Very useful considering that the medical industry is the one that loots you the most, and takes you the cleaners before making you better - actually, whether the butchers in white coats make you better at all is very debatable.
Even a routine visit to the doctor is no longer routine any more. They insist on taking your blood pressure every time (though it beats me what that has to do with a common cold), and will look for every excuse to prescribe some expensive diagnostic tests. There are diagnostic centers opening up on every street, they require a huge investment, and they need to recover their costs. In several cases, the doctors get up to 40% of the test charges as kickbacks, so their incentive to get you tested goes up manifold. Even if I had money to burn, I would not go in for the tests, because the tests will always throw up some things which may be considered "out of range". In most such cases the body is capable of correcting itself, especially if one follows a reasonably healthy lifestyle. By going in for unnecessary tests, you are likely to find non-existent problems, and be asked to drug yourself needlessly. In fact, I firmly believe that one should not go in for a "regular health check up". It's completely unnecessary, and will end up in things like your taking statins since your cholesterol is high or something - one of the many cases where the cure is worse than the disease. Lifestyle problems need to be corrected with lifestyle changes - and not with taking statins or something else. Talking of statins, that is a category of drug which the medical industry likes a lot - the kind of drug which needs to be taken by you for the rest of your life. Lovely, recurring stream of income for the drug companies.
Back to the visit to the doctor - if it happens to require a visit to the hospital, you are in for even bigger trouble. Hospitals require heavy capital expenditure to build, and the money has to be recovered from the patients, i.e., us. They even have a range of super-specialist doctors, one for each part and each orifice in the body. The moment you enter, you are put on the assembly line of diagnostic tests, interventions, and still more tests. If you happen to have insurance, the bills are going to be even higher. Again, I don't have so much of a problem with the higher bills, as much as with the needless extra intervention and drugging that goes on. I have never gone in for any kind of regular health check-up, and generally cross over to the other side of the road when I pass a hospital to be as far away from it as possible.
There is another conspiracy afoot in the entire medical industry - that of increasing the number of "diseases" or, in other words, of conditions that require medicine and medical intervention. They made depression into a disease, then all kinds of so-called mental disorders; the latest is that they are labelling obesity as a disease that needs drugs! All it needs is to take the patient off junk foods in most cases, but then, the food industry and the medical industry feed on each other, so the patient continues to gorge himself and become fatter, and then goes in for procedures like stapling the stomach!
And then, of course, there are the pharma companies. They need to grow their profits, so they will incentivise doctors to prescribe more of the expensive medicines. It is doubtful to start with whether a lot of these medicines are required in the first place. But then, who wants to question the doctors? We easily fall into the trap of consuming more and more medicines, which screws up our bodies more and more, requiring more and more visits to the doctor, culminating in more and more medicines - you get the picture... But then, if you are going to be like that only, at least you better be armed with all the information about the drug you are taking - and more important, know how to get the same drug cheaper. Which is where this site comes in.
Happy browsing!
PS: Two articles by Dr. B M Hegde that you may find interesting:
