The myth of preventive medicine Universal health care is the worst possible solution to our nation's health care problems. The government thinks that money and mandates can solve everything, but medicine just isn't that simple. Case in point: The Obama administration wants to pump billions of taxpayer dollars into preventive care and early detection programs. What a complete waste of time and money. I've said it before and I'll say it again: annual check-ups, in general, are pretty useless. There's not a lot of proof that preventive care actually prevents anything at all. I've been telling you this for years, and recently this idea has finally started to gain quite a bit of traction in the medical community. In a recent blog entry on USA Today, primary care doc Kevin Pho hit the nail on the head when he said that "for every inspiring story of a person cured from cancer made possible by early detection, there are untold stories of many more who suffer from the side effects of unnecessary invasive procedures stemming from false positive test results." If you've been with me for any amount of time, you've read my opinions about the downsides and inaccuracies of some of the most common cancer screening tests out there: PSA for prostate cancer and mammography for breast cancer being two of the biggies. What's more, overloading the system with a greater demand for these tests may considerably dampen the urgency for new and better screening methods. "Early screening tests are not always in the patient's best interest," Dr. Pho said in his blog. "As much as we'd like to believe that early detection automatically leads to better care, that is not always the case. There cannot be a one-size-fits-all approach." But the government does everything on a one-size-fits-all basis. So while upwards of $7.8 billion is spent every year on annual check ups, don't be fooled into thinking they're preventing anything. The best way to prevent disease and improve public health is to make smart food choices. Do that, and you'll drastically reduce your chances of getting any major disease. In fact, studies have shown that proper diet can reduce the risk of Type II diabetes by as much as 90 percent, and reduce heart disease risk by more than 80 percent. Of course, the problem is, if you ask 10 different people their definition of "proper diet," you'll get 10 different answers. And chances are, most of them will be way off base. But I'm here to set the record straight. If you want to find out the best - and easiest - way to eat for good health, read my upcoming July issue of The Douglass Report. There's big news on the stem cell front. Researchers have used stem cells from bone marrow to create a new cancer-killing protein. So far, lab mice have been the only beneficiary of the discovery, but the news and powers of stems cells just seems to get better and better. The researchers created a kind of hunter-killer cell that attacks and kills cancer cells while sparing the healthy cells. These mesenchymal stems cells can literally travel around the body looking for cancer cells to destroy. When injected into lab mice, the hunter-killer cells were able to successfully destroy cells of squamous, breast, lung, and even lethal cervical cancers. Up to 38 percent of the tumors were completely eliminated. Doctors say what's best about this kind of stem cell is that it's "immunopriviledged" - a fancy way of saying that the human body doesn't recognize it as an invasive foreign body and will not try to destroy it. This is promising because it's thought that when this is eventually used for humans, the treatment won't have to be tailored to the needs of individual patients, but can be made in large batches. Maybe a massive success of this level would be enough to keep stems cells from being a constant political football, and put them back into the hands of researchers where they can do some real good. | 
