Science vs Tech in Health plus the Inevitability of Death

00:18 Hello and welcome back. I'm Logan Christopher and we'll be doing another solo episode going over some of the points on the health sovereign creed today. We're getting down near the wire to the end of this if you haven't already, just to remind her that you can find the full creed, all 16 points available at health sovereign dotcom point number 11 I will strive to understand the difference between what is scientific for health versus what is simply technological. That the highest tech interventions are not necessarily the healthiest as shown by science. This touches once again on that concept of intervention and in general, I'd say the higher-tech intervention, the bigger of an intervention it actually is. This is probably one of the harder points to understand and it took a while for me to really wrap my own mind around this concept. I first wrote about it on the lost empire herbs blog maybe a year or so ago.

01:22 Maybe a little bit longer than that, but it's a very important one. So we tend to confound the ideas of science and technology and there are reasons we do this, right? So what is the difference between these? Science essentially produces technology. Technology is a byproduct of science, especially around engineering and design and all of those different things. But when I'm talking about science in this sense, specifically the health sciences, what is scientifically proven or has evidence for something being healthier for ourselves, that is a different thing than what is simply done using technology. So I'll use a very ridiculous example to prove this point. Think of eating some sort of natural food. Let's say an Apple. Okay. That is something produced by nature. Human technology doesn't really touch that. It can with pesticides and all kinds of things. But in general you can find an Apple tree, you can pick it straight from nature.

02:31 We can take a piece of technology, let's say a computer and a human could eat a computer. No one does this. But just as, once again a ridiculous example, eating a computer, just because technology is involved does not make this healthy. So now let's actually go to real-life examples because I know no one is trying to eat a computer. One of the over interventions of technology that we mentioned in the last episode is that of birth. I got some stats prepared for you here. So the USA is 61st in birth results and outcome. So the number of people dying or having tragic problems, 61st out of all the countries in the world, and this is from 2015, save the children’s state of the world's mothers report 61st of all, countries everywhere. And it is the worst of every industrialized country. Why is this?

03:33 Because of the overuse of technology. So that is one example. Here's another one. This was from a 2013 report saying that it was somewhere between 210,000 people and 400,000 people deaths coming from Western medicine itself. A different report titled death by medicine calculated 783,936 deaths from medicine, and this is properly practiced medicine, so not even overdosing or leaving a tool in a person in a surgery. This is the proper use of that with that number, and obviously we're seeing quite a range here from like 200,000 up to almost 800,000 but that last number would make it the number one leading cause of death. I think that maybe overblown. It's a hard thing to actually get to the, what is the real numbers in this area, but regardless of what the actual number is, we can see that Western medicine kills a lot of people.

04:39 Of course, they're trying to save people and in some cases accidents happen and whatnot. So we would expect this to be up there to some degree, but if properly prescribed medication kills a lot of people, if properly done surgery kills a lot of people, we need to recognize this and this is where the use of technology may be overplayed in some cases. Back in 1978, the US Office of Technological Assessment stated only 10 to 20% of all procedures currently used in medical practice have been shown to be efficacious by controlled trial. 10 had 20% one out of 10 or at best one out of five are shown to be efficacious. So this is the difference. We create technology, some sort of process or engineer some sort of device or patent medicine and then put it out there. And so few of these are actually shown scientifically to be efficacious to be a good idea worth doing.

05:46 We talked about placebo surgeries, very few of those are actually researched to be shown that they work, understand that medicines, pharmaceutical medicines have to go through a process. But as we'll cover in future episodes, understanding how trials can be misrepresented, it doesn't come down to statistical manipulation because that can be found out pretty easy. But how you set up a trial or what is known as the kind of the file drawer effect, not publishing those results, that sole negative and just getting lucky in one case and using that to publish results. So just because it's technology does not mean that it is scientifically validated for being healthy. What kind of kicked this off some of this, I know was pregnancy. I was talking to my wife about her pregnancy and my wife was mentioning some things around the use of hypnosis or working with a midwife rather than the hospital.

06:44 And this person kind of shut down and said, you know, I want science. The thing is the science is showing that midwives tend to have better outcomes if you're not in a high-risk pregnancy. There are cases for use of technology and interventions as we've discussed, but using something like that or using hypnosis, you get better outcomes. Scientifically it is validated, it's just not technological. The confounding of these two ideas is where we run into trouble. So more examples. I think x-rays are a good example of this. So did you know that after they developed x-ray technology, they would then have it in all kinds of different places? So this was a technological advancement, but is it scientifically validated for health? It has it to use and we use that for like broken bones. And things, but how many people are aware of the risks?

07:39 I mean if you go in for that, you recognize that the doctors, the nurses, the technicians are hiding behind concrete walls, wearing lead shields and everything. In order to not get radiation from this and yet there you are getting zapped by x-rays. I actually had this happen recently, a little over a year ago or about a year ago. Unfortunately, I broke my daughter's leg in setting up a swing incorrectly and it seemed like there was a break. She kept on screaming, had some problems and then you know before one year of age she couldn't communicate what was going on. So took her in, we did get an X-Ray and I'm holding her while wearing this led shield but then just holding this very tiny baby getting an x-ray and then it sucks cause a little bit later I'm reading some research saying just how damaging x-rays can be and cause cancer. And here's the thing about it, it doesn't cause a problem right then and there.

08:33 We don't see the short term negative consequences of such, but cancer may be caused that develops 10 years, 20 years, 30 years down the line, the devastating longer-term effects that we're not noticing from our technology, but so I'd say, you know, benefit-cost analysis or risk analysis in that. Then we got her in a cast and she healed up normally though, that's interesting to think about. Yeah, the cast is there to support, but the human body naturally does the healing process. There was nothing that could be done, no technical intervention that would actually really help things out. Sure. We supported her with good nutrition and all that, but surgery would not have helped the process become any better. That's not to say that there are not certain breaks of bones where surgery may be required because that certainly is there anyway. X-Rays, they used to be used at fairs.

09:28 You know, just as a fun, exciting thing that used to be found in shoe shops. You would get a shoe-fitting fluoroscope in order to look at your feet to get the right pair of shoes for you. This happened, all kinds of shoe shops everywhere in the USA, probably elsewhere in the world for many, many, many, many years. Then they recognized it was causing cancer and that just kind of silently disappeared. Going back in history as a good way to understand these kinds of concepts that our science, our technology, our understanding of health is ridiculous. We are wrong on 50% of things and all times it's just we do not know what 50% of things actually is, which is why I like to go back to natural principles and on that note, I have this quote from [inaudible] seem to live. The guy we talked about with antifragility also in that same book, but this is probably my favorite quote of the whole book.

10:30 Here it is. If there is something in nature you don't understand, odds are it makes sense in a deeper way that is beyond your understanding. So there is a logic to natural things that as much superior to our own just as there is a dichotomy in law, innocent until proven guilty as opposed to guilty until proven innocent. Let me express my rule as follows. What mother nature does is rigorous until proven otherwise. What humans and science do is flawed until proven otherwise, nothing on the planet can be as close to statistically significant as nature. Ooh, I love that. So much science is guilty until proven otherwise what humans do because we're arrogant, we have ideas, we can make the technology and let's just apply it. Once again, generally only looking at the short term things, it's really hard to look at longer-term things to do.

11:26 A study of the lifetime effects of something would take a lifetime to do and not dimension cost countless amounts of money to do so. Meanwhile, nature elevates statistically significant. I mean that's what we're looking for in all of our science and research and placebo-controlled studies that some sort of intervention is statistically significant, more so than the placebo and it is statistically significant because it has evolved in nature. It doesn't matter if you believe in the whole random mutation idea or you believe God designed us if it has come up through nature. To this point, it has been working in that sort of way. So the birthing process, yes, it has problems. There are trade-offs I guess, and developing our brain size and that skull being able to fit through the woman's pelvic area difficulties there that is causing some problems in childbirth, but we over intervene.

12:24 We disrupt that process. We don't necessarily see the effects of that for a long time to come. The rule of thumb, the principle that goes back to if it's been done in nature if it's been done for thousands of years, chances are it's pretty solid. We just may not know why as a really important thing to wrap your mind around. There's plenty of other examples. I mean I've talked about antibiotics a number of times. Technological intervention. This was a triumph of reductionist science and then we overuse them so they had a proper place of us using them, of overcoming nature in this way, but then our overuse of them having issues in doing that. So technologically it's an advancement scientifically, should you be using antibiotics at all if you are in good health for the most part, should you be using them for minor Colts? What is the proper place of antibiotics?

13:20 I was thinking about this. I don't think I discussed it. Antibiotics should be used in cases of life and death and I'd say catastrophe, so very big issues. Just having a minor cold, which has probably viral, not even bacteria in the first place, and an ear infection, probably not the best use of antibiotics, not worth it for the health consequences that come and this is being shown scientifically. The longer-term effects to your health, those ear infections are gonna come back. You're going to have other issues down the line because of the use of antibiotics. So life and death and catastrophe, that is where antibiotics should be used. They should not be used in other cases. That is my opinion and that is one that I think is best backed up by science where you can look at what some things they did around food.

14:10 So there's actually a scientific side. They aim to remove all the fats from food and replace it with trans fat. This was where the idea was getting coalesce, that fat was bad, specifically saturated fat was bad. So let's pull that out. Let's replace it with this technologically made partially hydrogenated fat and see the health outcomes of this from the point of science. This can make sense in that man. Let's see what happens with this and from the point of arrogance or like let's do something better than nature has done. But if you go back to that principle, that rule of thumb of following nature because she is statistically significant, then we wouldn't have even done this experiment in the first place because the answer is obvious. So I hope you get this point. A really important one, the difference between what is scientific for health and what is technological for health.

15:06 Countless other examples can be found and we'll probably talk about those some other time, but let's move on to the next point. This is an interesting one. Point number 12 I will come to terms with the inevitability of death for myself and my loved ones. I understand that this will help avoid the fear-induced pushing of unnecessary interventions, allowing for greater connection instead of denial. Ooh, yes, that's a fun topic. Right? So, especially in the West, we have quite an odd relationship to death in that we deny it. That's really what it comes down to. I mean like every one of us, you asked like you denied death happened, nothing like that, but we just try to push it out of our minds completely. One of the ways in which we see this is that, have you seen a dead body before? A human dead body?

16:05 The first human dead body I ever saw was my own mother and this was when I was 24 years old. For one, I don't think your own is probably the best first dead body you should see. Of course, it may happen in certain circumstances you can't get around that, but at 24 years of age, I've never seen death like this. Sure. I'd seen it in animals in some other places, seen it on TV plenty of times, but that's certainly a disassociated observer view, so we hide death. Even then, because I was not up on this stuff so quickly, the people came and took her body away, didn't recognize that you could actually like keep it low there. It's not to start stinking immediately. That's a false assumption. Many people have contrast this. A few years ago my grandfather-in-law passed away and it was nice like the whole family was there and got into like see 'him off.

17:01 Yeah. It was just much better death I would say, than what occurred with my mom and not that I was really involved in decisions there, but it's, you got just so interesting to see how we tried to not think of death at all and really from all kinds of religions to our technological religion. I mean, people are striving to become a mortal by uploading themselves to the cloud because they do not want it to die. Oh. If we go back to nature, things die. Everything dies. Every living being dies, even the earth will likely die at some point. Our solar system, the whole universe will possibly die out. Death seems to be a part of life that we can not get around. So, yeah, I'm not very optimistic about these immortality projects, although it is, we're striving for greater longevity and more importantly, the healthiness during the time of whatever years you have here, we need to recognize we're all going to die and face that there are the Latin words Momento Mori, which is basically, remember you are going to die.

18:07 That's very important and as that thing to meditate on, to reflect on your own death that you will pass. And I forget where I heard this the other day, but I thought it was so beautiful, not only to think of your own death but think of the last moment, the last time anyone will remember. You let that sink in for a little bit. I suppose if you have a huge impact on the human species, you could go on and on and on for the length of our species. That's possible. Who knows what the future holds. But if you're just an average person who will be the last person to remember you, your children, your grandchildren, friends, and family. What is the last thought about you to occur? We can memorialize ourselves in books and videos and all kinds of things. But yeah, how long will those last?

19:01 Certainly some interesting things to think about to contemplate, to meditate on. So he strives to avoid death and really the whole Western culture is so focused on youth and this has some bad effects just in, you know, hiding our elderly people away in old folks' home and retirement homes, but also just praising youth looking beauty, plastic surgery, all these things that come with that to not face death at all. And we can see there are some other negative consequences. Just looking at our healthcare system, a large amount of money, whether this insurance or other forms. A lot of the effort and energy and time are for people. In the last year of life, just poking around, I saw some different studies once I had a quarter of Medicare spending was on healthcare in the last year of life. In some other studies, more recent ones have lower estimates and that one of them says 13% which is still significant.

20:01 You think we have this entire lifespan, but 13% for that last year. And I'm not saying people should not be spending money in order to try to not die, but if we had a good culture around death, good ideas around death actually embraced it as part of life. Then as I said there we could stop this fear-induced pushing of death whether from the person you see. I think there are choices people should be making, especially at the end of life when they are not ready to die and when they are ready to die to fully embrace that and we can see things around psychedelic use that study with silicide mushrooms showing that one dose with them, I believe it was reduced end of life anxiety significantly. That's pretty cool stuff and I would say that psychedelic use, especially larger doses are some of the craziest stuff like five MEO DMT.

20:53 You will face your own death, you will feel like you are dying, your ego can be obliterated and in many cultures, this is part of the medicine, this experience of death and dying and then even being reborn after that. I think that's one of the great uses of such medicines. Once again, a warning caveat made sure you're psychologically healthy going into using these because as a powerful tool they can have some powerful negative side effects as well in certain people. But I would say that is certainly my experience. I have done some large dosages of different things. I have thought I was dying. I would recommend definitely having proper people around you because that is not a fun thing to face alone, play with fire and you will get burned. But even in hindsight, those at the time, negative experiences, I look back positively because this has helped to lessen any anxiety and fear of dying.

21:52 It's not that I want to die, it's not that I'm looking forward to that. I'm having quite a bit of fun in this life. I love sharing things such as this with you, but that doesn't mean that I have to go through life, afraid of death and looking to spend every last penny of mine in order to avoid it. So once again, this point talks about the unnecessary interventions. At what point should a person except should a person's family except family and friends, because often they are making decisions at this point. If we all have a good relationship to death, then yeah, we can possibly avoid wasteful spending. Not that someone's life is not more important than any amount of money, right? But recognizing that proper place of death that some that we in the West overall suck at. So that is why that is included in here.

22:44 And I say that this allows for greater connection, I guess personal beliefs, I think we go on, that doesn't just end and this definitely doesn't seem to be informed by my psychedelic experiences. But so much else. I mean we can talk about research around reincarnation or mediumship, how there actually is solid research around these subjects. So we can pick silence to some degree into the mysteries, right? But there are signs for anything you want to believe. So it comes down to what you want to believe in the first place, I think. But if we have this belief, then once again, that makes it a little easier. Recognizing that life here is just one phase of who knows what else goes on afterward, but I think that can all help. Wrapping our mind around this, having some experiences, some practices of dying and if we look at indigenous peoples, often initiations, whether using psychedelic drugs or not, various other forms, there is this understanding of death.

23:46 That part of this cycle and that death then leads to earth again leads to new life. So even when I die, the kind of, I would like to have a natural burial. I'd want my body just buried in the ground so that I can feed the bacteria, the insects, the fungi, and given new life, I've eaten all this life throughout my lifetime. Whether this is plant or animal origin, isn't it time that I give back to that cycle? So that is how I would personally like to be buried. I think it's an interesting idea that is actually harder to do. Then cremations and coffins and all the other stuff. We have muzzle OEMs just go back into the cycle. That's my personal viewpoint there. So we got four points left and more interviews to come. I hope you've been enjoying what we have covered so far, so much more, so many guests in the lineup. So many fun talks we'll be going into. Thank you for listening. We'll be back again next week as always, and once again, leave a review on iTunes. Super simple to do. Actually, I was surprised how easy this was. If you have the Apple podcasts app, I'm not sure about other players and whatnot, but all you have to do is click into the podcast hell and you're listening to it and click five stars. Super simple there. Then if you want to write some words, that is amazing as well. Thank you so much. We'll be back again next week.