This post about questioning our healthcare providers and taking responsibility for our healthcare is by Douglas Mulhall who was our guest in episode 299 – video and audio.

In the interview with Kathleen and Peter that accompanies this blog, I describe some of the incredible advances that are being made in reversing the damage done by hidden stress, including how to restore the elastic fiber that drives every breath we take and every move we make, and how to reverse damage from exposure to the toxic metals that harm all of us. But this information will only be useful for you if you’re ready to do one thing: take charge of your own health and start asking awkward questions. This involves confronting a monster that resides in all of us – the hostage syndrome. This monster shows up every time we have to make a tough health decision.

We each face a dilemma: should we question our healthcare providers? This inner conflict comes from a strange hostage syndrome that is the main reason why millions of people walk hand-in-hand with their healthcare provider to the grave, while alternatives that their providers rejected or didn’t know about might have saved them.

Longevity

When I wrote Discovering the Nature of Longevity, I described this syndrome so that readers could learn what drives it. A few months after the book was published, I saw just how powerful that hostage syndrome.  Among the many people who told me they loved the book, it made total sense, and it opened their eyes to new alternatives, a few went on to ignore all that…. and had heart attacks within a few months. Even AFTER they’d had those heart attacks, they still failed to act on any of the tests or therapies described in the book.

This hostage syndrome continued when I did dozens of well-received interviews with national media on how people with Peripheral Artery Disease might avoid amputation of their limbs simply by phoning the Mt. Sinai Medical Center in Miami, whose doctors had saved limbs without surgery. At last count, Mount Sinai hadn’t received many calls, although thousands of those surgeries are performed to treat this condition across America and Canada every day.

Questioning Healthcare

“You can lead a horse to water, but you can’t make it drink,” is the well-known saying. Well, in healthcare there’s a variation: You can lead a horse to water, but then the horse has to scale a ten-foot-high fence to get a drink. That fence is a massive, standardized healthcare system that takes years to adapt to new science. Meanwhile, doctors who are stuck in that system are discouraged from using treatments that are outside the box, due to insurers’ fears of malpractice lawsuits and drug companies and surgeons with a vested interest in the status quo. Also, in the U.S., many private insurers have their own preferred providers, and if you go outside of that stable, they don’t cover you.

In brief: don’t blame your doctors – they have the same problem that you do.

But then there are some cases where doctors simply don’t want to believe new facts because these contradict the training they had years ago. In researching this book, I was told of many cases where heart patients brought information about science-based alternative therapies to their doctors and were told that if they used those therapies they could walk out the door and never come back to that clinic. Some of them did – they fired their cardiologists, then actively looked for other physicians who had a more informed approach. Years later, they are still here to tell the tale, and are not incapacitated by their condition. That took courage to fight the hostage syndrome inside all of us.

That’s not to say you should ignore your doctor’s advice. Instead, inform yourself as well. Present the evidence to your physician. If you don’t like the answer, be ready to get a second opinion – then you can decide for yourself.

Our healthcare systems do a lot of good, and are especially good at keeping us going when we’re really sick, or rescuing us in emergencies because that’s what we asked them to do for the past 75 years – patch us up so we can go back to work. However they are not designed for preventative care, they are slow to adapt to new science, and they have a severe allergy to anything that smacks of alternative healthcare. Getting the courage to break free from that mold is a tough challenge, but as you’ll hear in this interview, it is possible.

About the Author

Douglas Mulhall’s career spans his work as a journalist, author, award-winning documentary film maker, TV network founder & CEO, academic researcher, biotech company co-founder, pioneer of digital standards for healthy products, and developer of award-winning healthy buildings. He co-founded Elastrin Therapeutics, dedicated to reversing cardiovascular damage.  He also co-founded projects in Argentina, Brazil, Canada, Europe, and the U.S. He co-created award-winning buildings in Sweden & Netherlands, and co-developed healthy materials for the building, packaging & printing industries. He has published on calcification in heart disease in journals like Nature’s Laboratory Investigations.

 CONTACT: Douglas Mulhall +1-559-961-7979 mulhall@calcify.com https://www.natureoflongevity.com/