When healthcare became a business

There’s an old saying that almost sounds like a dark joke:

You don’t make money on healthy people.

You don’t make money on dead people.

The real profit lives somewhere in between — with people who are kept just sick enough.

It’s uncomfortable to sit with.

But once you start looking closely, it’s hard to unsee.

Because modern medicine didn’t appear in a vacuum. Behind it is a long economic and historical journey that most of us were never taught — one that gradually turned healing into an industry, and the human body into a marketplace.

In ancient China, doctors were paid to keep people well.

If someone got sick, the payment stopped until health was restored.

Imagine that today.

A flu would mean a pay cut.

Chronic illness would be financially devastating.

Back then, the doctor succeeded when people thrived.

Today, the system succeeds when people don’t.

THE TURNING POINT

The Flexner Report was published in 1910 by Abraham Flexner, commissioned by the Carnegie Foundation and supported by the American Medical Association (AMA).

Flexner’s report called for a standardized, science-based approach to medicine, which emphasized laboratory research, pharmacology, and clinical practice grounded in biology and chemistry.

While the report did help raise educational standards and remove many low-quality or unsafe institutions, it also triggered a massive consolidation of medical power — and an ideological shift that defined “real” medicine narrowly as pharmaceutical and surgical science. Over 75% of medical schools were closed. Funding and legitimacy were redirected exclusively toward institutions aligned with laboratory-based medicine — supported by emerging pharmaceutical and financial interests.

The consequences were profound and long-lasting: 

1) Rise of Pharmaceutical Dominance, leading to a system focused on symptom management rather than root-cause healing.

2) The holistic view of the human being — as body, mind, and spirit — was replaced by a reductionist model treating organs and symptoms in isolation.

You can’t patent a plant, but you CAN patent a synthetic molecule.

Once you see that, the direction medicine took makes economic sense.

In a very short period of time, thousands of years of healing traditions were pushed aside in favor of petroleum-based, patentable drugs.

Not because they were always better —but because they were profitable.

Healthcare doesn’t truly profit from fully healthy humans.

The pharmaceutical industry doesn’t profit from cures.

Our model rewards symptom management, not resolution.

This isn’t about bad doctors or evil scientists.

It’s about structures shaped over more than a century by money, industrial chemistry, education systems, and institutional design.

WHAT HAPPENS NOW?

We are more medicated than ever —and also sicker than ever.

Chronic disease, metabolic dysfunction, autoimmune conditions, mental health struggles.

We have endless pills. But very little healing.

What we need now is fascinatingly simple:

• Real food instead of chemical substitutes

• Nervous systems that actually get to rest

• Bodies that are allowed to move

• Sleep that restores

• Stress that’s addressed, not ignored

• Lives aligned with human biology — not industrial efficiency

Maybe the most revolutionary thing we can do today is return to what was obvious long before modern medicine existed:

Live in a way that supports health —before we need to manage disease.