Evidence-based medicine has been hijacked & sold to the highest bidder.
Under the guise of ‘Evidence Based Medicine’ the public has been sold fraudulent goods, and the result is that people suffer from unnecessary but lucrative procedures and take unnecessary but lucrative medications. Meta-analyses and guidelines have become a factory, mostly also serving vested interests. National and federal research funds are funneled almost exclusively to research with little relevance to health outcomes.
Big pharma and big food companies sponsor lots of research into drugs and they really don’t want people to get better. They give prominent doctors lots of money to speak to other doctors. They send them on fancy trips all over the world. Unfortunately, they have corrupted the academic doctors who write national guidelines. This leads doctors to tell the Biggest Lie, that TYPE 2 DIABETES is chronic and progressive. You’ve got it, get used to it!
Many major key opinion leaders, influencers, and patient advocacy organizations take pharma cash. For example, the two biggest diabetes organizations – The American Diabetes Association and The Juvenile Diabetes Research Foundation – have accepted huge sums from insulin manufacturers. Other groups were actually created by money from the ‘big three’, like the World Diabetes Foundation which is funded by Novo Nordisk.
Doctors and universities, and everybody else in the world knows that you don’t bite the hand that feeds you.
In addition, pharmaceutical companies usually hide unflattering results of clinical trials and publish only favorable for them. There is very good reason to believe that much scientific research published today is false, there is no good way to sort the wheat from the chaff, and, most importantly, that the way the system is designed ensures that this will continue being the case. By some estimates, at least 51%—and as much as 89%—of published papers are based on studies and experiments showing results that cannot be reproduced.
For example, Ever since the results of the UKPDS 34 study were published in 1998, Metformin has been considered as the first-line pharmacological treatment for type 2 diabetes. Its efficacy was supposedly conclusively demonstrated in the UKPDS 34 study published in 1998 (reduction in mortality: RR=0.64; CI 95% (0.45 to 0.91) and in myocardial infarction: RR=0.61; CI 95% (0.41 to 0.89). However, these rather impressive results regarding total 10 year mortality (ARR=0.07; NNT=14) in a small subgroup of obese type 2 diabetes patients (342 in the metformin group vs. 411 patients in the conventional group) have never been reproduced .
Taking into account all the other randomized clinical trials (RCTs) having evaluated the specific effectiveness of metformin in Type 2 Diabetes patients, it becomes evident that although Metformin is considered the gold standard, its benefit/risk ratio remains uncertain. We cannot exclude a 25% reduction or a 31% increase in all-cause mortality. We cannot exclude a 33% reduction or a 64% increase in cardiovascular mortality.
So, a significant population of the doctors are caught between the pharmaceutical industry and medical duties. As a result, the system is misleading and forcing these altruistic people to prescribe drugs, not knowing enough about them, which cause abnormal damage.
Doctors don’t want to be perceived as crazy.
Generally, doctors, dieticians and diabetic educators know that Type 2 Diabetes is a dietary disease. But a dietary disease requires a dietary solution.
This is where the breakdown occurs. Doctors treat this dietary disease with lots of drugs, and then watch as the patient continues to worsen. Consider when multiple drugs are added to your regimen which work on multiple organs. You are asking multiple organs to work harder. How long can that last? “Oh well” the doctor tells himself, “It’s a chronic, progressive disease”.
So, either they admit that they are giving the complete wrong treatment (drugs for a dietary disease), or they lie to themselves that the disease is itself progressive. Psychologically, they cannot admit to themselves that they are not only bad doctors, but allowed Big Pharma to buy them off. So, they institutionalize the lie that TYPE 2 DIABETES is progressive and they are doing the best they can. They lie to themselves that they are working with Big Pharma to find a cure. Now, they can believe themselves to be the noble healer facing this deadly onslaught. In truth, they have betrayed their patients trust and broke the oath of Hippocrates to first do no harm.
Nowdays, many doctors do know that Type 2 Diabetes can be reversed, but don’t want to search or recommend the remedy because they don’t want to be seen as nuts who chase fads.
People have a natural bias toward consistency.
People like to be consistent with the things they have previously said or done. People show confirmation bias because they are weighing up the costs of being wrong, rather than investigating in a neutral, scientific way. Moreover, “Make no mistake”: This social psychological principle is powerful.
So if you’re a doctor and you’ve already stated your view that Type 2 Diabetes is a chronic and progressive disease, then it’s going to be hard to shift gears. But it’s going to be even harder, perhaps nearly impossible to change course if you’re the head of a prestigious medical association, the editor of a nutrition journal or a researcher at an Ivy League university. Why? Because:
- You have authority
- You’ve likely put your views in writing
- You may have given speeches in support of that view
- You may have authored papers, conducted studies and/or taught classes that support that view.
In other words, it’s not that the doctors who don’t want to embrace the fact that Type 2 Diabetes is a fully reversible disease are bad scientists. It’s not even about fear of looking foolish for changing their minds. Rather, maybe it’s a natural human instinct to try to preserve internal consistency.
Health is not taught in medical schools & Doctors don’t know much about nutrition.
The current doctor knows a lot of cells, organs, tissues, but almost nothing about the man. Sadly, the main task of modern doctors, even the most effective, is not to restore the health of the human body as a whole, but to restore some laboratory and clinical parameters (blood sugar, cholesterol) and discharge the patient.
Maybe, for this reason, health is not taught in medical schools and medical students do not require studying healthy people. We, doctors don’t take into account the importance of diet and lifestyle on health. How could we? We get a total of 6-8 hours of nutrition lectures in medical school. Medical doctors are not trained in nutrition; they are trained in drugs, drugs, and more drugs. Medical doctors study medicine, not healthicine. They study illness, not healthiness. Asking a doctor about nutrition is like asking a train conductor about brick laying.
Moreover, many doctors — like many people — have entrenched views on nutrition that are based on cultural and intellectual bias, not scientific data.
Conventional Medicine utilizes a reductionist approach.
The so called modern “Evidence Based Medicine” believes the complexity of human body has to be broken down into smaller units to understand it. Once the smaller units are understood, bigger picture can be assembled from the small pieces. So, conventional medicine focuses on the symptoms and seldom the cause. A system like this is broken up into many specialties. No medical doctor is trained to examine in depth the entire body and mind. Each has his own specialty. A cardiologist only addresses the heart. A gastroenterologist surveys the internal organs. A pulmonologist will be responsible for the lungs.
This is like the story of the six blind men who all have a different part of the elephant to examine. As each touches one particular part of the elephant each comes to understand the elephant differently. Conventional medicine works much like this. Each organ and gland is regarded as operating independently while not associated with other parts. For example, under this theory it is believed that if you are experiencing heart disease it is because of something going on in the heart. The elephant is not just a trunk or a tail. It takes an understanding of all the parts in order to grasp the whole.
May be for that reason, if the pulmonologist has a kidney disease, he will not be able to treat himself and will go to the nephrologist; if the nephrologist has a tooth ache, he would take an appointment with the dentist, not thinking that the pain may have some reason.
Maybe we have forgotten that the human body is a highly self-regulating system, which is able to self-regulate and self-repair, maintaining homeostasis and sometimes even improves the whole system. No system of the body works in isolation, and the well-being of the person depends upon the well-being of all the interacting body systems. A disruption within one system generally has consequences for several additional body systems.
Doctors don’t want to get in trouble.
At the moment, the medical community does strongly believe that Type 2 Diabetes is a Chronic and Progressive Disease, which cannot be reversed. So if an intervention, like a diet, isn’t part of the customary practice for treating a particular malady, doctors could run into problems recommending it. This actually happened to Dr. Tim Noakes, a South African M.D. and professor of exercise science and sports medicine at the University of Cape Town. After offering the advice that breastfed babies should be weaned onto a high fat, low carb diet, the Health Professionals council of South Africa accused him of “unprofessional conduct,” resulting in a trial in which Noakes could have lost his medical license.
He ended up being exonerated, but his trial surely gave many doctors pause. This may sound a little harsh but even the hands of the good doctors are tied, because even if they do know some alternative treatment, they can only prescribe drugs and surgery or risk losing their license, being sued, ridiculed, or thrown out of high job positions, as many honest doctors already have been.
It is not economically viable to cure diabetes
Think about it, lets say, if your doctor has a pool of 1000 patients, and they all become healthy, which means nobody is coming into his office anymore, he will go out of business! So, what incentive does he have to keep you healthy? None!
On the other hand, curing a patient can be very time consuming and has little payback. It’s much easier, and more effective financially, to write a prescription for the symptoms and move to the next patient. Because, it only takes 2 minutes to write a prescription; but it takes 20 minutes NOT to write a prescription. What usually happens? Just do the math. Anyone who’s seen a conventional medical doctor understands this.
This is all, despite all evidence in front of their very noses that TYPE 2 DIABETES is Fully Reversible. Bariatric surgery results have proven that losing weight in morbidly obese patients with Type 2 Diabetes reverses the disease state. Virta’s program with continuous remote care intervention including Nutritional Ketosis resulted in “reversal” of Type 2 Diabetes in 54% of participants after two years.
If there is only one thing you need to remember, it is that “Type 2 Diabetes is a fully reversible disease”. This is the first step to reclaiming your health.
But, the question remains “Why everybody seems to manage type 2 diabetes by focusing on reducing blood sugar levels through drugs, rather than addressing the root cause?”
Why Your Doctor Won’t Tell You About curing Diabetes?
No doctor would be so stupid as to claim to heal diabetes…the best they offer is management of symptoms and a delay in progression of disease. Those who religiously follow and trust in the medical model STILL go blind, suffer kidney failure, amputations etc etc…WHILE faithfully taking their meds and adhering to standard diabetic dietary recommendations.
On the other hand many have personally observed diabetics reversing their diabetes, getting off their medications, becoming free of symptoms and complications through simple natural lifestyle changes…AND STAYING THAT WAY. These are not random isolated cases but results achieved over and over again by any and everyone who will adopt and implement the necessary changes.
Let’s Stop Lying About Diabetes that we can control blood sugar
We should all stop suffering from this lie that we can control blood sugar. We can’t.This idea that diabetes can be “controlled” contributes to the general public’s ignorance. Too many people think, “Well, can’t you just avoid sweets?” It’s not their fault, they keep hearing we can “control” diabetes. This myth of control also keeps those of us who have diabetes frustrate because I’m sorry, but no we can’t “control” it.
Unfortunately too, many health professionals themselves don’t understand the complexity of managing blood sugar. Those who tell patients to eat healthy, drop weight start moving and take these meds, highly underestimate what goes into regulating blood sugar in the human body. A body that, by the way, gets weary of being on diabetes patrol 24/7, and happens to also have a life in which maybe that body just lost her job or her boyfriend.
A Deficiency of Nutrition Education and Practice in Cardiology
Patients expect physicians to be sources of information related to nutrition. In fact, 61% of respondents to an American Dietetic Association (now the Academy of Nutrition and Dietetics) survey stated that they believe physicians are a “very credible” source of nutrition information.2 At the same time, though, in a study of internal medicine interns, 86% of respondents admitted to being inadequately trained to provide nutritional counseling. This inadequacy starts early in a physician’s career, with 51.1% of medical school graduates in 2005 reporting that they received insufficient nutrition education during medical school.3
Take the field of cardiology, for example, where a recent study found that, among a cohort of 930 cardiologists, 90% believe their role includes providing patients with basic nutrition information. In the same group of physicians, though, 90% stated that they had received little-to-no training in nutrition during their fellowship, 59% stated that they had received no nutrition during internal medicine training, and 31% reported no nutrition education in medical school.4 Simply put, the perceived role of physicians and the training they are given don’t match up.
This is not a matter of self-reported opinion either, because curricula also lack dedicated nutrition training, and this is not a new phenomenon. In 1962, the American Medical Association (AMA)’s Council on Foods and Nutrition held a conference pertaining to the “inadequate recognition, support and attention” given to nutrition education in medical schools. The council acknowledged that nutrition is intimately involved in the pathogenesis of chronic and degenerative diseases and that the medical curriculum was lagging with respect to advances in nutrition science. 5 The interrelatedness of medicine and nutrition was recognized by the council as more than the just the treatment of isolated nutrient deficiencies.
In 1976, the AMA conducted a mail survey to better understand the status of nutrition education in U.S. medical schools. When 102 medical schools responded to the surveys, fewer than 20% of schools reported requiring a nutrition course.6 The schools cited lack of funds, inadequate number of physicians trained in clinical nutrition, and limited amount of time available in the curriculum as limitations for increased nutrition education. This forty-year-old survey also highlighted the increased interest in nutrition from students and faculty at these institutions.7 We can only assume this interest has since grown.
The scientific conferences and congressional hearings in the decades leading up to the 80s drew attention to the need to improve nutrition education in U.S. medical schools. As a result, the National Research Council Committee on Nutrition in Medical Education published recommendations in 1985 stating that a minimum of 25 to 30 classroom hours during preclinical years should be allotted to covering the topics in nutrition that were underscored by the committee.6 For the past two decades, research spearheaded by University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill has tracked the state of nutrition education in U.S. medical schools every four years. Unfortunately, the data show no sign of changes in the average hours required in nutrition education since 2000. The most recent survey during the 2012-2013 academic year included 121 medical schools, with an average of 19 hours (SD =13.7) of nutrition education in their curriculum. The survey showed that 71% of medical schools failed to meet the minimum recommendation of 25 hours, 36% provided 12 or fewer hours, and 9% provided none.8
Current nutrition education is evidently not translating into practice when only 10% of primary care physicians include weight counseling for patients, and fewer than half of obese and overweight patients are advised to lose weight.9 Primary care practitioners overwhelmingly support requiring additional training so that they will be better informed about the care they provide to their patients with obesity.10
The Association of American Medical Colleges has recently declined to incorporate nutrition into its new blueprint for medical competencies.11 The 2013 American Council for Graduate Medical Education (ACGME) program requirements for Graduate Medical Education in Cardiovascular Disease neglects to mention nutrition. 12 This continues to be the case in the most recent iteration of the ACGME requirements along with the ACGME for Internal Medicine.13,14 These examples show that both medical schools and graduate medical education have yet to legitimize the value of incorporating nutrition training through their competencies.