Without question, the U.S. economy is heavily invested in disease. Retailers like Walgreens have mastered the art of selling products on both sides of the equation. At the front of the store, Walgreens sells junk food products, soft drinks, candy and a lot of food that really has no nutrition. At the back of the store, they sell prescription drugs — drugs that treat the symptoms of diseases that are ultimately caused by people’s poor dietary choices and their consumption of junk food. Walgreens has really mastered this. They will sell you the problem and the treatment, all in the same store. One reason Walgreens is so incredibly successful as a business is because it has mastered the art of selling products to consumers as part of the disease economy. It is a flagship company of the disease economy, perhaps even more so than pharmaceutical companies.
One of the funniest things about the disease economy is that the consumers who are diseased think they’re doing well because they own stocks in the companies selling the products that harm them. This fascinates me. A guy dying of cancer or suffering from heart disease, because of the products he has been consuming for years, believes he’s doing well because he owns stock in large food manufacturing companies or large pharmaceutical companies. Maybe he owns stock in a new medical technology, or maybe he’s a partner in a local medical clinic. His investments are doing great, but he’s dying, and he’s dying from preventable degenerative disease.
This is what’s happening across the country, not just to one person, but to millions of people — perhaps hundreds of millions — who think the economy is looking up and think that maybe they have a good job because they work for a pharmaceutical company. They think they have good investments now because they have stocks in the junk food manufacturers. They think they’re doing well financially, but guess what? They’re consuming the product themselves, and they are dying. They’re dying from a degenerative disease at a rate that has never before been witnessed in human history. This demonstrates my entire point: We cannot create abundance by selling each other increasingly expensive products and services that harm each other.
By the way, I don’t mean to leave out all those chemical companies manufacturing pesticides, herbicides, fungicides, toxic household cleaners and toxic personal care products. A lot of those skincare companies are really just chemical manufacturers with sexy marketing and lots of women in lab coats selling you products that actually harm your health; that literally contain ingredients that cause cancer and liver disease. People think our economy is booming, but we’re all dying of chronic disease. Why is it that 50 percent of our senior citizens in the United States have high blood pressure? Why is it that 40 percent of our senior citizens are now clinically obese? I’m willing to bet that a similar percentage may have nervous system disorders or early stages of dementia or Alzheimer’s disease. Most of them are probably metabolizing some form of cancer right now, even though it may not have been diagnosed yet.
The US is a nation of diseased individuals, and that disease starts very early. There are 12-year-old children who have atherosclerosis. There are teenagers with osteoporosis, and teenage children with obesity are now common. In fact, diabetes has gotten so bad in young people that they had to change the name. That used to be the name. Now they just have to call it diabesity, and that applies to children, teenagers and adults alike.
They have created so much disease in US, and based our economy on it to such a degree that, frankly, they cannot untangle this situation without causing economic distress. If there were a cure for cancer, diabetes or heart disease tomorrow, where a person could wave a magic wand and instantly eliminate those diseases, and if every person in the country did that tomorrow, the sobering truth is that the US national economy would collapse overnight. It would collapse because there’s so much money, so much real estate, so much education and so much expertise and research invested in disease that they could not financially survive in an economy based on health and abundance, at least not the way things are configured right now.
They could not economically survive in an economy based on real health. They are so invested in disease in the US that they truly have a disease economy, and in order for that economy to grow, they have to expand the number of people with disease, expand the definition of disease or expand the coverage of people who are treated with high-profit disease-masking products. All three of those things are happening right now. And guess what, the disease economy is spreading. Look around you and ask yourself how many Asian countries are following these trends.
Be well
Dr Sundardas