What Working at a Retirement Home Taught Me About the Elderly and Today's Healthcare Racket

Since retiring a few years back, I’ve kept myself busy by working as a night attendant for a large retirement facility in the mid-West. The two main advantages of the job are that I get to meet some wonderful people as well as walk about seven miles each night which helps to keep me in generally good shape. Hearing the life stories of folks who have been on earth for the past eighty or ninety years and the insight they’ve learned has, at times, been fascinating and I’ve enjoyed it immensely.

Over the past few years, however, I’ve discovered many truths about our corrupt and broken Heathcare system, including just how badly uninformed enormous numbers of elderly people are about nutrition and the medical industrial complex that has largely taken over their lives.

The following are my observations and opinions based on numerous conversations with elderly residents. I don’t claim to be novel or innovative in my criticism of the contemporary Healthcare system. Nothing I’ve written here hasn’t also been said or written by someone else in some form. But this doesn’t make it any less true, and I hope some will be encouraged to rethink their opinion of doctors and the corrupt medical system that we’ve been subjected to.

The first thing I’ve learned is just how naively trusting the elderly are of their doctors. They really do view them as their ‘savior,’ almost godlike in a sense. To think their primary care physician may have ulterior motives other than the improvement of their personal health would come as a shock to a good many of them.

This is somewhat understandable, of course, since the doctors might have improved their health or even saved their lives in some instances. There are, indeed, good doctors out there, but even the best ones are caught up in a corrupt medical matrix that far too often places profit above the health of their patients. This is because America’s 4.5 trillion healthcare industry is a business, and their primary motivation is to make large profits for their investors and to raise enormous sums of money to pay staff, employees, maintain tech equipment and facilities.

Having talked to many of the residents, none of them from what I could determine view themselves as being their own health advocates. The notion is completely foreign to almost all of them. They wholly trust their doctors without question. They don’t challenge their physicians even when there are valid reasons for doing so. They don’t seem do any medical research on their ailments, despite there being a plethora of books, internet articles, and social media platforms that might address their particular disease or symptoms. They seem to know nothing about alternative medicine, the benefits of quality supplements, or holistic treatments. They don’t even think in such terms. Again, they completely trust all of what their doctors tell them and place full faith in the medical establishment.

This may be due to the era and culture out of which they have lived for many years, a time in which every institution, including the federal government, was trusted without question. The majority of their lives were spent in a high-trust society which contrasts sharply with our current no-trust society that we live in. Those days, however, are long gone, and there is every reason now to challenge and to question the contemporary medical system that we live under.

Trusting completely in medical doctors might be a good idea if our physicians were infallible, but they’re not. In fact, medical errors, including mistakes in prescriptions, cause a considerable number of deaths each year. Granted, it may not be the third leading cause of death as reported by some publications, but there can be little doubt that much of it is the direct result of human error, wrongful diagnosis, mistakes in pharmaceutical prescriptions, and sheer incompetence.

According to the National Library of Medicine, “Health care is not as safe as it should be. A substantial body of evidence points to medical errors as a leading cause of death and injury. Sizable numbers of Americans are harmed as a result of medical errors. Two studies of large samples of hospital admissions, one in New York using 1984 data and another in Colorado and Utah using 1992 data, found that the proportion of hospital admissions experiencing an adverse event, defined as injuries caused by medical management, were 2.9 and 3.7 percent, respectively. The proportion of adverse events attributable to errors (i.e., preventable adverse events) was 58 percent in New York, and 53 percent in Colorado and Utah. Preventable adverse events are a leading cause of death in the United States. When extrapolated to the over 33.6 million admissions to U.S. hospitals in 1997, the results of these two studies imply that at least 44,000 and perhaps as many as 98,000 Americans die in hospitals each year as a result of medical errors . . . In terms of lives lost, patient safety is as important an issue as worker safety. Although more than 6,000 Americans die from workplace injuries every year, in 1993 medication errors are estimated to have accounted for about 7,000 deaths. Medication errors account for one out of 131 outpatient deaths and one out of 854 inpatient deaths” (‘To Err is Human: Building a Safer Healthcare System’).

The second thing I’ve learned is that almost every resident is on a plethora of pharmaceutical drugs. One elderly gentleman proudly told me that’s he on fifteen separate medications each day, including four different blood pressure pills! Another woman told me that her doctor prescribed her nineteen separate pills that’s she’s required to take with her breakfast each morning. To many of these elderly folks, swallowing large numbers of pills each day is seen as perfectly normal which is a clear indicator of just how insane things have become in the Healthcare world.

In my opinion, some physicians intentionally load their elderly patients with more medications than they actually need as a way of meeting the prescription quotas required by their hospital. This is another way that big bucks are brought into the system. How about the flu shot? Ever notice how pushy nurses and doctors get or even annoyed when you refuse a flu shot? They take it so personal. I doubt that it’s because they care so much for your health. The real answer probably lies in the loss of revenue that occurs when patients refuse it.

According to a PBS News article, “In the Byzantine world of health care pricing, most people wouldn’t expect that the ubiquitous flu shot could be a prime example of how the system’s lack of transparency can lead to disparate costs. The Affordable Care Act requires health insurers to cover all federally recommended vaccines at no charge to patients, including flu immunizations. Although people with insurance pay nothing when they get their shot, many don’t realize that their insurers foot the bill — and that those companies will recoup their costs eventually. In just one small sample from one insurer, Kaiser Health News found dramatic differences among the costs for its own employees. At a Sacramento, Calif., facility, the insurer paid $85, but just a little more than half that at a clinic in Long Beach. A drugstore in Washington, D.C., was paid $32. The wide discrepancy in what insurers pay for the same flu shot illustrates what’s wrong with America’s health system, said Glenn Melnick, a health economist at the University of Southern California” (‘The Hidden Costs of “Free” Flu Shots,’ by Phil Galewitz, 11/19/2019).

Primary care physicians get angered when they’re accused of being legalized pill pushers, but what else are we to think when so much of what they do each day involves writing endless prescriptions? And to think that most doctors are going to carefully sift through any possible contraindications for the medications they prescribe is laughable. The doctors are too busy, and they have very precise time limits they are allowed for each patient.

Are there exceptions to what I have written here? Of course! But the few exceptions only serve to prove the general rule.

Dr. Uma Pisharody, in a recent article, concedes that this model of care has not been effective for either the patient or the doctors’ captive to it. She has urged her colleagues to move away from this ineffectual and outdated framework:

“Infants are now prescribed strong medications for spitting up, equating their regurgitations with adult heartburn and reflux. Older children are being diagnosed with hypertension, ADHD, sleep disorders, anxiety at alarming rates and then suffering the consequences of the side effects of the polypharmacy that we prescribe. Kids are medicated more than ever before. If one drug doesn’t work, we suggest trying another. If a pill fails, we try an injection, and if that fails, we try invasive procedures and surgeries followed by even stronger medications. Let’s face it, most doctors are trained to be pill-pushers. Tell us your symptoms — we will medicate you. We love prescribing medications, which essentially work like applying band-aids to external symptoms because we don’t understand how to prevent, treat, or reverse chronic disease. We simply don’t understand diet and lifestyle intervention. We were never taught this in medical school” (KevinMD.Com., ‘A Call to Action for My Medical Colleagues,’ 5/10/2022).

The doctors, as noted above, largely treat their patients in terms of symptoms only, and do not think in terms of the root cause of their ailments. Thus, modern physicians are locked into a system of treatment as health management or pain management rather than one that actually seeks to cure or end the problem. This works out beautifully for the medical industrial complex because it maintains a steady stream of lifelong patients whose medical complications are forever managed, but which never go away.

This creates enormously staggering profits for the hospitals, and the corporations that own them, including the pharmaceutical companies they are wed to. As the old saying goes, “A patient healed is a customer lost.”

It’s also important to understand the mindset of today’s doctors. There is little doubt that they are intelligent because completing the academic rigors of medical school requires an IQ far above average. Many of them are well-meaning and genuinely want what is best for their patients. However, they tend to also be compliant types which means few of them are going to challenge the system nor rethink what they’ve been taught since medical school. Some of them, as others have noted, are arrogant and unteachable. The entire way that society looks at medical doctors only serves to reinforce the ‘god complex’ of far too many of them.

These same doctors know that if they deviate from mandated protocols regardless of how ineffective they may prove to be, they will be penalized and may lose their medical license as a result. Few physicians, understandably, are willing to fight the medical system and jeopardize their salary, status and medical license. Thus, they are caught up in a system that inevitably burns them out and leaves them disillusioned.

The third thing I’ve noticed is that few, if any, of the residents that I’ve talked to seem to know anything about what constitutes a healthy and balanced diet. They actually believe their dining hall feeds them good meals because it’s required by government guidelines from the sorely outdated food pyramid. What is not known by the residents is just how many chemicals and harmful additives are included in their meals. From what I could gather, the food is mostly cheap and highly processed as it likely is in every other Independent and Assisted Living facility. I very much doubt that the corporations who own such retirement centers scattered throughout the nation dictate that only organic and non-GMO ingredients are used in their food. This would be enormously costly, and I know of no corporation involved in elder care that does it.

The retirement facility that I work in provides a bakery and cookie store for the residents. The residents, of course, love it and I can understand why. Yet, I’m inclined to think that our well-intentioned sweet shop has only exacerbated the rates of dementia and Alzheimer among our residents. And believe me, almost every person living at our facility has some form of serious memory decline which sugar and grains only make worse when they are metabolized in the body. Not only are desserts offered on the lunch and dinner menus, but any resident entering or leaving the facility must pass by the bakery and cookie store. Few can resist the temptation to stop in and buy something sweet. In other words, the very thing that contributes to and exacerbates memory loss is constantly offered to the elderly residents. I doubt that any of them have been told by their physicians that completely eliminating sugar, high fructose corn syrup and grains from one’s diet has, in many reported cases, gradually caused their memories to improve over time. This is why some have referred to Alzheimer’s as Type-3 diabetes. It all depends, of course, on just how bad one’s dementia is but studies have shown marked improvement in memory when sugar is totally eliminated.

It’s not just the residents who are uninformed as to proper nutrition, but so are the greater numbers of doctors. Doctors in medical school are usually given one or two courses on nutrition, and that’s about it. And what little they do teach to their students is based on what the nutritional establishment thinks is a healthy diet which is largely wrong and outdated. This is government advice, the kind we probably don’t want or need.

The medical establishment places little importance on one’s diet as the source of so many health complications. This explains why most doctors during a routine checkup rarely inquire as to what their patients eat on a regular basis. The doctor has not been trained to think in this way, and so he assumes that diet plays little role in one’s overall health. It’s completely irrational and unscientific, and yet this is the way they think. Their entire paradigm is out of whack. It’s like bringing your car to a mechanic because the engine stalls and sputters and him telling you not to worry about what you put into the gas tank because fuel doesn’t really matter in the overall health of one’s car!?

Strangely, humans are the only species on earth that’s confused about what they should eat. One doesn’t find this in the animal world. Much of this confusion in the U.S. is the direct result of decades-long propaganda by the food corporations. They have manipulated us to consume highly refined franken-foods that are not really foods at all. These same food manufacturers have bribed government officials to look the other way when harmful ingredients are added to their products. They also contribute huge sums of money to hospitals and medical schools which, in turn, influences how these same institutions address the subject of processed carbohydrates, refined sugars, and seed oils.

Our universities and medical schools have in their own way contributed to the obesity epidemic in America by the sin of omission, and by publishing studies that were observational in nature and not based on rigorous scientific inquiry. This is the problem when food corporations are allowed to donate large sums of money to medical schools because it essentially guarantees that they will tread lightly when it comes to warning the American consumer about the health dangers of certain foods and ingredients. The concluding data might also be doctored in order to fit prior assumptions, or to not upset the lucrative gravy train that large corporate donors provide (see Dr. Malcolm Kendrik, Doctoring the Data [Columbus Publishing Ltd, 2015]).

The elderly that I’ve had discussions with seemed to have no awareness that part of the reason they’re required to take so many prescriptions is because of decades of a poor diet - namely, the standard American diet that’s heavy on highly processed food that’s been enriched with chemicals most people can’t pronounce, additives, artificial coloring, emulsifiers, preservatives, excessive carbohydrates and seed oils, refined sugars, and ingredients that cause inflammation and weight gain. Decades of eating such chemically laden slop invariably creates a host of health problems, such as diabetes, chronic kidney disease, heart disease, and different metabolic and autoimmune issues, including various forms of cancer.

The elderly who have shared with me their health concerns have been shocked when I’ve told them that Type-2 diabetes can be reversed and that life-long medication for it are unnecessary because diet alone can rectify the problem. Others have told me that they’re content with receiving medication for insulin resistance because it allows them to continue eating sweets. This is the kind of thing only an addict would say. How strange it is that many persons have little interest in ending their ailments when lifestyle and dietary changes are required.

The common assumption seems to be that taking multiple prescriptions is all part of getting older. Yet, I’m not so sure that this is true nor has to be the case. There are, in fact, many people who have avoided medication in their older years by simply watching what they eat, consuming only nutrient dense foods, avoiding sugar, and engaging in regular exercise.

Lastly, almost all of the residents faithfully line up to receive their seasonal flu immunizations, including their Covid shot and boosters. This too, in my view, is a reflection of their complete trust in the medical establishment and by extension the federal government itself. I doubt any of them would believe me if I told them that the Covid pandemic was largely a scam and a diabolical effort by our government to gain total control over the American people. They would probably scoff at the idea that the Covid ‘vaccine’ was foolishly rushed and did not go through the rigorous testing procedures and allotted time that all other vaccines are required to endure. The ‘vaccine’ also proved to be ineffective and even dangerous for many people who mindlessly took the jab thinking the pharmaceutical companies could be trusted.

Moreover, there seems to be little awareness or suspicion among most people, elderly or not, that allowing oneself to be injected with vaccines containing strange concoctions of chemicals might not be all that healthy as we’re repeatedly told by Big Pharma. I can only hope that the following generations of Americans will not be so trusting of their physicians and of the medical industrial complex.