The Medical Renaissance Group

1. The Medical Renaissance Group ‘Our task must be to free ourselves from this prison by widening our circle of compassion to embrace all living creatures and the whole of nature in its beauty’ – Albert Einstein

2. The Medical Renaissance Group • The morbidity from illness in our world is at crisis level • Epidemic of obesity throughout the world associated with an epidemic of diabetes • Failure to deal with degenerative diseases of western society, the epidemic of AIDS, and the spread of new diseases and new resistant bacteria due to climate change and the wide use of anti-biotics • The greatest killer in our society is cardio-vascular disease. In Australia, one person dies of a heart attack every ten minutes • One in ten people will end up with cancer of the colon

3. The Medical Renaissance Group • Three quarters of men who reach 65 have a chronic disease. • 50% of adult Australians have hypertension and 30% have raised cholesterol. • In the next ten years, two out of three people will suffer from depression. • We cannot solve the problems of society with minds and intellect alone. We have to use our hearts and use the new wisdom of functional medicine and the life sciences.

4. The Medical Renaissance Group • Cardiovascular disease, cancer, diabetes, suicide and road traffic accidents are the killers of our society worldwide. • Unless we can create a more equitable, sustainable and co-operative and caring society how can we survive? • One billion people in the developed world suffer from the diseases of exaggerated lifestyle of western civilisation • One billion people in the developing world suffer from the diseases of starvation and lack of sanitation and polluted water

5. The Medical Renaissance Group • the pharmaceutical industry worldwide has a GDP of almost $1trillion, equivalent to the total GDP of many of the countries in the developing world.

6. The Medical Renaissance Group The Medical Renaissance Group is a group of doctors, nurses, health professionals, scientists and those who are interested in healing and who are in any way related to public health.

7. The Medical Renaissance Group The group’s aim is to look at healing and the health system, ways of healing the individual and healing society. The basic unit of society is the individual human being. Healing of the individual will allow society to become productive and sustainable in the future. Unless we can heal our hearts and our minds, how can we hope to create a future which is sustainable for future generations?

8. The Medical Renaissance Group We have to see ourselves as really significant catalysts in society and not allow ourselves to be limited by governmental restrictions and the impositions of societal structures. We intend to become a political and lobbying body so that we can create a more integrated and healed society.

9. The Medical Renaissance Group Our aim is to comment on values and to realise the integration of health. Our concern is for quality of life for our patients and all of humanity.

10. The Medical Renaissance Group Our world faces the challenge of healing in every conceivable way -from the healing of grief, the understanding of death, the suffering of millions within the developing world, where lives are cut short, often to a couple of decades, and where one out of every three children will die from a preventable disease.

11. The Medical Renaissance Group Even in our own society, healing has been relegated to purveyors of so-called “instant cures”. As doctors, we are taught a bio-medical model, which sees the human being as a machine which can be fixed by taking a broken or affected part and putting it back together again in the right way.

12. The Medical Renaissance Group The system, even in our Australian society, functions as an anonymous, alienating machine, in which the hospital is structured like a factory, and its aim is to be as economically viable as it possibly can be, without any kind of relevance to healing in the absolute sense.

13. The Medical Renaissance Group In our society we have lost the understanding of what caring, compassion and healing are. We have forgotten about the affect of the mind on the body, and the way the mind can heal not only the self, but the physical body as well.

14. The Medical Renaissance Group • Social isolation, chronic life stress, personality factors, depression, anxiety and smoking are all independent factors for the risk of heart disease (Rozansky). • Rachael Naomi Remen, Director for the Study of Health and Illness at Commonweal has said that intimacy heals suffering. She has said that we suffer not because we are in pain, the real suffering is that we feel we are in pain alone. • As little as six weeks in a loving supportive group can affect recurrence and death rates from cancer years later (Dean Ornish

15. The Medical Renaissance Group • Social isolation doubles death rates. This was a study done in Scandinavia and the US on 35,000 people. High levels of stress in animals and humans increase genetic damage Social support is a huge factor in the prevention of illness. Having a relationship gives people the opportunity to grow and soothes and integrates their total system

16. The Medical Renaissance Group • Even in the most affluent countries, people who are less well off have substantially shorter life expectancies and more illnesses than the rich There is a remarkable sensitivity of health to the social environment and to what have become known as the social determinants of health.

17. The Medical Renaissance Group The system encourages the GP to make often unnecessary referrals and unnecessary prescriptions for the sake of the exploitative pharmaceutical industry. Preventative and nutritional medicine is frowned upon by the government, even though such practice could save the medical system millions of dollars.

18. The Medical Renaissance Group There are so many specialists that one patient has to be referred to one specialist after another after another in an attempt to get the correct treatment, and often this is a result of pure serendipity rather than any overriding integration by any caring general practitioner within the primary care scene. This is because the GPs have very little time to function in a co-ordinating role as they often have to up to 6 patients per hour, in comparison to specialists who may see 1 or 2 patients per hour.

19. The Medical Renaissance Group GPs are the meat in the sandwich, compressed by excessive surveillance and bureaucratic paperwork and the requirements of a health economy reliant on medical technology, hospitals and pharmaceuticals.

20. The Medical Renaissance Group This also puts GPs under enormous stress. If the system is stressing doctors, it is almost certainly stressing patients (National Centre for Epidemiology and Population ANU).

21. The Medical Renaissance Group In this kind of health system, there never seems to be any kind of integration or communication between the healers nor healing bodies. There is no regular consultation on a patient between various specialists and the only form of communication is the occasional letter (if the hospital remembers to send one).

22. The Medical Renaissance Group Added to this confusion are the statistics which show that 16% of patients who enter hospital come out either worse or do not come out at all because they have died (this is often due to error of various kinds either of the hospital or of the treatment given by the doctor). This however, is politely swept under the carpet as “just one of those things”.

23. The Medical Renaissance Group The high levels of medical insurance are an indictment on a society which seeks for litigation in healing rather than healing for itself. Doctors are more and more beginning to practice defensive medicine rather than healing medicine.

24. The Medical Renaissance Group A lot of patients who see the GP go along for an “instant fix”. The system has not educated them to take responsibility for their own illnesses or explain to them why it is important to have a happy, healthy, active community. It has not yet filtered down from the bureaucrats and the economic rationalists that a happy, healthy, active, properly nourished society is more likely to perform well economically and create an intelligent nation.

25. The Medical Renaissance Group It is not surprising that illness is on the increase, when there are so many new drugs to be used and more profits to be made by the pharmaceutical companies. It is almost coming to the stage where GPs are becoming the technicians for the pharmaceutical companies and the Health Insurance Commission. If they do not prescribe the latest drugs they are criticised and may even be complained about by their patients.

26. The Medical Renaissance Group The burgeoning health care costs in the USA are a typical example of the problems that face a society which looks at things in a reductionist way and does not look at the whole picture.

27. The Medical Renaissance Group The basic problem with healing our Australian society is that we have at the helm politicians who have mainly been trained in economics, law and politics and who are rational thinkers and do not understand the life sciences in any way whatsoever. They do not understand the need for a co-operative and caring community

28. The Medical Renaissance Group The Medical Renaissance Group aims to lobby for a form of medicine which is integrative, health giving and gives individuals the opportunity to take responsibility for their own lives and the opportunity to arrest the development of degenerative disease or to prevent it altogether.

29. The Medical Renaissance Group What society does not amplify is the fact that degenerative diseases in our society, including heart disease, cardiovascular disease, atherosclerosis, strokes, cancer, diabetes, depression, osteoporosis and arthritis are due mainly to faulty nutrition, lack of exercise and stress.

30. The Medical Renaissance Group The new medicine which the Medical Renaissance Group proposes is an integrated health system which is based on communication between all specialties of doctors, as well as other health professionals, with the prime aim of giving members of public the opportunity to heal themselves

31. The Medical Renaissance Group Above and beyond all of this is the need to change attitudes and mind-set so that we may have healing in the broadest possible sense- healing not only of our Australian society, but of our Australian environment and our planet as they are all related and all vitally connected.

32. The Medical Renaissance Group • Stresses that doctors are under: • Climate of fear engendered by the increasing threats of litigation and also the fear of the HIC • Too much work and limited time. • Earning enough money. • Difficult to manage patients. • Paperwork. • Intrusion on family life. • Practice overheads. • Time pressure to see patients. • Unrealistic community expectations (within the current system).

33. The Medical Renaissance Group • The Re-education of Patients • a Requirement or instant cures • b Their ceaseless demands for antibiotics • c Their lack of a basic understanding of self help and preventive issues • d The erosion of the Professionalism of the GP who is now looked upon as a purveyor of pharmaceuticals • e The increased burn out of GPs due to inability to manage their stress and the patients` stress

34. The Medical Renaissance Group • Doctors are the Third leading Cause of Death • In 1994, an estimated 2,216,000 (1,721,000 to 2,711,000) hospitalized patients had serious adverse drug reactions (ADRs) and 106,000 (76,000 to 137,000) had fatal ADRs, making these reactions between the fourth and sixth leading cause of death. • Fatal ADRs accounted for 0.32 percent (95 percent confidence interval (CI), 0.23 percent to 0.41 percent) of hospitalized patients. • JAMA April 15, 1998;279(15):1200-5

35. The Medical Renaissance Group The U.S. health care system may contribute to poor health or death.  According to Dr. Barbara Starfield of the Johns Hopkins School of Hygiene and Public Health, 250,000 deaths per year are caused by medical errors, making this the third-largest cause of death in the U.S., following heart disease and cancer. Writing in the Journal of the American Medical Association (JAMA), Journal American Medical Association July 26, 2000;284(4):483-5, Dr. Starfield has documented the tragedy of the traditional medical paradigm in the following statistics:

36. The Medical Renaissance Group in the following statistics: * The term iatrogenic is 

37. The Medical Renaissance Group • The Quality in Australian Health Care Study (QAHCS), published in the Medical Journal Australia in 1995,1 reported that 16.6% of hospital admissions were associated with an iatrogenic patient injury, termed an adverse event (AE) This compares with the rate of 3.7% for AEs in the Harvard Medical Practice Study (HMPS),2 and a rate of 17% in a more recent study with an alternative observational method of determining AE