Addressing Systemic Dysfunction

At multiple levels

I just finished reading Casey Means’ book Good Energy.

Casey’s book addresses the American disease epidemic of systemic dysfunction happening at a cellular level.

Mitochondria are the microscopic engines that vitalize every cell in our bodies. A diet heavy in ultra-refined foods combined with various lifestyle factors means that something like 94% of Americans suffer from mitochondria that function sub-optimally. Over time, this metabolic dysfunction very often leads to a series of chronic diseases and eventually a shortened lifespan. Metabolic dysfunction has Americans becoming fatter, sicker, and dying younger with each passing decade.

I’d like to do a post on this issue at some point, but Casey’s book also speaks eloquently to systemic dysfunction at a much higher level: i.e., the American ‘health’care system.

Casey graduated at the top of her class from Stanford medical school. She then went into a five-year residency program to become a Nose and Throat Surgeon.

It was in her last year of that residency that Casey hit her limit. She was reaming bone and flesh out of a woman’s inflamed nasal passages. She knew this woman suffered from half a dozen chronic diseases all caused by inflammation and disrupted metabolism. She knew her patient was seeing half-a-dozen specialists who each, like her, were treating her symptoms without addressing the root cause.

Casey just couldn’t do it any more. She resigned from her surgical residency and began studying wholistic medicine, eventually opening a private practice.

Casey says the system demands that doctors bill as much as possible. Billing for active interventions - either surgery or prescribing pills - is where the money is, so that’s what doctors do. Doctors don’t learn about nutrition, and aren’t taught to look for root causes. (Investigating either would take way too much time, in any case!)

Casey doesn’t blame the doctors. She feels that an idealistic desire to save lives is what gets many young people to enter the profession. Then the system traps them into treating symptoms with pills or surgery, without ever treating root causes.

This mismatch between what they wanted to do, and what they end up doing, is often painful for doctors, so painful that roughly 400 American doctors kill themselves every year. (That’s the equivalent of the graduating class from four medical schools!)

Casey described how it was normal for her to do exhausting 36-hour shifts as a surgical resident - snatching bits of sleep when she could, living on cafeteria food.

There’s lots of research indicating that surgeons working such long shifts are much more likely to cut themselves during surgery, or slip with the knife and injure a patient on the operating table. There’s even clinical evidence that residents working such long shifts are twice as likely to get into a car accident on the way home from work. You would think that a healthcare system that actually cared about health would ban this barbaric practice. But they don’t. All the insanity you saw in the early seasons of Grey’s Anatomy is still going on!

What all this tells me is that you can’t leave something as important as your health to doctors, because they make money when you are sick, not when you are well.

Casey has got me thinking very differently about food.

We think of food as what fuels us with energy, but it’s much more than that. Every day, your body sheds about a pound in dead cells. Over a period of six months most of the cells in your body die and are replaced with new cells. You are literally not the same person now you were six months ago.

The new you that replaced the old you was built from the food you ate. If the building blocks you gave your body to make the new you were crap, you can hardly blame your body if the new you is a somewhat degraded version of the one from six months ago.

Though the whole field of nutrition is chock-a-block with conflicting information, what you eat is hugely important to your health. It’s worth finding out as much as you can, and taking your best guess at what to do, because your doctor isn’t going to do it for you, and they may well know less about nutrition than you do.

I will warn you that Casey’s book has a lot of whole lot of biochemistry in it. To my mind, it succeeds better as a polemic than as a self-help guide. It is well worth reading to understand better how important the energy systems inside each of your cells are to your wellbeing and vitality.

Casey also did an amazing interview with Tucker Carlson that I highly recommend; she is both eloquent and passionate.

I will try to write more about the causes of, and remedies for, metabolic dysfunction, once I have processed more of the information in Good Energy myself. Next week, touch wood.

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PS: Here’s an even higher level of dysfunction.

After a long legal battle, ICAN got the FDA to release the VAERS safety data for deaths caused by vaccines. Here it is:

All those little bars on the left are the total number of deaths that resulted from all vaccines given in each years. (We’re talking dozens of different vaccines, and sometimes tens of millions of doses for each.)

Now look at the huge red lines for 2021, 2022, and 2023. Those are virtually all deaths from the COVID vaccines - tens of thousands of them. There were more deaths from the COVID vaccines than from all other vaccines combined during the 34 years that VAERS has been collecting data. Yet the FDA saw nothing alarming about vaccines that were an order of magnitude more dangerous than any other vaccine on the market. (No wonder they tried to keep the data secret.) Now THAT is a truly stunning level of dysfunction!