The Cure Industry: How Pharma Turns Illness Into Revenue, Part 2 🥼

[appalachiablue]

Offended Outcast (13 mins). "The Sickness Economy"

- Description: In Part 1, (below) we talked about how the food system quietly made us sick.
In Part 2, we talk about what happens next, when the pharmaceutical industry steps in to "help."

Modern healthcare didn't fail by accident. It changed incentives. Cures went out of fashion, management became the business model.

The perfect customer isn't healthy and they aren't dead. The perfect customer is alive, sick, compliant and blamed for their own condition.

In this episode we break down: how chronic illness became recurring revenue, why so many medications "manage" instead of "resolve," why shame protects industry profits, how media helps normalize sickness and what agency looks like for ordinary people.

This isn't about rejecting medicine. This is about rejecting a system that monetized suffering. You weren't meant to be manageable. You were meant to be human.

- Read Comments in the YouTube link above. 🖊
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Part 1: Sick by Design: How America Turned Food Into Disease
Part 2: The Cure Industry: When Pharma Turns Your illness Into Revenue

-- Part 1. - Sick By Design: How America Turned Food Into Disease 🍏
https://democraticunderground.com/118313323

[highplainsdem]

1. K&R! Thanks for posting! I checked out the YouTube channel, as I always do these days, to make

sure it wasn't AI.There are AI channels with older, folksy narrators, and he's posted a lot of videos in less than a year, which is often a warning sign of AI. But he's real, and the advice he's giving that I've seen so far is very good.

I first discovered health food stores and nutritionist Adelle Davis's books when I moved to NYC in the 1970s. She had a lot to say - very angry words - about what she called "trash foods." Her books were eye-opening. It's terrible that we don't teach kids more about nutrition, that most of what's sold in our grocery stores is unhealthy, and that Americans sickened by poor diets spend so much of their lives and their money trying to recover and often just treating symptoms and not the cause. And, as he said, being told they're responsible for getting ill due to the very addictive and more available and affordable junk foods they consume.

[appalachiablue]

2. Tx for posting. Davis realized the coming changes in food & health and enormous costs & hardships. It's tragic esp

for young people. Offended Outcast is super, he's right on top of critical issues facing the nation. Well researched and written, his talks have a lot of impact. OO knows his stuff..

We need real education. Nutrition, health and fitness should be taught in schools but that will be the day. Documentaries and researchers like Michael Pollan are good sources of information esp. the film FOOD INC (2008 ) which has a new version in 2024.
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- FOOD, INC. 2, Trailer, (2024).
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- wiki, - Food, Inc. is a * 2008 American documentary film directed by Robert Kenner[1] and narrated by Michael Pollan and Eric Schlosser.[5][6] It examines corporate farming in the United States, concluding that agribusiness produces food that is unhealthy in a way that is environmentally harmful and abusive of both animals and employees.

The film received positive reviews and was nominated for several awards, including the Academy Award for Best Documentary Feature and the Independent Spirit Award for Best Documentary Feature.

* A sequel, Food, Inc. 2 was released on April 12, 2024.

- Summary. The film examines the modern food industry, and raises alarms about both the industrial production of meat (chicken, beef, and pork) and the modern methods used to grow grains and vegetables (primarily corn and soybeans). It discusses the dominance of the American food market by a handful of huge corporations, which work to keep consumers from being aware of how their food is produced and are largely successful in their efforts to avoid such things as stronger food safety laws, the unionization of their workers, and additional food labeling regulations.

These companies promote unhealthy food consumption habits among the American public and then supply cheap, inadequately safety-tested, increasingly transgenic food that is produced and transported using methods that exploit livestock, employees, farmers, and the environment and use large amounts of petroleum products.[1][7] Eating organic, locally-grown food that is in season and reading product labels are offered as solutions, and the rapid growth of the organic food industry seen as providing hope for the future...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Food,_Inc.

[bucolic_frolic]

3. They do it in the Shrink business too. See the book: "Unshrunk" by Laura Delano (2024)

https://www.lauradelano.com/book/unshrunk

[appalachiablue]

6. IK, bigtime. This is quite common. Thanks for the book reference.

[Mosby]

4. His premise is stupid.

The idea that we used to go to the doctor to "cure" our health problems and now they are just "managed". No basis in reality for this, its silly, chronic illness exists, heart disease, liver/kidney disease, metabolic disorders, obesity, etc.

Has food been weaponized? Sure, it's called capitalism, the worst offenders are restaurants. But it's not a fucking conspiracy.

[appalachiablue]

5. I don't think he literally means 'cure' as the final point. Sometimes older people and patients from the country

say 'cure' meaning medicine or treatment - 'I'm going to see the doctor about getting some more of that cure.' (pills, prescriptions, therapy, treatment, advice, etc). It's not that common now but I remember hearing the term used this way years ago.

He is absolutely referring to managing chronic diseases, including ones related to overeating - esp. widespread unhealthy, high calorie, ultra processed industrial foods in the U.S. where chronic diseases and conditions are on the rise in the last several decades - obesity, diabetes, heart disease.
These illnesses mean management of regular medical visits, monitoring and testing, and prescriptions from the pharmacy, all of which involve multiple medical professionals.

For background, he mentions Part 1 (see below) of this topic which may be of help. I can't clarify the topic any more than this right now. - AB
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Part 1, referenced in his post.
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Sick By Design: How America Turned Food Into Disease 🍏

- Offended Outcast. Welcome to the Sickness Economy Series. (12 mins). 🍕 🌽

Modern food didn't fail on accident. It changed on purpose. In America, the cheapest calories are the ones that hurt us, and the expensive ones are the ones that nourish us. That isn't a mystery. It's an incentive.

- Over the last 50 years, real food was slowly replaced by "products," shelf stable, addictive, convenient, engineered for profit and quietly harmful in ways that didn't show up overnight. You don't drop dead from a cereal box. You just get a little sicker every year.

And while the government pointed a finger at "personal responsibility" the food industry quietly turned nourishment into a business model, and our bodies carried the cost... Read More under * Description in the YouTube link above.