The story that you believe about the system that takes care of you shapes your destiny through the actions you take because of that belief. Is your Healthcare System actually just a Sickcare System?

The specific words we use to describe or address someone or something impact how we think about that person or thing. The word “healthcare” as it is practically used every day is dangerously flawed in that usage and should be correctly called “sickcare”. By correcting that error in word usage, you will automatically drive yourself to live a longer healthier life. What I will tell you today is for a small yet powerful shift at the root of a network of your thought processes with the potential to deliver incredibly wide and deep positive impacts. Read on to appreciate what I mean.

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Contents

Where’s the money, dude?
The 3 States
Puru’s Primary Message
1234Sickcare is not Healthcare
1234Healthcare is Healthcare
Is Puru being Ridiculous?
“This sounds extreme! Why raise this issue?”
A Thought Experiment for You
1234Part-1 – Simple Logic
1234Part-2 – Deception by Words
1234Deception beats Logic
Precision Matters with Words
Fighting Injustice
In Defence of the Sickcare System
Spanning both Healthcare and Sickcare
Actions Steps for You
1234Starting Within
12341234DAFER is not Health Insurance
1234Inner Circle
1234External Systems
12341234National Sickcare Systems
12341234Conflicting Interests
12341234Your Internal Technology
Parting Message

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Where’s the money dude? [top]

To start off, let us focus on a phrase that is approximately true:

There is no money in healthy people, there is no money in dead people, but there is money to be made from sick people.

I will return in a future article to “no money in healthy people” with warnings and good advice, but for now, hold on to the idea that most of the money is to be made from sick people.

The 3 States [top]

After birth, the final state that we all reach, “dead,” is a state we cannot get out of, nor can we avoid it indefinitely.

The other 2 states we move between are “healthy” and “sick”. We can think of them as being opposites of each other.

There is not much to debate about what “dead” means. On the other hand, “healthy” and “sick” are 2 distinct words to encompass the reality of a continuum between extremely healthy and extremely sick.

On the timeline too, we have a timestamp for birth and a timestamp for death, but timestamps for a continuum with 2 distinct labels (healthy/sick) are difficult to always pin down objectively and without debate. Who decides the exact moment that you are sick?

The debate is complicated by the fact that while “dead” means dead, the words “health” and “sickness” can have 4 dimensions: physical, mental, emotional, and spiritual. Within each of those dimensions are distinct measures e.g. you might have great physical health in terms of your nervous system but also be suffering from a disease of the blood. Or you might still be able to do mental arithmetic quickly but have a failing memory for what happened as recently as this morning. For most of today, to proceed towards the light that I want you to see, I will clump all these elements together and simply use the terms “health” and “sickness”.

Puru’s Primary Message [top]

Let us now focus on some literal truths.

Sickcare is not Healthcare [top]

Before today whenever you have come across or used the term “healthcare” it has, in your mind, encompassed what I correctly call “sickcare”. I firmly take the stance that the word “healthcare” is almost 100% incorrect in its widely accepted definition. If words are meant to mean what they are composed of, it is time for all of us to take the stance that I do. When a system takes care of the sick, we should call it sickcare. When a system takes care of the healthy, we must call it healthcare.

Thus, your diabetologist, cardiologist and endocrinologist do not work in healthcare – they work in the sickcare system.

Why am I making such a big deal of this? Read on…

Healthcare is Healthcare [top]

Having dealt with the term sickcare, we should agree that healthcare is what systems that maintain health and fitness deal with.

Your farmer who grows grains, legumes, fruits, vegetables, berries, and spices – she is a healthcare worker.

Your strength training instructor at the gym – she is a healthcare worker.

Your air conditioning technician who makes sure you get a good night’s sleep – she is a healthcare worker.

Is Puru being Ridiculous? [top]

Yes, I am being a little ridiculous and I do not automatically think of the person who soundproofs my room for sleep as being a healthcare worker. However, I can guarantee you that I do not think of your family doctor as being a healthcare worker. Even when speaking to them, I will refer to them as a medical professional or a sickcare worker, not a healthcare professional.

I do think your running coach is a healthcare professional. So is your dance teacher.

“This sounds extreme! Why raise this issue?” [top]

Although you might react that my stance is extreme, I disagree, because continuing to wrongly call a sickcare system a healthcare system is what is extreme! Let us reach a new and better normal with fewer errors in it. That is the first of two reasons for raising this issue – terminology that has been knowingly and unknowingly misused for the last 80 years.

This leads us to the second reason – a phenomenon that might, at first, appear subtle to you, until you realize that its implications are anything but subtle in terms of the continued impact at an individual and societal level. Let us understand it with a simple 2-part thought experiment.

A Thought Experiment for You [top]

There are 2 parts to this thought experiment: a “simple logic” part, and a “deception through words” part

Part-1 – Simple Logic [top]

If I asked you, “Would you like to be sick or healthy?” you would immediately answer, “Healthy!”

If you are healthy, and I asked you, “Do you want to be cruising in a healthy state and reduce the likelihood of reaching a sick state?” your immediate answer would be “Yes, of course. No one wants to be sick.”

Now, say I asked you to split your resources between 2 systems:

System H: prevents you from falling sick

System S: manages your symptoms when you are sick, to keep you alive with some chance that your body heals itself over time with the support it gets

In answering this “allocation of resources” question, I would like you to bear in mind 4 ideas:

• prevention is better than treatment in terms of lower pain and greater pleasure
• prevention is cheaper than treatment
• the more you prevent, the less you need to treat
• with a modest increase in the resources that go towards prevention, significantly fewer would be needed for treatment

Elementary logic would get you to quickly conclude that it would be prudent for you to increase the resources going to System H, the healthcare system that prevents sickness, which would automatically reduce the need for too many resources to go to System S. Society would be better off both financially and in terms of the pain and discomfort created by sickness.

Part-2 – Deception by Words [top]

Imagine an ecosystem containing 2 systems.

Let us assume now that you are told that the first system is called The Zero-Effort Healthcare System. In addition, you find out that it is a national system that is free – you do not even need to pay higher taxes for it. You are told everywhere that this is a system that takes care of your health. Let us even assume it has neither waiting lists nor long durations for meetings requested with a professional in that system. You will say “I want it, I want it, I want it!”

To this ecosystem, now I add a second system called The Moderate Effort System. Yes, as the name suggests, you need to make some effort. You will say, “Oh, effort?! Um…”

Now I ask you to choose, “Do you want the Moderate Effort System or the Zero-Effort Healthcare System?”

You choose the Zero-Effort Healthcare System because it sounds more attractive than a Moderate Effort System and they did tell you that it takes care of your health. Sounds logical, right?

Do you see the problem now? No?

I have not told you what the Zero-Effort Healthcare System actually does. Instead:

• I have told you that it is free
• and that included in its name is “Zero Effort”
• and told you that it has both “health” and “care” in its name
• and that every time that you hear about it, you are told that it takes care of your health

Do you see the problem now? No?

I have not told you the truth – that it is not a system that actually takes care of your health. Instead, it is a system that, for the most part, treats the symptoms of your disease, and does not cure them. Still very excited? Mind you, it does manage your sickness. It is what I call a sickcare system.

As you can imagine by now, the Moderate Effort System that I did not describe in detail is one that works to prevent disease – it requires moderate effort on your part.

You have, however, quite innocently, invested more of your personal resources into the Zero-Effort Healthcare System and fewer into the Moderate Effort Healthcare System.

This happened because you were deceived through the deliberate use of incorrect words to convey false ideas.

Deception beats Logic [top]

Did you see how Part-2 overrode Part-1? What has happened in countries around the world? Driven by corporate shareholder interests, a transfer of wealth continues to systems of sickcare that call themselves healthcare. Much like governments allowing cigarettes to be sold, or medical doctors refusing to learn that even a single drop of alcohol is above the safe limit for good health, we have the earnings of citizens going disproportionately towards sickcare rather than healthcare. Corporations can control you because you have poor mastery over the Unholy Trinity.

Precision Matters with Words [top]

Each time we express a thought or idea in written or spoken words, we must be as precise as possible to convey the correct meaning of that thought or idea. During rapid conversation, we will sometimes use an incorrect or imprecise word and correct ourselves while in the flow of that conversation. As words have precise meanings, if we keep using incorrect words, they will adversely impact our understanding of the world around us.

I am compressing a large topic into a few words here but the idea is straightforward. The incorrect models of the world that we build in our heads can lead us down paths of unfair, wrong, or harmful actions.

Fighting Injustice [top]

Using the word healthcare for what is, in truth, sickcare is a form of injustice – a combination of linguistic and public health injustice. As an analogy, consider the area of foreign policy. When a global superpower does not like a democratically elected government in a far-off country that it wants to control the resources of, it calls that democratically and fairly-elected government a “regime” rather than a “government” because the former word is a negative-sounding word while the latter suggests legal and moral correctness. The establishments of the superpower will refer to freedom fighters within puppet regimes as “terrorists”, and they will refer to the soldiers of the oppressive regime as “defence forces” rather than “extremists” or “terrorists” which are both words that might more correctly describe them. The repeated use of incorrect words helps drive a propaganda machine. The ordinary citizen is kept under control.

At this point it is worth pausing to acknowledge that “health” and “healthy” are positive and attractive words and “sick” and “sickness” are negative and unattractive words. It is natural for humans to favour systems that call themselves “healthcare” and want to stay away from systems that have the words “sickness” or “disease” in them.

(If you benefit financially from the sickcare system you may well love words like sickness and disease.)

In Defence of the Sickcare System [top]

Please note that, at this moment, I am not berating the sickcare system. It has a place in any society. I am merely pointing out that using the wrong terminology nudges us to allocate resources sub-optimally. The individuals who work within the sickcare system are trained professionals attempting to deliver what they believe to be the best they can deliver, given the constraints they face and the resources they have at their disposal. Every society needs this system. What society does not need is citizens living foolishly and ending up in the sickcare system. If every individual focused on what is true healthcare, the sickcare professionals would need to be fewer in number and have more time and resources to dedicate to those fewer fellow citizens who end up becoming sick despite making their best attempts to be healthy.

Spanning both Healthcare and Sickcare [top]

There are many professionals whose work spans both healthcare and sickcare. When you feel fine and healthy and go for routine blood tests, the phlebotomist (who draws blood) and the pathologist (who reports on the blood numbers) are healthcare professionals. When you go for your 6-monthly checkups to a dentist, they can report to you about your oral health along with any relevant guidance for preventing future problems. She is being a healthcare professional.

When you go to the dentist only because you have pain and problems, your dentist is having to take care of your sickness – she is now a sickcare professional. We are grateful that she can do that, and hopefully, you did try your best to take care of your oral health.

Approximately one-third of my work with my mentees revolves around reversing diseases they brought upon themselves through improper lifestyle choices before they signed up with me to improve their lives. This makes me a sickcare worker for part of the time. For the remaining time, I am a healthcare worker, empowering people by teaching them how to cruise in “very healthy” mode, far from the boundaries that when crossed would lead to a classification of “sick” or “diseased”.

Actions Steps for You [top]

Starting with yourself and moving outwards we can think about what your action steps should be for a better future.

Starting Within [top]

Because every effort to get a better set of results starts off as a set of thought processes, the first thing you can do is to begin to make the correct distinction in your thoughts between what is healthcare and what is sickcare. From those thoughts will follow appropriate words and effective actions.

You know very well that it is foolish to give up internal wealth to build up external wealth to be able to pay for sickcare to massage the symptoms of sickness you created on the path to accumulating that external wealth to pay for sickcare that could have been avoided. Exhausted at the end of that sentence? It is a very real and very common vicious cycle that I am suggesting you break out of. Make having good health as a way of life rather than sickness as some eventual state to fix. Have the mental clarity that healthcare is something you can do at every moment of the day and night. Failing to make this internal shift increases the likelihood that you will need sickcare one day. What worsens matters is that, once a disease hits you, the incorrect models floating around and getting hardwired in your head over many years make only the path of sickcare visible to you when you are diagnosed with a problem, instead of a path of disease reversal.

The sickcare system can be useful for you. Use it for accidents and emergencies, not for building and preserving health!

DAFER is not Health Insurance [top]

An example of a simple change you could make is to refrain from using the term “health insurance” as it is commonly used and, instead, refer to it as DAFER insurance – “disease and accident financial expense reduction insurance”. Why? Because that is what it is. You are not insured against disease – you are only eligible for financial help from the insurance company for your medical bills.

A correct example of health insurance would be 30 minutes of consciously exposing your skin to strong high-elevation sunlight around mid-afternoon on a regular basis. An insurance policy that reduces your hospital bill after a heart attack is not health insurance, it is DAFER insurance. Using a gym to get stronger and fitter is health insurance. Eating a bowl of fruits and berries is health insurance.

Paying daily premiums by investing in yourself is health insurance. Paying an annual premium to an insurance company to get an offset to medical bills is not health insurance. That insurance company does nothing to protect your health. In fact, did it ever strike you that your medical bills insurance company does not give a damn about you? It is not wise to equate a loss of health with a reduction in medical bills. Keep your health and your money! Common sense, right?

Inner Circle [top]

With your internal culture set up to demonstrate through your actions an appreciation of the vast differences between healthcare and sickcare, those around you, in your inner circle and beyond will also get nudged down better paths when they see you do what you do – and the high quality of life that you live.

External Systems [top]

What steps can you take to thrive within larger systems whose interests do not align well with yours?

National Sickcare Systems [top]

At a national level, it amuses me in a sad manner that citizens and policymakers debate how much taxpayers’ money goes into their sickcare system instead of debating about how much of that national budget should be invested in the prevention of disease i.e. a true healthcare system. You were smart enough to see in Part-1 of our Thought Experiment that at an individual level, we would like to invest more in a system that maintains health and thus need less for a system that does sickcare. So, it is morbidly funny to see “civilized” countries spending less than 5% of their sickcare budget on prevention i.e. efforts to keep the citizens healthy and away from sickness. As a result, the sickcare budgets are stretched when they need not be. And, yet, they call it a National Healthcare System! If they did spend more on health itself, rather than sickness, the lie would not be so painful for those who are paying for it twice – first, through hard-earned taxes and, again, through the pain and discomfort of disease and ill health. To make matters worse, in such over-burdened systems, the sickcare is often delayed and usually just a management of the symptoms rather than a root cause-based cure of the disease.

Conflicting Interests [top]

No matter which political party is in power in your country, you are unlikely to see a radical positive change of the kind I am suggesting. Your government is just the legal pretty face representing corporate interests. Whether it is the pharmaceutical industry, tobacco industry, alcohol industry or the junk food industry – they have your government in their pockets. Even the medical technology industry does not, for the most part, want to prevent disease, it wants to help you diagnose and manage the symptoms. And those employed by the sickcare system want your sickness even if their budgets are stretched. They do not want most of the country to become healthy and not reliant on them. No more than typewriter and fax machine manufacturers wanted technologies that wiped them out.

Your Internal Technology [top]

As you are unlikely to ever change the direction of government policy, you cannot do much to change the status quo out there. However, unlike the technologies of typewriters and fax machines being made redundant, you can have control over the most amazing technology that is inside you to prevent almost all diseases that might come your way. And if you do get sick or diagnosed with a disease, you have that same technology to get cured. All you must do is learn to use that technology and then make it a way of life. Do you want to use effective systems of science or do you want to be used by the sickcare system? Do you have the strength and courage to walk the path of healthcare or are you fearful and weak, thus making yourself a victim of the sickcare system?

Parting Message [top]

The words that you use in the stories that you tell yourself influence the part that you play in that ongoing saga. To be victorious every day rather than a prisoner in an ongoing war around you – you get to write the story and the part you play in it.

If everything you do is consistent with your core beliefs and desires, then a long and healthy life of joy is pretty much guaranteed to be yours. If you want to be guided in detail, you know how to reach me, and if you found this useful, please do share it with others.

Puru

Dr Purnendu Nath spends his waking hours focusing on helping individuals and organizations reach their goals, to make the world a better place. He speaks, writes and advises on topics such as finance, investment management, discipline, education, self-improvement, exercise, nutrition, health and fitness, leadership and parenting.