It's the eyeshadow that does it
Deepak Chopra is on the march again. Writing in a bizarre contribution to the Wall Street Journal, the New Age Guru and his friends had a few sage words for the incoming president on healthcare policy.
Arguing that the American healthcare system is far too geared toward cures, and not enough towards prevention, Chopra writes:
If we want to make affordable health care available to the 45 million Americans who do not have health insurance, then we need to address the fundamental causes of health and illness, and provide incentives for healthy ways of living rather than reimbursing only drugs and surgery.
So far, so surprisingly sensible. Chopra even rightly notes that emphasis on prevention of chronic diseases was at the heart of Obama’s healthcare plan.
But compare Obama’s list of preventable diseases to Chopra’s and suddenly everything starts to unravel. The former, while no medical expert, could be sure that any statement made during the campaign would be endlessly dissected by the medical community and the Republicans. The latter is under no such scrutiny and is free, unfortunately, to say just about anything - irrespective of its factual basis.
Obama lists “obesity, diabetes, heart disease, asthma and HIV/AIDS” as “[diseases] which can be delayed in onset if not prevented entirely.” The list is a sound one – in each case it has been proven that lifestyle changes can dramatically reduce the likelihood of occurrence.
Chopra is somewhat less discerning. He claims
Integrative medicine approaches such as plant-based diets, yoga, meditation and psychosocial support may stop or even reverse the progression of coronary heart disease, diabetes, hypertension, prostate cancer, obesity, hypercholesterolemia and other chronic conditions.
It’s difficult to know where to start, but let’s try his glib assertion that prostate cancer can be stopped or even reversed with correct use of “integrative medicine”. The idea that prostate cancer may be preventable is not a new one and the geographic disparities in occurrence (rates are much higher in the West than in Asia) do seem to suggest that lifestyle plays a role. But it is disingenuous and dangerous to pretend we know how to prevent it, to say nothing of prevention coming in the form of “plant-based diets, yoga, meditation and psychosocial support”. The idea that prostate cancer can be “reversed” or cured using any of these methods is completely baseless and insulting to men across the world battling against it.
Chopra goes on to shake his head in wonder at the ignorance of people who look to the scientific community for medical advances. He describes sadly how
Many people tend to think of breakthroughs in medicine as a new drug, laser or high-tech surgical procedure. They often have a hard time believing that the simple choices that we make in our lifestyle — what we eat, how we respond to stress, whether or not we smoke cigarettes, how much exercise we get, and the quality of our relationships and social support — can be as powerful as drugs and surgery. But they often are. And in many instances, they’re even more powerful.
The day that we concede that not smoking and eating properly are somehow the findings of “integrated medicine”, and not central tenets of a scientific understanding of health, is the day we should admit that Sir Isaac Newton’s prisms were actually intended as spirit crystals. It’s hardly a new revelation that if people were to live healthier lives they would be healthier. The question for the new administration and Health Secretary Daschle is how to get people across a broad spectrum of education and income to do it.
Working to convince large segments of the American people to change their lifestyle for the sake of their health is undoubtedly a worthy task. But it’s also a gargantuan one, which will require the careful coordination of health, education, labour and social policy. Somehow I doubt that Chopra’s suggestion that everything will be okay if only we have little more yoga is going to find its way onto the president’s desk.
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7 responses
Chopra and his buddies wrote that column because they want to get their piece of the pie. They say as much in the first few paragraphs, talking about the increases in health care spending.
The danger is that it really is possible to mandate preventative medicine. The Dems, especially guys like Rahm Emanuel, are looking at the military as a model for it: mandatory morning exercises, shut down some roads for running and biking, universal health care, weight control programs (including penalties if you’re overweight) and regular physical fitness tests. Emanuel has actually proposed setting up a civilian corps where kids would build their own barracks and do physical training every morning, all based off a military model.
And the reality is that it would work, and that’s part of the dangerous allure of such a scheme. People really would be healthier and since many people don’t really mind being told what to do they’d probably be happier overall. They could work it incrementally by starting with universal health care, then foisting mandatory exercise on kids (just an extension of what they already do at school), then finally on adults as well. A few people would cry out that it’s fascism, but everyone knows it can’t happen here.
you are wrong. There were studies done to successfuly stop progression of prostate cancers by changing diets.
Almost all studies analyzing links between prostate cancers and lifestyle indicate that the amount of dairy consumption is the best determinant of prostate cancer. Recently I read about a similar study of egg consumption. I do not remenber details but consumption of more than 7 eggs a week increased the probability of prostate cancer by around 50%.
paul- is there any actual medical evidence that eggs contain something that leads to cancer, other than the fact that there seems to be a statistical link? I read once that a ridiculously high number of all crimes were committed within 24 hours of the perpetrator consuming some sort of bread product. So should we follow the same logic in this case and conclude that bread=criminal behavior?
Obviously this is an extreme and ridiculous example, the fact remains that statistic trends do not equal proven facts.
This is nothing new with Chopra. I’m the widow of a man who died waiting for an organ transplant. A woman, in the transplant support group my husband attended, was reading one of Chopra’s books, because singer, Naomi Judd attributed her cure (she had a liver disease and needed a transplant) to Deepak Chopra’s treatment, rather than the course of injections that she’d taken. It was frightening how he had instilled such false hope in this woman, and goodness knows how many others. It makes one wonder about those who would grab on to such a hope and not take conventional treatments/therapies.
It would be foolish to refute that exercise, nutrition, relaxation and emotional wellbeing are factors contributory to health?
This is basically all he is putting across.
To diminish his message to “everything will be okay if only we have little more yoga” is not taking the article at face value, but rather, I suspect, using it to poorly reinforce a preconceived opinion of Chopra.
Ben -
You might want to read up on the health care system in Australia. We have (gasp! socialist!) universal health coverage, without your big-brother doomsday predictions of forced boot camps. And guess what? We’re ahead of the USA on OECD health and lifespan indicators.
For a site that claims to stick strictly to facts, it seems that you are widely exaggerating what Chopra is actually asserting.
His list, after all, is very similar to Obama’s, with the exception of prostate cancer. Admittedly that latter is an odd one, since it is not a major cause of death in the population.
When he says prevention is more powerful and beneficial to quality of life than drugs given after the fact, it is indeed a basic scientific observation, especially with conditions like obesity, CVD and diabetes. They are all incredibly preventable, and in large percentage of people, curable through nutrition and exercise. However this has not been give adequate attention by medical schools and their graduates, presumably because insurance does not reimburse much for the extra time spent on counseling on diet. So they rely on drugs that may be effective, but are not always safe and come with their own risks.
Thus, medical doctors and other practitioners who so spend time on the basics are dubbed “alternative” or “integrative”, because medicine in its conventional practice falsely reduces health to the treatment of symptoms using potent biochemicals.
So “integrative medicine” is not a different thing from good scientific practice. It is a rational, reasonable medicine based on a basic understanding of health and how the body works.
You give the impression of being a highly rational person, but I suspect you have your own set of irrational biases, just like everyone else.