RESULTS AND CLINICAL OUTCOMES

The following breath-taking improvements in clinical measures have been recorded.

And whacko, all this from an impressive 6.5% of Australian general practices. One giant step for mankind!

USEFUL LINKS - USUAL SUSPECTS

You'll know the character of an organisation by the company it keeps. Here's the company the NPCC keeps.

▪ National Heart Foundation

▪ Australian Divisions of General Practice
▪ National Prescribing Service
▪ Royal Australian College of General Practitioners
▪ Stroke Foundation
▪ Australian Consumer Health Forum
▪ Pub Med (sounds interesting!)
▪ The John Curtin School of Medical Research 

By clicking on the NPCC useful links hyperlink it won't take you long to work out that it's a program driven by the usual suspects, the cozy medical cabal, ideologically locked into the selective evidence, symptom masking, pharmaceutical based, dependence generating, dualist, reductionist, blank cheque, junk medical view of the world.

More of the same old; here are the links to the expert panels

-  Heart dysfunction

-  Pancreatic dysfunction

-  Access

SOME COLLABORATION!  SOME QUALITY!  SOME CARE!

So who is this collaboration between? Well, based on the evidence you'd have to say it was between the medical industry and the pharmaceutical industry.

It's not a collaboration it's a corroboree.

There's certainly no collaboration with the fitness industry; no results to say that people have improved their aerobic fitness, the key performance indicator for how healthy you are. (There aren't many GP's who'll down the stethoscope,  take their customers out the back and run them through the 20m run test of aerobic fitness.)

If doctors aren't measuring aerobic fitness they're falling down on the job. I know they think it's beneath their dignity but unlike pathology and radiology they won't subcontract the work out to the experts.

There aren't any measures of how much weight people lost.

In fact there are no measures of anything that require some effort. 

There's no collaboration that includes naturopaths, counselors, life coaches or sporting associations. Not even dieticians.

And what did the taxpayers get for their $14m; a vapid set of results on how many more people are swilling down Aspros, Lipitor and Tenormin.

And what does the Government think about it? They think it's a great success and want to fork out $34m for another dose. The first three years of this project have ended up in tragedy. With history about to repeat itself, the next three years will see it end up as farce. (Hegel and Marx.) No-one is going to become fitter and healthier.

So what's the problem?

The drugs being used to stabilize blood sugar levels and blood pressure don't stimulate recuperative power.

We know that cardiac insufficiency isn't caused by a lack of aspirin, high blood pressure isn't caused by a lack of Tenormin, diabetes by a lack of Diabex or elevated cholesterol by a lack of Lipitor and yet this is medical best practice in the treatment of these four symptoms of body system dysfunctions. If this is the best practice treatment that comes at the end of a $14m collaboration program, you wouldn't want to be on the receiving end of worst practice.

You don't 'reduce lifestyle risk factors' and restore poor function to good without changing your lifestyle for the better.

Prescribing a drug to lower your blood pressure doesn't reduce lifestyle risk factors. All it does is lower blood pressure. It teaches people to become dependent on a taxpayer subsidized drug, (for life) instead of developing the exercise habit, or the relaxation habit, or the holiday habit, or the eat from the top of the Hourglass habit ...

Prescribing a drug is definitely not the same as prescribing the right amount of exercise It's the very antithesis of the objectives of the program which are to 'help maintain good health for those with chronic conditions'.

You don't change poor health to good health with an Aspro.

'DOCTOR, DOCTOR GIVE ME THE NEWS'

The original meaning of the word 'doctor' was 'teacher'. What the results of the NPCC program show is that the word 'teacher' has been supplanted by the word 'prescriber'.

If the evidenced on the NPCC's website is any guide, patient education is at an all-time low.

(Except I did hear of one doctor who got all his customers out before work on a local oval that he'd marked out with circles. If you weren't in great shape you started walking around one of the inside circles. As you got fitter you moved further out and started shuffling and jogging. The wheel of life!)

3.  If it's not in MIMS it doesn't exist.

And based on current best practice you'll be holding your breath a long time waiting for the white coat therapists to collaborate with the tracksuit therapists.

This is what Benjamin Disraeli said 150 years ago:

'Two nations between whom there is no intercourse and no sympathy; who are as ignorant of each other's habits, thoughts and feelings as if they were the dwellers in different time zones, or inhabitants of different planets; are formed of a different breeding, are fed by a different food, are ordered by different manners, and are not governed by the same laws.'

He was speaking of the rich and the poor.

But he might well have been speaking about the medical profession and the fitness profession.
 

Typically, the advisory boards of the NPCC don't include fitness experts.

This points to the great failure of the NPCC program - an inability to educate doctors about how to prescribe and then administer lifestyle change rather than drugs. They've got the wrong people running it.

THE GREAT TRAGEDY

The pharmaceutical industry will love you to death.

Of course it's a nonsense, a medical legerdemain, and the NPCC is happy to perpetuate it

They're not interested in fitness. I asked them. The reply from their Executive Officer?

'I agree with much of what you are saying however unfortunately it is out of the scope for the Collaboratives Program. The DoHA (Department of Health and Aging) have tight guidelines around the program.'

Well that just about says it all doesn't it; they're not interested in lifestyle change - just masking symptoms, spewing out a few graphs and then patting themselves on the back.   They're not interested in changing the lifestyle that caused the dysfunction.   Leave that one in the too hard basket!

It's business as usual. Ignore and keep off the gravy train any of the healing professions with an ability to teach, guide, inspire, motivate, supervise and monitor lifestyle change.

JUNK MEDICINE

You've got to be very careful if the only route you take is the junk medical route. There are side effects? -  If you're on beta blockers you could end up fat, tired and depressed. How do you fix that? Swallow more Zenical, caffeine and Zoloft.

The beta blockers act as a governor on your heart rate and affect your ability to exercise with vigor.

If you take the cholesterol lowering drugs you may end up with muscle weakness or feeling dizzy - and the number of people who benefit from taking statins is a very small percentage of the people who take them, very small. Here's what John Abrahamson wrote in Overdosed America.

(Based on the Airforce/Texas Coronary Artherosclerosis Prevention Study - JAMA 279, 1998) One hundred people in this study would have to be treated with a statin drug for two and a half years to prevent a single episode of heart disease - and the other 99 people would not have derived any benefit.

So there you go. If you want to know more about the effectiveness and/or side effects of junk medicine spend an afternoon flicking through the Mercola website. Subscribe to the What Doctors Don't Tell You newsletter. Purchase a copy of Overdosed America and The Truth About Drug Companies.

The NPCC program encourages people to keep dragging themselves into surgeries and pharmacies instead of bouncing into fitness centres and diving into swimming pools.

It's a sit-down-cooped-up-in-a-cage program. Sit down at work all day. Sit down at home watching TV all night. Sit down in the waiting room reading magazines. Sit down in the surgery waiting for a prescription. Then do it all over again.

BOOM BOOM

And business is booming. The medical boom is putting the mining boom in the shade. Demand has been stimulated to the point where doctors and chemists are being run off their feet.

Want to know more about the NPCC program. Click here and you'll be directed to their mauve website.

SO WHAT CAN YOU DO?

The best thing you can do is look after your Self.

You reduce your lifestyle risks (and the risk of drug-induced side effects) by increasing your level of aerobic fitness, by eating wisely, by stimulating the relaxation response, by avoiding a toxic environment. You do something, you don't just sit there gulping down Aspros.

Click here and take the aerobic fitness test and see what sort of shape you're really in. When you can complete  35, 20m laps in 5 minutes report back.   When you can do 40 laps, you'll know you're in pretty good shape.   When you can get 45 laps you get to wear the fox hat.

The best I've seen in the work-place is 60 laps by CSIRO staff member, Stuart Doyle in 2000, and 55 laps by Australian Institute of Health and Welfare staff member, Heather Logie in 2006.

Or click here and complete the Metabolic Dysfunction profile. An honest appraisal will give you a very good idea of what sort of shape you're in.

Or instead of the Sickness Impact Profile, click here and see how you fare in the Health, Fitness and Wellbeing profile.

HOPE FOR THE BEST. No hope for the worst

I got this note from Lina a few of months ago.

Hi John

I did one of your courses at the Dogsville office and I had a particularly high rating of numbers.  The good news is that I've made several changes and have since been able to come off all medication for blood pressure and antidepressants. I am doing more aerobic activity in the form of spin and RPM classes at the gym and feel heaps better.

Along with a couple of the other participants we still do the stretches everyday and take the fibre stuff each day in our juice or cereals. You did make a difference to a few of our lives long term (which I think is where change counts).
 

So there you have it; no smoke, no mirrors, no drugs, just a change of attitude and a good aerobic fitness program; the complicated simplified, the expensive made cheap.

In the mean time stay tuned, highly tuned and the next time you hear the words 'evidence' and 'based' in the same breath, remember that all evidence is selective and some evidence is more selective than others.

Regards

John Miller

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