical health and vitality, we made what we think is an extraordinary discovery.
A significant chunk of many of our toughest killers, for the most part...
- have already been figured out.
Wait...what?
Seriously.
A significant chunk of many of our worst killers have already, for the most part, been figured out.
But wait: our worst killers are cancer, heart disease, strokes, diabetes, and so on. If someone would have figured out heart attacks, cancer, and so on, we definitely would have heard about it, right?
...right?
Apparently not.
This sounds absurd, we know. We couldn’t really believe it ourselves when we ran across it. It sounds like a gimmick, like somebody's peddling some kind of miracle-pill or weird alternative herb or snake oil, like somebody's running a scam and somebody else is falling for it.
The story seems to become more absurd the more we dig into it.
But after taking a long, hard, sober look at the evidence...well, it seems legit to us.
So after digging into this (and finding a story that seems more absurd the more we dug in to it), this all puts us in a bit of an awkward position: we can either talk about what we've found (which means making some claims that sound kind of fantastic and impossible) and put our credibility on the line, or, we could keep our caffeine-holes shut and go about making friendly small-talk about agreeable topics and such.
(We chose the open-caffeine-hole route.)
To clarify what exactly we're talking about:
We've found a doctor we trust (an M.D. who graduated from Cornell and Tufts) who spends a great deal of time researching other doctors and studies, and especially, finding nuggets in floods of information.
For example:
“Most deaths in the Unites States are preventable.”
“More than 90% of heart attacks may be avoided.”
This "may reduce the odds of breast cancer more than 90 percent."
This "might wipe out more than 90% of your risk of developing diabetes; more than 80% of your risk of having a heart attack, cut your risk of having a stroke by half, and reduce your overall cancer risk by more than one-third."
"For some cancers (like our #2 cancer killer, colon cancer), up to 71% of cases appear to be preventable."
This addressed "the number one cause of premature death and the number one cause of disability."
Let's put it this way:
If we were selling a pill that would cut your risk of heart attacks by 80-90%, your risk of breast cancer by 90%, your risk of diabetes by 50%, and your overall cancer risk by more than 33%...
- How much would you pay for that pill? (Side note: we aren't selling pills).
(Another Side Note: this isn't a scenario of someone getting one of the above conditions, getting sick, and then getting "cured;" it's much better: it's never getting sick to start with.)
If this isn't sounding too good to be true yet, we probably aren't doing a very good job of communicating what we're trying to say.
Assuming for now this isn't totally bogus...is it mainstream, or at least halfway normal, or is it some kind of weird, far-out, alternative treatment?
This approach is straight up the middle of the mainstream.
Our sources on this are not only several highly respected M.D.’s, but also by our most authoritative governmental agencies (The C.D.C. and the American Heart Association, which we actually happen to agree with, at the moment, on these points.)
Not that this makes what we're about to say infallible. But it’s not quack science.
Is it some kind of miracle drug, hyped-up ingredient, expensive treatment, etc?
Again, this entire article probably sounds like an informercial that's hyping up phony miracle pills.
But we aren't.
It’s something that’s within your control. (Meaning, it doesn’t depend on, say, you winning the lottery or finding a doctor who will write you prescriptions to some miracle drug.
It’s not a miracle drug we’re trying to hype up and hock.
It isn’t some secret ingredient (eg take a fish oil pill every day! Drink a glass of wine every day! Beer bongs are actually good for you!)
It isn’t about genes. ("The science" now generally shows that our genes often account for only 10-20 percent of risk, at most.)
It isn’t expensive. (In fact, it could save you money (considering the cost of, say, a heart attack or diabetes.) And if you really apply it, it should save you - and your insurance companies, and maybe even the country - lots of money.
Not to overhype: this isn't about a "cure" for heart attacks or cancer or etc, although this has been shown to treat, slow, and even reverse some conditions; it's largely about preventing these from ever happening to start with.
So if any of this is even half of what it's claimed to be, why don't more people know about it?
We’re living in the age of information overload. We’re simply inundated with a flood of too much information these days. The media has to grab your attention to survive; to do that, they have to hype, mercilessly, whatever they can. This creates and overall environment filled with “signal noise” – a cacophony of scattered, fragmented, isolated story-segments composed of random facts, disorganized bits of information, and scattered pieces of what might have been part of a meaningful, integrated experience. (“Dog swallows diamond engagement ring! Story at 11!”)
It's an environment where real nuggets of truth are mixed in a casserole filled with 98% info-lard. Even if we get the nugget, we’re so stuffed with the “info-lard” that we probably can’t even digest it.
What we're getting at here is a "nugget." Many people already know about it (you might already know - it's a popular blog/book/author/etc), but many more don't. The reason why more don't is because of all the info-lard.
"One of the reasons, I believe,
that knowledge is in a state of useless overproduction
is that it is strewn all over the place,
spoken in a thousand competitive voices.
Its insignificant fragments are magnified all out of proportion,
while its major and world-historical insights
lie around begging for attention."
- Ernest Becker
This is where we, your cuddly LiveReal Agents act in some capacity as information-brokers. Our job is to strip away the info-lard, and serve only the good stuff. This site is designed to be a place where we try to collect nuggets and flush away info-lard; to find the needle in the stack of needles.
So, yes. From what we (and many others) can tell, it really is this effective and powerful. You probably have “heard” about it; this “secret” is hiding in plain sight. It’s not hidden; it’s become camouflaged by thousands of other competing “secrets of health,” like the real Holy Grail in Indiana Jones (the one that's right there, it's just surrounded by dozens of other phony pseudo-Grails.)
But it definitely makes sense that this can be lost in the fog of noise that is our modern information environment. Especially when it doesn't have a multi-million-dollar corporate marketing machine behind it.
So, finally...what is it?
Bonus: A different approach:
According to medical anthropologists, humans have lived through several major eras of human disease throughout history, starting with "The Age of Pestilence and Famine," which largely ended with the Industrial Revolution, and stretching through the stage we’re in now, which they refer to as "The Age of Degenerative and Man-Made Diseases."
So the key element of the stage we're in now: "man-made diseases."
In 1900 in the US, the top three causes of death were infectious diseases: pneumonia, tuberculosis, and diarrheal disease. Now the killers are largely what are described as "lifestyle" diseases: heart disease, cancer, and chronic lung disease.”
In other words: our most deadly diseases today are mostly man-made.
Our biggest threat, in other words, is actually ourselves.
"Know thyself."
- Socrates
- and if we have the power to make them, we have the power to stop making them.