I remember an astonishingly bright morning sky leaving the subway terminal in Pudong, China. As opposed to Nanpu by the Bund, here I could see the sun and even a semi-blue sky. In this part of Shanghai the streets were wider and the buildings shorter but it still took about ten minutes to walk past one aggressively wide building equivalent in length to a whole city block in San Francisco. I had another 30-minute walk to my work building even though it was only a few streets away.

Shanghai is FULL of bright lights, STUFF, food, noise, pollution, and people. For a year I traversed the city streets and tried to manage the barrage of information thrown at me from every angle. It wasn’t until years later that I could finally make sense of the changes I underwent mentally and physically and understood the impact that stress and pollutants had on my body. For example, just undergoing a change of any kind can be a stressor and put a strain on your adrenal gland and your adrenal gland uses vitamin C like how a car uses gasoline. I wish I knew then to take vitamin C to help balance out my adrenal gland and calm down my senses, but instead I continued to run on a near empty gas tank.

I was living and working in Shanghai, China as a finance analyst for a French-Chinese joint venture telecommunications company. As one would expect, I gained a lot of experience in that role being one of the only Americans on my floor and I also unexpectedly learned a different perspective on health and wellness. Nowadays we pay doctors when we get sick while in ancient China doctors were paid when patients were well and not paid when patients were sick. When I first heard this different business model for healthcare it didn’t make sense to me; why pay a doctor when you are healthy? Well, one reason for that may be to incentivize doctors to keep you healthy as opposed to being compensated for your illness.

The U.S. has a trillion-dollar market for doctors to continually heal people. In other words, people who are healthy and not currently purchasing prescription drugs or getting surgeries or buying other medical products and services are not contributing to the bottom line. Health professionals are paid more when there are more sick people. Having worked in corporate finance it is clear that ‘for-profit’ organizations truly do make decisions based on increasing their profitability and incentivize their employees to do the same.

I knew an orthodontist once who told me about ways his peers in the dental industry would falsely tell customers they had cavities simply to get the income for removing the cavity. Customers are in a vulnerable position, many times they have no way of confirming whether or not the dentist is telling the truth and hearing that this may be a common practice was extremely disheartening. I believe that quite a few dentists I have gone to have been straight-forward and honest with me but I feel confident in the importance of getting a second opinion before purchasing medical services like surgeries.

Misleading information from certain medical professionals looking to earn an extra buck isn’t the only way we can be fooled as paid advertising is also frequently used by organizations to generate a particular message on how we should approach health and wellness. A notorious example is the distribution of a food pyramid with grains as the major food group originating from recommendations of the U.S. Department of Agriculture in 1992 (1). The U.S. department of agriculture made more money from people buying grain products than the other food groups in the pyramid. Of course this organization would want to distribute this message to the masses, however, how was it adopted when we have a nation full of professionals schooled in topics of health and wellness? My opinion is that it has to do with a lack of corporate responsibility to separate conflicts of interest in the health industry. As consumers of health products we have a right to request information on how those products are made and to avoid products that are made with supply chain negligence, misleading R&D results, harmful ingredients, or other actions made to save a penny so that a dollar can be paid out as a bonus. We also need to support each other’s right to question the information we are receiving on health and wellness including the importance of nutrition made of organic substances.

References

1) Scott Solomons, D. (2014, April 08). What's wrong with the USDA Food Pyramid? Retrieved November 02, 2020, from https://drscottsolomons.com/nutrition/2014/4/8/whats-wrong-with-the-usda-food-pyramid

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