The Myth of Equating Diseases to Numbers

Although fully normalized in our society, the idea of equating disease to numerical abnormalities has little precedence in healthcare and virtually no evidence of efficacy.  It does distill complex medical illness into simplistic numerical categories, and in this way it feeds people’s cognitive needs to sidestep the nuanced and confusing face of illness, while providing the medical industrial complex a facile way of creating disease, increasing profit, and selling a deceptive message of hope: measure and fix numbers, and you’re ok!

Few people are aware just how anti-science, self-serving, and detrimental our medical society’s focus is on numerical medical abnormalities.  In fact, to truly even scrape the surface of this perversion of science and care will require a few blogs.  This initial blog will define what is meant by numerical medical science, the deceptive goals of its architects, and how it has been so normalized by society to make it seem sensible.  We will provide several examples of misappropriate medical numbers, show briefly why connecting these numbers to health outcomes is deleterious, and then delve into the historical origins of numerical medicine.  The breadth of numerical medical care flows through our book A Return to Healing, which explores the origins of our health care morass, the perfidy of numerical epidemics, and the profit-based allegiance of the medical industrial complex (and its doctor salesmen) to a number-focused pseudo-science which has largely coopted our entire medical landscape. Between the book and several articles, all of which are on our Return to Healing website, we provide references and documentation to debunk a pervasive medical dogma that has been sold to Americans linking number measuring to health, even as its mythical proclamations gain a foothold on our medical landscape.

The meaning of numerical medical care

At first glance, many readers may wonder what is meant by numerical care, and then when it is explained, they will say: well, of course that’s important.  We have been so indoctrinated by the medical community into believing the significance of measuring and treating numbers as to obscure its absurdity and malleability.

What numbers are we talking about?  Some of them are good correlates for disease, but the lines defining normal/abnormal have been perverted to make more people seem sick.  This is the case, for instance, with blood pressure and diabetes, which, while important to measure and treat, are now being treated to such obscene extremes as to make the treatment worse than the problem.  Some lack any prognostic significance at all or have a significance that can vary enough to preclude any means of defining normal.  This is the case, for instance, with cholesterol, BMI, bone density, stress tests/percentage of artery blockage, vitamin D levels, kidney function, and so many more.  And others may have some clinical significance but often their treatment is more dangerous than merely leaving them alone.  This is the case, for instance, with PSA, cardiac arrythmias (such as afib), dementia scores, depression scales, and many, many more. We will have blogs that look at all these arenas separately.

We are so comfortable with doctors performing a plethora of tests on us that we have come to equate this approach to thorough care.  In fact, it is anything but.  It is lazy care, often care designed to create illness where none exists, to enable doctors to take short cuts rather than to truly explore patient symptoms and needs, to sell drugs and procedures, to assure that patients continue return to their doctor.  Such care engenders fear, not wellness; it invites overtreatment not sensible care.

Real sickness and wellness cannot be delineated by numerical measurements, and few of the numbers we regularly equate with health are sufficiently understood to enable us to provide norms, all of which differ from person to person, from age to age, from society to society.  And too, often treating numerical aberrations causes more problems than the abnormal numbers themselves, especially since our body often creates abnormal numbers to promote its health, or the body has already fixed the problem, or the numbers themselves are actually quite normal for that particular person.  Most importantly, our obsession with numerically-defined diseases has led to over-treatment, over-testing, over-specialization, and fear mongering, all of which have dramatically increased the cost of care while simultaneously leading to lower life expectancy, a higher burden of chronic disease, and a population of people who feel worse than people in areas of the world that don’t measure numbers.

Even as we normalize numbers through drugs and procedures, even as we invent more and more tests and drugs to find more and more numbers to measure and fix, we seem to get sicker, we spend more money, we live shorter, and yet that only prompts the medical community to push the levels of “normal” even lower and to find more numbers to measure.  We will talk about cholesterol in my next blog.  We used to measure cholesterol, then LDL, then LDL/HDL ratios, now LDL(a).  Now the 2026 cholesterol guidelines demand measures of all of this and pushing LDL below 70, a number so low to require often dangerous drugs and entirely out of step with the science of heart disease. Of course, the data for such foolish proclamations is lacking, but because “experts” enunciate this gospel, because 150 pages can be written about it, well then, we have to believe it and buy more statins and then go beyond statins to take injections and to get more tests.  Forget that the “experts” and organizations spreading the gospel are all deeply immersed in the pharmaceutical industry, forget that the doctors who are its most vocal advocates are either tied to industry or merely parrot industry protocols, forget that all this testing and drugging is making people sick.  Once the guidelines emerge to show the benefit of number fixing, like in the case of cholesterol, or blood pressure, or bone density, or sugar, then the press will tout its benefit, insurance will require its execution lest doctors are penalized, and most doctors will blindly sign on.

The problem comes down to an unfortunate illusion that has been hammered into our skulls by doctors and the media and pharm commercials and that feeds our cognitive biases: we believe that when our numbers look better, we’re healthier.  As my son told me when I asked him how apparently intelligent people could believe all the myths Dr. Fauci and the CDC were weaving during COVID despite the fact that most of their solutions were either designed to sell drugs never shown to be beneficial,  were cheap parlor tricks (masks, 6 foot separation, isolation) fully debunked by scientific scrutiny, or were draconian measures that destroyed life for almost two years and deprived us of our constitutional rights (societal closures, school closings, censorship, removal of doctor licenses among those who sought a different approach): even smart people, even liberal people, are easily deceived and compliant when they are scared about their health.  Yes, just scare people into believing something about their own mortality or their own health and they will usually act more like religious devotees than skeptical and critically thinking humans.  Fix a number and we’re well, don’t fix it and we’re dead.  So simple!  Just watch TV these days and you’ll see they mock those who seek to improve nutrition and lifestyle while praising our number-fixing high-tech medical world.  Of course, those TV stations, their shows, their news anchors owe a lot to big pharma, their biggest sponsor! So they, like our nation’s doctors, weave a detective fabric with numerical threads and sell it to the American public.  It’s good for business all around!

We described in the last blog the scientific disconnect between weight loss and better health outcomes, especially in the setting of new GLP-1 drugs.  Many conditions that trigger weight loss, such as cancer, are not promoting health, and GLP-1 drugs may well be cancer in a shot; only time and many deaths will reveal that verdict, all of which will likely occur after drug companies and complicit doctors earn their tens of millions of dollars.  But because weight is measurable, and because a drug can help us lose weight when we do not want to do the hard work of making our body healthier, and because paid-off doctors and celebrities advocate this approach, people believe these drugs must be beneficial since they improve a number we have been taught is a reflection of health. 

Like with GLP-1’s, the general purpose of a numerical based medical system that equates numerical improvement to better health is to promote the sale of drugs, to justify profitable tests and procedures, and to promote hospitalization and specialty care.  The gap between what doctors and the media promise with regard to measuring/fixing numbers, and the reality of how sick we are becoming from following their script, is so stark as to be obvious to anyone with open eyes.  And yet, since doctors are trained to be blind to the risk and lack of scientific scrutiny of measuring and fixing numbers (while many of them profit from the illusion’s proliferation), and since patients have a cognitive need to equate health to normal measurements which is easier to digest than the messy uncertainty of our true health barometers, this perversion of science has persevered and continues to drive us into wheelchairs and early graves, even as our numbers look so good.

In parts of the world that don’t rely on medical measurements, where people eat well and walk often, where doctors are rare and specialists even rarer, people live far longer than we do, are far less ill, feel better, and spend far less.  What is the average cholesterol of people in the Blue Zones, what is their bone density, how many are in atrial fibrillation?  We don’t know because they don’t know, and their ignorance of what doctors and the media tell us is vitally important has helped them to live longer and healthier.  We have so many examples of how fixing numbers leads to worse outcomes, we have studies, we have reality, and yet we continue to believe that numbers mean something almost holy.  Why?

The historical origins of numerical medicine.

As we show in our book, health care need not have devolved into the pit of measuring and fixing numbers.  Prior to 1911, much of the healthcare landscape revolved around speaking with patients, being guided by their subjective symptoms and correlative objective signs (derived by a targeted physical exam) and being very cautious about drug-based therapies.  It was more that charlatan doctors doing just the opposite—claiming to cure all ails with proprietary drugs that could fix various abnormalities in the body—that medicine incurred such a bad name. 

In fact, for most of our nation’s medical existence, going to a doctor was dangerous, whereas self-care promoted better health.  Just ask George Washington, killed by a doctor who came over to “cure” his sore throat.  If you take him and Alexander Hamilton (killed by a bullet) out of the calculation, the longevity of our founding fathers (who largely stayed away from doctors) was in the mid-80’s, about 8 years longer than our longevity now.  In fact, once we remove the death of kids and birthing women from consideration (both of whom were helped after we understood notions of infection and sanitation), we are living shorter now than we did 100 years ago, when people avoided doctors like the plague.

What changed?  First and foremost, we became a corporate-financed number-fixing medical world, all out of a quest for power and profit by the medical community.  In 1900 there were no centralized dogmas that defined good healthcare, but the American Medical Association (AMA) sought to change that reality.  Allying with corporations and Progressive reformers and relying on a novel notion of German care built on laboratory measurement rather than patient-centered care to determine and treat illness, the AMA fabricated an appealing and scientifically popular dogma that allowed it to coopt the entire health care landscape.  Healthcare can be objective if we look inside the patient and measure his/her numbers and then fix them.  Number-based treatment proved easy to equate with evolving German Progressive science: it was discrete, it was objective, and it seemed to make sense.  As one health care provider (and eugenicist, which too relied on numerical measurements to prove the superiority of the white race) stated: The human body is as measurable as a bar of steel. 

German-trained doctors inveighed against speaking with patients or considering their symptoms as being meaningful, both of which were simply too subjective to be believed.  By measuring internal numbers and equating those to illness, and relying on their improvement to demonstrate cure, objectivity could now replace subjective norms.  No need to speak with or examine patients, and no need to subject patients to ancient remedies more holistic than modern.  Now we had measurements, and no one could argue with the objectivity of those!

Corporations leaped upon the notion that they could profit from the numbers game, creating medical labs and drugs to delve into the mysteries of the human body and repair what ailed people.  And the AMA realized that to embrace German Progressive science and team with corporations to reshape medicine was the recipe for their struggle to control the entire medical landscape. 

The alliance of the AMA, number-based German Progressive science, and corporate financing was sanctified by the 1911 Flexner Report that transformed our entire medical system into the AMA’s fiefdom.  The concept was easy to sell, and it generated enormous profits for doctors and corporations alike.  Because this medical “revolution” occurred contemporaneously with improvements in sanitation and infection control, it correlated to an increase in longevity, even though a true analysis of its impact on health and lifespan is far less sanguine. 

After Flexner, most medical schools closed, and any allowed to survive required AMA sanction, full time laboratory faculty with large commercial labs, corporate funding, and a number-based curriculum.  All licensed doctors had to attend an AMA-sanction school, be part of the AMA universe, and acknowledge lab-based medicine as the only true scientific means of practicing.  This also led to a proliferation of new drugs and drug companies, all of which responded to the number-defined diseases that became the norm.  The AMA’s power and prestige grew, corporations reaped huge profits, doctor salaries and scientific credentials soared, and the public swallowed a new reality that was fed to them and seemed to be appealing.  Oh so simple!  But it didn’t have to be this way.

It is worth examining the dichotomy between two of the most prominent doctors in 1900, both founders of Johns Hopkins Medical School and considered scientific reformers of health care.  Only one of them prevailed, while we still look to the other as a beacon of healthcare sensibility, even if all his ideas evaporated in the cloud of Flexner’s axe.

Let’s talk about the loser first. William Osler believed in patient-centric care, writing two of the most popular and esteemed books on medical care at the time, and even today.  At Hopkins he sought to reform healthcare by educating students through patients.  All students began their training by working with community primary care physicians, immersing themselves in humans and human disease head-on.  The students juxtaposed direct patient care with time in the classroom, discussing and studying the science behind the diseases they witnessed.  As Osler said: “If you want to know what is wrong with the patient, ask the patient.”  He rejected the notion of laboratory measurements, all of which varied from person to person and were not well enough correlated to real disease to be useful.  He distrusted drug companies, corporations, and the AMA.  He believed that nuance, not measurable Progressive objectivity, defined healthcare, and preached to his students to embrace uncertainty.  He was non-dogmatic.  The very notion of corporate Progressive healthcare disturbed him.

But when he retired in 1905, William Welch had rid himself of his greatest nuisance.  Welch founded Hopkins and hired Osler, but then the latter overshadowed Welch during his time there.  Welch was a pathologist who studied in Germany.  He did not see patients, nor did he believe patient exposure was important to student education or proper care.  He worked on corporate boards, was a leader of eugenic movements, and was president of the AMA.  His goal was to change medicine into a lab-based entity that worked with corporations, removing the patient from central importance.  When Osler retired, Welch fired all the Hopkins clinical staff and pushed students into the classroom and lab.  He changed the curriculum to reflect his number-based ethos, building larger labs and accepting corporate funding.  He worked with the AMA and both the Rockefeller and Carnegie corporations, in conjunction with Progressive reformers and State licensing agencies, to script the Flexner Report and its aftermath.  He then fed corporate money into medical schools that were willing to play the new game.  Welch, the great eugenicist, the doctor who never saw patients nor believed there was a reason to do so, a man who built power and profit for himself and for the corporations and organizations in which he worked, defined the new medical landscape.  Osler protested from abroad, but his words evaporated into oblivion.  A new reality was born.

The Dagger of Number-based Care

Ever since our medical system has relied on dogmatic numerical “diseases” and their pharmaceutical and procedural treatments to define and alleviate illness, as it delineates “norms” whereby certain numbers are indicative of disease while others are considered normal, its profits have soared even as patient survival (short of sanitation and perhaps antibiotics) has not.  From the time of Flexner through today, doctors are trained in the lab and classroom for two years followed by a hospital stint, never spending time learning about the subtleties of wellness and illness through the lens of real human beings, as Osler had advocated.  Patients and their nuances, their individual differences and manifestations of illness, their conceptions of wellness, their wants and needs; all that faded into obscurity.  Flexner’s empire—initially controlled by the AMA and now by specialty societies and academic “experts” beholden to corporate needs—delineated narrow walls of numerical norms that define disease and wellness, constructing a feasible deception whereby doctors can make you healthy by measuring and fixing numbers they tell you are medically meaningful.  That is what we are left with today.

The cost of such care, both in dollars and in medical suffering, is beyond comprehension.

Doctors no longer engage in patient-centric critical thinking as advocated by Osler.  They no longer adhere to Einsteinian notions of science, whereby nothing is concrete and everything must be questioned and subjected to endless scrutiny.  Instead, they memorize facts, learn the numerical lines that separate illness from wellness, rely on calculators and “number scores” created by drug companies, while eschewing patient realities, science, and common sense in their quest to diagnose and treat.  They receive far more money to specialize and bombard patients with tests and procedures than to speak with patients and treat them with scientific humanism.  Those who play the numbers game prosper, those who don’t often are excluded from the club.

We are a medical society in which doctors are no more than robots, touting as scientific fact the many numerical diseases that have been invented over time and whose lines of normal constantly shift to increase the number of people who are labeled as being sick.   Distilling illness into a numbers game not only enables the invention of fake disease and dangerous treatments, but it also minimizes the only effective way of exploring illness: speaking with the patient.  If someone feels sick and their numbers are normal, they are considered psychologically ill.  When someone feels well with abnormal numbers, they are considered sick.  This is the state of healthcare in a society that has relegated the patient to being an asterisk.

What is most insidious about the numerical backbone of our healthcare system is the ease with which doctors and drug companies manipulate numerical norms to broaden the range of abnormal and invent sickness.  Diabetes is a good example, and we will address it more fully in future blogs.  All good studies show that sugar under about 170 is adequate to maintain good health in most people, that lows are often more dangerous than highs, that the harm incurred by diabetes has nothing to do with the sugars themselves but rather is triggered by inflammation (from our horrific diets, lack of exercise, and incessant stress) that blocks insulin and leads to damage across our entire bodies.    Lowering sugars through drugs (and worse, through more insulin) fixes numbers, but does not address the inflammation, providing an illusion of cure no more effective than a Band-Aid over an abscess.  The abscess—the inflammation—continues to hammer at our bodies as our doctors assure us everything must be ok; hell, our sugars are good, so how could it not be.

But it’s worse than that.  Through “expert” declarations, manipulative observational drug company studies (we have discussed the perfidy of observational studies and their ability to promote number fixing through deception in a past blog), we have lowered the numerical line of normal sugars.  Decade after decade the drug-financed American Diabetes Association, the American Endocrine Society that has as its only interest increasing salaries of its member doctors (on top of its drug company sponsors), academic doctors similarly beholden to drug company money, and compliant doctors who have lost all critical thinking skills and simply do what they are told, we have pushed “normal” down and down, well below the number that large randomized trials show to be meaningful, down into the range that the same trials show to be dangerous.  We even created a bogus diagnosis called prediabetes, which, as we have shown in an article, and as others have shown to be a concerted effort to increase drug prescriptions, is not a disease at all until it’s diagnosed, instigating a proliferation of unnecessary office visits, tests, and medicines.  So, now we have a diabetes epidemic requiring tens of billions of dollars of tests, specialist visits, drugging, and procedures to normalize numbers that were never abnormal, to pathologize numerical variations such that patients fall into the pit of fear and blind compliance lest—as their doctors tell them—they lose limbs or kidneys or even get a stroke.  Down and down the numbers are pushed so now about 75% of adult Americans have a diabetic condition based on such manipulation.

Doctors and the medical system give no more than lip service to addressing our diet or the inflammation that causes diabetes, nor do they question the broadening of what we now call abnormal.  They are not concerned about the human beings behind the numbers.  No one cares that all this testing and treating and fearmongering is only making people sicker even as sugars drop lower.  Hell, sicker people are good business! And that only incites the need for lower values of norms and to prescribe more medicines, more visits, more fear.

Numerical medicine has allowed the healthcare system to do exactly what the AMA prescribed over 100 years ago: remove uncertainty by creating a rigid dogma of numerical diseases, increase doctor salaries and prestige, and help industry sell more stuff.  Dr. Welch and the AMA never purported to succor patients in their quest to transform and dominate the healthcare infrastructure.  They sought power and money, patients be damned.  And with a well-paid compliant media, a bribed Congress and FDA/CDC, the absolute allegiance of its doctors and patient-focused groups (like the American Diabetes Association, Alzheimer’s Association, American Cancer Society, all of which are run and financed by drug companies), and specialty organizations that spread a self-serving number-focused gospel and pass out money to those in power, Welch and the AMA have achieved their dreams.

What has our numerical obsession done to our health, to our finances, and to the soul of medicine?  Which numbers are meaningful, what are the clinically important ranges of norms, and how do subjective patient beliefs impact how we should view those numbers?  Those are the topics of subsequent blogs. 

We’ll start with cholesterol, since the cholesterol myth is among the most injurious of all health care fantasies and has led to tremendous harm in the wake of huge profit. According to the newly released 2026 cholesterol guidelines—touted by doctors and their organizations, by the media, and by academics bought off by drug companies as a crucial bridge to good health—all of us, even kids under 10, need to measure cholesterol regularly and push it down as low as possible, preferably with drugs.  The organizations that scripted the guidelines—the American Heart Association and the American College of Cardiology—are fronts for drug companies and specialist doctors and have no interest in patient care.  The academic doctors who signed their names to the document and who are touting its virtues on TV are a who’s who of pharmaceutical industry lackies. And the science behind the guidelines is so lacking as to make it seem more biblical than scientific.  By twisting health into a numbers game rather than a scientifically derived process that seeks to improve lifestyle and the true barometers of health, the guidelines will steer us away from what really matters and deepen the muck of our costly and aggressive healthcare morass.  These guidelines demonstrate not only how numbers are being manipulated to trick people into purchasing drugs/tests/procedures that are contrary to their best interest, but also why numbers are so dangerous as a surrogate to health.  We’ll dive in deeper next time!