Sick as, Australia
We’re wealthier than ever. But are we getting even more unwell?
Is the quality of our lives getting better or worse?
Yes, gains have been made in medicine, but somehow we don’t seem to be seeing this firsthand. In this blog I have broken down lots of information to see if we really are getting more unwell.
Some good news to start….
Overall life expectancy in Australia has been steadily increasing for years, and we are the world’s richest people.
The flip side of this
So that’s the good news. But there’s another side to this coin. How is our quality of life? Also, given that we richer than ever, shouldn’t our standards of health be higher than ever? Sadly, the figures I’ll show you next put on display the fact that in many key areas we are getting sicker.
Many of us are struggling mentally
According to the Australian Bureau of Statistics, in 2020-21, of the 19.6 million Australians aged 16-85 years:
Over two in five (43.7% or 8.6 million people) had experienced a mental disorder at some time in their life
One in five people (21.4% or 4.2 million people) had a 12-month mental disorder (that is, they had experienced a mental disorder at some time in their life and had sufficient symptoms of that disorder in the 12 months prior to the survey)
There were 4.4 million people (22.3%) who had experienced a mental disorder at some time in their life but did not have a 12-month mental disorder.
Mental disorders includes anxiety, bipolar and depression.
The Black Dog Institute states that:
“Depression has high lifetime prevalence - one in seven Australians will experience depression in their lifetime. Depression has the third highest burden of all diseases in Australia (13%) and also third globally. Burden of disease refers to the total impact of a disease measured by financial cost, mortality, morbidity and other indicators. It is often expressed as number of years of life lost due to ill-health, disability or early death.”
Remember that mental disorders have flow on effects
Take depression for example.
It’s important to note that depression, while an “intangible” ailment, has impacts on our physical wellbeing. As a New York Times article by Jane E Brody said, the mind and body is a two-way street.
It’s no surprise that when a person gets a diagnosis of heart disease, cancer or some other life-limiting or life-threatening physical ailment, they become anxious or depressed. But the reverse can also be true: Undue anxiety or depression can foster the development of a serious physical disease, and even impede the ability to withstand or recover from one. The potential consequences are particularly timely, as the ongoing stress and disruptions of the pandemic continue to take a toll on mental health.
The human organism does not recognize the medical profession’s artificial separation of mental and physical ills. Rather, mind and body form a two-way street. What happens inside a person’s head can have damaging effects throughout the body, as well as the other way around. An untreated mental illness can significantly increase the risk of becoming physically ill, and physical disorders may result in behaviors that make mental conditions worse.
In studies that tracked how patients with breast cancer fared, for example, Dr. David Spiegel and his colleagues at Stanford University School of Medicine showed decades ago that women whose depression was easing lived longer than those whose depression was getting worse. His research and other studies have clearly shown that “the brain is intimately connected to the body and the body to the brain,” Dr. Spiegel said in an interview. “The body tends to react to mental stress as if it was a physical stress.”
Despite such evidence, he and other experts say, chronic emotional distress is too often overlooked by doctors. Commonly, a physician will prescribe a therapy for physical ailments like heart disease or diabetes, only to wonder why some patients get worse instead of better.
Antibiotics are still being over-prescribed
According to The Fourth Australian report on antimicrobial use and resistance in human health (AURA 2021), released by the Australian Commission on Safety and Quality in Health Care (the Commission), there is an ongoing public health and safety threat posed by antimicrobial resistance.
The report says:
“The most comprehensive report produced on Australian antimicrobial use and resistance trends to date has found that while antimicrobial use in the community is decreasing, overprescribing and inappropriate prescribing continues to be a problem. Antimicrobial resistance to commonly prescribed antibiotics remains an ongoing threat. Antimicrobial resistance is driven by the overuse and misuse of antimicrobials (including antibiotics). It is projected that, between 2015 and 2050, more than 10,000 Australians will die as a result of antimicrobial resistance.”
The point that people forget about antibiotics is that as well as killing the bad bacteria in your body they also kill the good. This means the more often they are prescribed, without replenishing the balance of good gut bacteria, the more you will continue to get sicker. Antibiotics should be there as a last resort for minor infections but unfortunately they are now the immediate “go-to” solution. If we learn how to give our bodies the nutrients they need, our body will fight infections for us without us knowing much about it.
Misuse of pharmaceuticals
According to the Australian Institute of Health and Welfare, results from the 2016 National Drug Strategy Household Survey (NDSHS) showed that about 1 million Australians (4.8%) aged 14 years or older misused a pharmaceutical drug (excluding non-opioid over-the-counter medicines) in the previous 12 months. The institute stated:
“In 2013, recent non-medical use of pharmaceuticals was 4.7%, having increased steadily from 3.7% in 2007.
The non-medical use of pharmaceuticals in 2016 was higher than all other illicit drugs, except cannabis (10.4%). Pharmaceuticals most commonly used for non-medical purposes were opioid analgesics and benzodiazepines. Recent non-medical use occurred more often than for most other illicit drugs, with 28% of people who misused them doing so daily or weekly.”
Why don't we try to get to the cause of the problem instead of masking it with drugs? The answer is that the more drug dependent people there are in the world the more money that can be made off them. When we heal people there can be no money made from them because they don’t need drugs.
Autoimmune diseases
According to a report in The Guardian, more people around the world are suffering because their immune systems “can no longer tell the difference between healthy cells and invading micro-organisms” meaning “disease defences that once protected them are instead attacking their tissue and organs”.
According to the article:
Major international research efforts are being made to fight this trend – including an initiative at London’s Francis Crick Institute, where two world experts, James Lee and Carola Vinuesa, have set up separate research groups to help pinpoint the precise causes of autoimmune disease, as these conditions are known.
“Numbers of autoimmune cases began to increase about 40 years ago in the west,” Lee told the Observer. “However, we are now seeing some emerge in countries that never had such diseases before.
For example, the biggest recent increase in inflammatory bowel disease cases has been in the Middle East and east Asia. Before that they had hardly seen the disease.”
Autoimmune diseases range from type 1 diabetes to rheumatoid arthritis, inflammatory bowel disease and multiple sclerosis. In each case, the immune system gets its wires crossed and turns on healthy tissue instead of infectious agents.
It would be wise to look at what the big changes have been over the years to understand why autoimmune diseases seem to be skyrocketing. Is it diet? Is it environment? Is it stress? What else is new that we have implemented into our ecosystems to cause this change?
Overweight and obese numbers are increasing
The lines below show overweight/obese proportions in the adult population across states and territories. As you can see in the Australian Institute of Health and Welfare report, it’s a consistent increase. According to the institute, excess weight, especially obesity, is a major risk factor for cardiovascular disease, Type 2 diabetes, high blood pressure, sleep apnoea, psychological issues, some musculoskeletal conditions and some cancers.
What is frustrating to see is when people think they are eating healthy food because of the labeling on that food when in fact it is just as bad or worse than junk food. Because it has ‘healthy’ or ‘natural’ written on the packet they are just being led down a garden path to more fat gain. Why are we not being taught how to prepare meals in school so that when kids leave home they know how to put a nutrient dense meal together? I wonder how much could be changed in the world of obesity with some really simple guidelines to follow instead of all this conflicting information that just bamboozles people.
Does it grow in a tree or in the ground? Yes? Eat it.
Does it walk around in a paddock and eat grass? Yes? Eat it.
Is it made in a lab? No. Don’t eat it.
Let’s get back to basics.
Autism is on the increase
Rates of NDIS recipients show autism and “developmental delays” are increasing (or at least the level of diagnosis is increasing). The increases in autism that you are looking at below are quarter by quarter increases. I’m interested here in how this flows into discussions regarding diet, and the relationship between the gut and the brain when it comes to immunity.
Breast cancer is increasing
To understand these numbers below we need to know what has changed since 1982 and now.
What have we done?
What have we not done?
What are we doing differently?
Melanoma of the skin
A specific kind of skin cancer known as “melanoma of the skin” is increasing.
Suicide rates are higher in men than women
“… an average of about 9 deaths per day”
According to the Australian Institute of Health and Welfare, in 2021, there were 3,144 deaths by suicide – an average of about 9 deaths per day. The age standardised rate was 12.0 deaths per 100,000 population, which is down from 13.2 in 2017. Since 1907, the male age-standardised suicide rate has been consistently higher and more variable than the female rate. Variations in the overall suicide rate in Australia have been largely driven by changes in the male suicide rate.
Let's make it normal to ask friends and family how their mental fitness is tracking.
11 seconds before a GP cuts you off
Let me change tack a little here. Could these negative trends in the health industry be significantly changed if the medical industry listened better?
In my ebook Unpoisoned I talk about my experience of being ignored by medical professionals, and the problem of medication error has been called the submerged iceberg in health care systems in other western nations.
A 2018 study published in the Journal of General Internal Medicine found it took 11 seconds (median time) for a doctor to interrupt a patient, and stated that “clinicians often fail to elicit the patient’s agenda and, when they do, they interrupt the patient’s discourse”.
As reported by Forbes: “These interruptions came pretty quickly: a median of 11 seconds with a range of 3 seconds to 234 seconds. (3 seconds?!?) And most of the time (59%), the interruption wasn't something like "I see, tell me more" or "that must be hard for you" or "I really have to go pee" but instead a closed-ended question, that is, a question just seeking a "yes" or "no" response.”
In a 2023 interview in Australia, Professor David Newman-Toker, director of the Centre for Diagnostic Excellence at Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore, described his centre’s study that showed 795,000 Americans a year died or were permanently disabled after misdiagnosis.
When asked about doctors not listening, Professor Newman-Toker said: “We hear that routinely. In the diagnostic error community it's rare that we encounter a patient who has been misdiagnosed who doesn't say that exact thing; 'I was telling the doctor and they weren't listening.' And there is a big component of that that comes into play here where clinicians sometimes just don't want to hear or can't hear what the patients are saying to them, whether they're moving too quickly, or they've got their own conception of how the diagnosis should happen and they're not quite hearing what the patient has to say. It's definitely an issue that we hear about repeatedly.”
Conclusion
Overall, I think we can do better, but to do better we must think better.
There was a lot of grim information in that but the hope here is that things can change, and change for the better. Let's start to educate kids on real food, let's get back out in the garden growing our own foods , or purchasing directly from farmers. Let's get back to basics, stop overcomplicating it and heal ourselves back to health.
If your own health is not your responsibility then with whom does that responsibility lie..?
Take action…
Download Unpoisoned: How I escaped a medical industry that didn’t listen, went medication free, and how I help others do the same.
Get off the sickness merry-go-round. Start with a Wellness Map and consult. Chat to someone who’s been there and can help guide you back to health.