Fat Chance
Regular Authentic Medicine readers will know that whenever possible I oppose collective medicine, and if you’re tired of hearing about it, then I refer you to Bill Murray’s admonition to Harold Ramis in “Stripes”: “This was good for you, you needed this.”
Collective medicine sometimes accomplishes some good, but always, always causes harm, often out of proportion to whatever benefits were initially realized. If all of us agree that there should be some medical-social safety net, very, very few of us want there to be any actual accountability teeth keeping the compassion in check. Rampant in this faltering society, obesity has been encouraged by government food subsidies, SNAP/EBT, WIC, crony corporatism, maniacal self-harm in advertising, and overall sorriness. There is even a “Fat Con 2024,” celebrating the joys of insulin resistance, blown out knees, and blubbery sexual preferences. After a gluttonous holiday season (I just got off the elliptical, much needed) the cable channels are awash with commercials for Jenny Craig, Nutri-system, GOLO, and the Dance of the Biscuit Fairies hawking Jardiance.
Post-modern medicine has so badly betrayed its mission that nearly all primary care has descended to the level of one-to-one pill:complaint ratio as was brilliantly pointed out here last week, as any ER nurse trying to enter in the basket full of meds accompanying the average patient can so attest. I can’t think of a better rationale to formally surrender all primary care to pill peddling NP’s pretending to be doctors.
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Enter the flamethrower commentary of the brilliantly acerbic John Nolte, who is properly ripping the Big Pharma-Big Government-dumbass doctors cabal for pushing obesity, and its (non)solutions in an endless cycle of futility, all courtesy of the benighted taxpayer. “Currently, more ‘one in 10 Americans have type 2 diabetes, and upward of 100 million suffer from obesity.’ The obesity rate is even higher for Medicaid recipients. Oh, and 19 percent of Americans receive Medicaid.” Did you know that the taxpayer is now on the hook for BILLIONS in Ozempic et al purchases? Neither did I, but I’m sure neither of us are a bit surprised.
“What better way to increase government dependency than to commission the worlds of pop culture and the corporate media to lie to the public about obesity being beautiful and healthy and then offer government programs that reduce obesity…? Oh, and then the pharmaceutical companies that flood politicians with contributions and the pop culture/corporate media worlds with advertising dollars make billions and billions off the American taxpayer.”
Yep, just as they did with the statin racket (oooo, that’ll get me angry letters). And what was the universal conduit in all of this, the rate limiting step? Doctors. If we had not spent decades sliding into the corruption of fat acceptance/celebration, this would not have happened. But we didn’t want to hurt anyone’s feelings, piss off customers, get bad Press-Ganeys, and hey, we had mortgages to pay. But somewhere along the way, irritated reader, I submit to you that our ill-founded, self-deceiving compassion led to massive, utterly corrupt mechanisms that made the general population … sicker.
