Today the 6th anniversary

Today is 6 years since being given the terminal cancer diagnosis, and being told I had a 2% chance of surviving 2 years, and sent home with a file note “palliative care only”. That must put me close to the 1 in a million category.

The fact that I have 5 times had tumours go by diet alone, and 4 times with surgery, is strong enough for me to have high confidence.
The last time I relaxed the diet (5 years and 4 months ago) it took only 2 weeks for a tumour to show up. I had it surgically removed, and histologically identified, just to be sure.
Haven’t missed a twice daily dose of vit C since then.
Haven’t consciously eaten animal products since (though I suspect some products that salespeople claimed were vegan did in fact contain some dairy products – that has happened probably a dozen times over that 6 year period).

I am now clear that it is a relatively trivial problem to reduce the incidence of cancer by over 90% – just by getting people to eat a diet which is mostly fresh fruits and vegetables (over 90% by calorific value) and mostly raw (over 50%), and as organic as possible. Problem is, that is not in the interests of those people making the most money out of health or food supply. The medical profession and the pharmaceutical industry, however much that industry has many great and committed individuals within it, has systemic incentives that are dominated by the need to make money, not to make themselves redundant by solving the problems.

With our exponentially increasing abilities to automate the production of goods and services (including health-care) the systemic incentives of the market place are now directly in opposition to many fundamental universal human needs. And very few people currently experience having any direct personal need to change that – yet the systemic reality seems most likely to be that we all do, but not many understand that fact yet.

Our food supply system, of supermarkets and supply chains, is dominated by heat treated processed foods, because they have a long shelf life, and return a reliable profit. Fresh foods are much more variable, and harder to make profit from, so “cost more” in the current paradigm, even if the energy content and “environmental footprint” of processed food is far higher. Another of the perverse anomalies of market systems.
Heat treatment destroys vitamin C, so most people have far less than they need to maintain their immune systems at optimal function (enough to avoid scurvy, but not enough to avoid colds and flus and other similar).

So we live in “interesting times”.

Change is happening far faster than most people have the time or interest to keep a reasonable handle on. I am a weird sort of “geek” in that respect, spending many hours a day following research reports across all domains of knowledge from AI to biochemistry, nano-materials to ecosystem modeling, engineering to politics, etc – something I’ve been doing for almost 50 years.
My perspectives are far from common, shared by very few, and they are what they are.

Clearly, we are in exponentially changing times, both in terms of the technologies available to us, and in terms of the domains of information and understanding.

We have the potential to provided security and freedom to all, yet our history of the utility of markets to our ancestors blinds many to the current dangers of that particular set of paradigms in the exponentially changing present. We are in one of these rare periods where the past is no longer the best predictor of the future. The context has changed beyond the logical capacity of the paradigm to adapt. There cannot be any longer any logical defense of having market factors dominate our decision making.

We need to be quite explicit, that it is life and liberty, in that order, and universally applied, that offer the greatest benefit to all in the long term, even to those who seem in the short term to be doing so well from the current set of paradigms.

Getting individuals to consider such a possibility is not easy.

Ailsa and I – 19th May 2016