How Do We Stay Healthy When Illness Equals Profit?
We trust our healthcare system to help us when we are injured and sick to get us back on our feed. Medical professionals like doctors, nurses, and the armies of support staff do miracle work each day saving lives from fixing broken bones to providing helpful medical advice and treating disease.
At the same time, we live in a capitalistic system where profit equals growth. For our healthcare system, the fast path to profit is chronic illness requiring frequent doctor's visits, expensive treatments, and medications that cost almost nothing to produce while being sold often at a massive profit.
How do we stay healthy when illness is so profitable? What works to interact with our medical system in a way that helps us increase our quality of life without getting funneled into a diagnosis that then starts a cycle of downward health spiraling?
Today I talk with Bonnie from Billing Buddies at http://www.billingbuddies.com/ and Don from https://www.donself.com/ in this video interview uploaded to DTube which we hope will leave you saying "Thank God I saw that!"
▶️ DTube
▶️ IPFS
Talking with Bonnie and Don helps me stay centered in remembering our healthcare system is full of good people trying to help alongside the capitalistic goals of growth which sometimes promotes profit at any cost because Bonnie and Don both help doctors maintain profitable businesses. We conclude that education is critical to help us develop and maintain a prevention mindset especially through diet and nutrition which we have control over today instead of thinking our diet has no consequences and that diseases can only be addressed through medical treatment.
Don reminds us that Medicare pays for Annual Wellness visits to our doctor which can help us feel good about our health and identity problems well enough in advance for prevention to work. For doctors, reminding patients of this visit is an opportunity to build a relationship based on prevention, increase referrals, and generate positive reviews online.
I am excited Bonnie and Don are planning to read the book "How Not To Die" by Michael Greger, M.D. as seen at https://nutritionfacts.org/book/ which helped me to lose weight, feel better every day, and believe that eating mostly whole plant foods is preventing the top 15 causes of my death from occurring!
Thank you for experiencing this interview with us! When you would like us to follow up with more discussion on the details of what we talked about here, would you please leave a comment with ideas for our next call because your feedback will help us know how to best serve you in the next video we produce?
Love,
Jerry Banfield
▶️ DTube
▶️ IPFS
I often think about this sort of thing because I am fascinated by incentives and how simply changing one's incentives can produce a radical change in behavior. What you've laid out here is a perfect example of incentives being misaligned.
Great post as always @jerrybanfield.
@brandonp thank you for reading, commenting, and upvoting with us here! Your positive feedback here is what motivates me to make Steem a priority each day and helps me think what can I do to help the most!
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Also, I think having a positive attitude each day, learning how to "breathe" (we forget sometimes!) thru those super stressful moments, much plant-based diet like you said, healthy supplements (as opposed to meds if you can), yoga/exercise, letting go of anger, prayer and lots of GRATITUDE for every moment and challenge! I also drink at least 1 tsp. of apple cider vinegar a day w/water. I haven't had a cold in a few years!
I agree with you.
One solution regarding changing incentives would be to shift the industry thinking that illness is profitable over to the idea that health is profitable. If we could structure healthcare so that doctors made more money keeping you well, we would see a big improvement.
Agreed @geke especially when we see that health is much more profitable for us as an entire society!
@geke thank you for being one of the first to comment on this post and for upvoting it because this is part of how I know that showing up here each day is useful!
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Exactly. I couldn't agree more. That's the exact way to do it. Shift the incentives.
thanks a lot @jerrybanfield for all your post and your info it help us so much i like your idea ,, ((( resteem ))) up vote
You can take me, but you cannot take my bunghole.... For I have no bunghole....
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I have done that I wish that I can be like you
Your doing great on steemit and i just start with it I will follow ur all ur post
I have a friend who works over 60 hours a week.
Loves what he does he runs his own business but the guy drinks heavily every. single. day.
When we try to get him to take it easy he just tells us that in a few years he can just buy a new liver loooool wtf
Thanks for this amazing video, it's really motivating to take more care about our health. We have to stop losing our money to buy this medicaments and stop sopporting the useless medical system that is made just to make profit from people. My wife is vegan and I try to support her by eating just vegan food at home and that helps a lot to stay healthy, she just joined steemit recently and here she will write about veganism in Russia and veganism generally because she is reallly true vegan and she really care about animals a lot. You can read her blog here : @steemitbaby .
She also likes you so much Jerry because she sees that you are vegan also, it makes me love you much more because my dear love also love you, you are doing very well, I wish you the best. ☺
Many health insurance company's provide incentives to the subscribers for taking preventive action. My insurance reimburses for 3 months of gym membership fees! Be sure to check out what benefits your policy provides.
how to stay healthy when illness equals profit? well for me, being healthy is equals more time and money being saved and that will lead to happier and longer life expectancy @jerrybanfield.
good quality post as always..thank you!
@dimas-alfaruq yes! I appreciate you for being one of the first to comment on this post and for upvoting it because this is part of how I know that showing up here each day makes a difference!
I see you have voted for 22 witnesses so far at https://steemit.com/~witnesses and not make a vote for me yet! Will you please add me to your list of witness votes because your witness vote for me will help fund additional projects to grow Steem via @budgets and help me represent your interests in our community?
Hi @jerrybanfield, thank you for taking the time to reply. Even though I have voted 22 witnesses, I don´t know really what it means:D..can you explain a bit about it? and yes I can make you my witness
and I would also appreciate if you could help me grow by following my account or my posts? thank you
When wealth is lost nothing is lost, health is lost something is lost, but when morality lost, everything is lost.
Health is all that matters! Money can be made back, and only buys temporary things.
Nice post Mr @jerrybanfield
wow awesome post @jerrybanfield
Only the educated will thrive... and our society crushes education / nuff said
@clumsysilverdad thank you very much for being one of the first to comment and for including me as one of your 26 witness votes at https://steemit.com/~witnesses because your vote is helping to indefinitely raise more funding for projects intended to grow our community here via @budgets!
As someone who also works in this environment, I must say I agree. This system needs to have another approach, one where prevention is the most important matter. Often the doctors are teached how to deal with a person that has a disease, but dedicate little to no time in helping them to avoid that people gets sick. And this has many benefits, from wherever point of view you see it.
It has the obvious benefits for the person who doesn't have to suffer an illness that could deteriorate their quality of life. And we all know that being healthy helps you to be more focused and productive. Also, as you already mentioned, it helps them to save money that in the case of chronic diseases or grave illness, could be a great amount of it. Besides, there are places where the access to medicaments it's very unequal and they have to resort to unusual ways to access to them or when it's very difficult, they don't purchase them at all. And in some cases, this is the reason of why some illness become chronic.
Nonetheless, the Health System could take advantage of this, too. I'm going to give my opinion based in how is it in my country (Venezuela), where at the moment, we're struggling to be able to assist the amount of people that visits the medical centers day by day. If we would focus more in promoting healthy life styles and regular visits to the doctors, the amount of emergencies would be lesser and the way the doctors could take care of them would definitely be more efficient.
It's a win-win situation, even when I'm sure some pharmaceutical companies would not agree with me. Anyway, I believe prevention is the future of medicine.
Thanks for sharing!
@hayleeng thank you very much for your long comment, your upvote and following me today because this motivates me to make more videos and posts like this one.
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Of course, I'll do it right away!