Why most medical doctors can’t tell you how to reverse chronic illness with nutrition
One of the first – and LOGICAL – questions we need to tackle is, “Why hasn’t my doctor told me this?” The quick answer is because functional medicine relies heavily on nutrition and medical schools don’t offer a meaningful amount of nutrition training. Here’s a quick history of how this came to be.
During the Industrial Revolution, training for physicians, surgeons and apothecaries varied tremendously around the globe. Medical schools were especially ripe for the kind of standardization that was the specialty of industry titans like John D. Rockefeller and Andrew Carnegie. These men had amassed so much wealth that they were able to generously build schools, parks, libraries and hospitals.
Rockefeller began using byproducts of his Standard Oil business to manufacture drugs that could mask or stop symptoms. His wealth helped fund Abraham Flexner, who submitted a course-altering report to Congress in 1910. The report declared non drug based medicine to be unscientific quackery. It called for the standardization of medical education and asked that only allopathic (pharmaceutical drug) based schools be allowed to grant medical licenses in the US. Congress made it the law.
In 1913, Rockefeller joined forces with Andrew Carnegie. They used their tax-exempt organizations to offer huge grants to the best medical schools in America, but only under the conditions that they limit teaching to allopathic methods and that their agents would have a place on the Board of Directors.
My take from studying the heads of these families is that their primary intent was to bring greater science and professionalism to health care. However, they happened to mass-produce a medical system that doesn’t consider nutrition to be relevant to health.
Many doctors can’t offer nutrition advice because it’s not taught in medical school.
In a 2004 study, researchers from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill looked at nutrition training in all 126 medical schools accredited at the time. The study found some schools to provide as little as 2 hours of total nutrition training during the entire span of a medical education. Only 40 of the schools provided the minimum hours of training recommended by the National Academy of Sciences – and that was 19 years after the recommendations came out! In 2010, they polled 127 medical schools and provided an update. Shockingly, the number of schools meeting NAS minimums had actually dropped almost in half from 40 to 26!
The North Carolina researchers noted, “…most of the nutrition instruction that does occur in medical schools takes place during the preclinical years—the first two years of medical training. It may be more beneficial, however, to emphasize nutrition during the later clinical years, when the student can see the direct correlation between nutrition principles and medical treatment.”
Why don’t medical schools teach much about nutrition when it works so effectively?
Perhaps it’s because medical schools remain heavily funded by pharmaceutical companies.
NPR and Time Magazine have documented annual contributions to individual medical schools, like Harvard, surpassing $11.5 million, with 18% of the professors having financial links to drug companies. A study funded by the National Institutes of Health points out, “By 2003, about half of all funding for accredited continuing medical education programs came from commercial sources.” The report also found 80% of medical students surveyed believed they were entitled to gifts. I’m not judging. Also in the report: “Medical school graduates pay approximately 9 to 12 percent of their after-tax income after graduation for educational debt service.”
Nevertheless, industry funding of medical schools is a conflict of interest. Med school graduates emerge as gatekeeper experts on patented drugs. Their political, legal and professional system punishes consideration of any method that does not involve selling a pharmaceutical company product.
Natural food can’t be patented, so there’s little financial incentive to bring attention to its impressive efficacy against chronic conditions. Put another way, the greatest need of pharmaceutical and chemical companies is repeat customers. Reversing diseases with food is bad for business.
“The enemy of the healthcare system is not sickness. It’s healthy people.” – Cardiologist, Dr. William Davis, M.D.
Insurance Heavily Influences Doctors
The health insurance industry rose along with the allopathic system.
At the turn of the century, people didn’t go to hospitals for survivable illnesses. They were known as a place for the very poor to die. That’s a huge marketing problem if you’re a hospital.
Hospitals wanted to change their image and make more money, so they began to market themselves as a place to have babies and get checkups. They invested heavily in their facilities and prices rose rapidly. But there was a new problem. Economic historian Melissa Thomasson says the average American spent $5 a year on health care at the time (about $100 in today’s valuation). How would people afford a hospital visit?
Baylor University Hospital in Dallas decided to try a program to get people to spend a little money each month on pre-paid health care. An official from the hospital said, “We spend a dollar or so at a time for cosmetics and do not notice the high cost,” he said. “The ribbon-counter clerk can pay 50 cents, 75 cents or $1 a month, yet it would take about 20 years to set aside [money for] a large hospital bill.”
According to an NPR report, “Hospital officials started small, offering a deal to a group of public school teachers in Dallas. They offered a plan for the teachers to pay 50 cents each month in exchange for Baylor picking up the tab on hospital visits. When the Great Depression hit, almost every hospital in the country saw its patient load disappear. The Baylor idea became hugely popular. It eventually got a name: Blue Cross.”
Today, doctors are heavily influenced by what insurance will cover. Have gallstones? Surgery is almost always the answer because the doctor can bill $50,000 to the insurance company. The doc may actually only get reimbursed a fraction of that, but your co-pay percentage will be based on the amount they billed, not what insurance actually pays. Need 90 minutes with the doctor to figure out what diet habits produced the stones to begin with, or how to dissolve the stones naturally? Sorry. Insurance only covers up to about 15 minutes per patient.
When you visit a functional medicine doctor, expect to spend over an hour talking about medical history, diet and lifestyle. The extra time is not reimbursed by insurance, so patients have to absorb more of the cost.
Why would you be willing to pay more out of pocket? Because it matters whether the treatment works or not. Efficacy (effectiveness) matters.