Unhealthy Americans

Jeffrey St.Clair at Counterpunch reports:

over the last 40 years, even as our society has become increasing medicalized, the populace has become less and less healthy. We are fatter, more sluggish, more dependent on prescribed drugs to make it through the workday. At a time when more than half of the population of the planet is suffering from malnourishment, more than two-thirds of Americans are considered obese.

America has steadily become a nation of hypochondriacs, filling the voids of contemporary life with prescribed drugs for imaginary illnesses. With direct market of prescribed drugs, the pharmaceutical companies are literally manufacturing diseases, such as restless leg syndrome, attention deficit disorder and sexual dysfunction. There’s billions to be made in disease mongering, and the medical establishment, from Eli Lilly to the country doctor, is quite willing to play along. The drug industry knows how to prime the pump. They keep personality profiles on nearly doctor in the country, charting their prescription writing habits. They target the “heavy hitters” with new drugs, pay them to prescribe “free samples,” reward the script-happy docs with trips to the Bahamas.

The high-tech machinery of the medical industry is designed for early detection of diseases, but these costly technologies are just as likely to force patients into treatments, biopsies and surgeries for non-existent conditions. One study suggests that between 30 and 40 percent of CAT scans and urinalysis exams are unnecessary, leading to unnecessary biopsies and other invasive, and dangerous, procedures.

If you don’t have a disease when you enter the hospital, you just might before you check out—that is if you check out. Hospitals are some of the most dangerous places in America. Each year two million Americans contract infections inside hospitals, resulting in more than 90,000 deaths. But it’s not just the patients who are at risk. Hospitals generate huge amounts of toxic waste. A typical hospital bed produces up to 45 pounds of waste each day and that’s not counting the toxic and radioactive waste, slushed into sewers or belched into the air from medical waste incinerators.