Why Have Diseases Increased So Much?

It's a fact that, thanks to improved infrastructure in cities and the absence of large-scale wars, famines, and epidemics, infant mortality has decreased and life expectancy has increased in our country and around the world compared to the previous century. However, these positive developments have been accompanied by a significant increase in cancers, cardiovascular diseases, diabetes, neurological and psychological illnesses, and autoimmune diseases—diseases caused by our own immune system.

One in three people die from cancer, and one in two from cardiovascular disease. Furthermore, these deadly diseases aren't limited to the elderly, as is commonly believed. Almost everyone has a close relative or acquaintance with cancer. A significant portion of these patients are young.

In my daily practice at the university, I perform biopsies and diagnose cancer on numerous patients under the age of 40. A doctor working in a public hospital has to see around 100 patients every day in the outpatient clinic. The age of heart attack has now dropped to the 30s and 40s. According to Ministry of Health statistics, 700 million patients visit a doctor each year in our country. Of these patients, 11 million receive MRI scans, 12 million receive CT scans, and more than 4 million undergo surgery. Our annual expenditure on all of this has exceeded 100 billion Turkish Lira. These figures are increasing every year, and we know that no country's social security system is economically strong enough to withstand these increasing diseases. Of course, this isn't just an economic problem. In addition to the average economic burden of 300,000 Turkish Lira imposed on the state by the 150,000 newly diagnosed cancer patients each year, a very serious social problem also arises for the cancer survivor and their immediate family members. Millions of people forced to care for patients, forced to abandon their productive lives, and lose their dreams and hopes also experience numerous problems, especially psychological ones. What saddens me most is the belief that the consequences of these illnesses are solely the result of genetic misfortune or bad luck.

This belief is prevalent among both doctors and patients. We fail to grasp how our lifestyles, our dietary habits, the environmental factors in our environment, the chemicals we've made an indispensable part of our lives, the heavy metals that accumulate in our organs and fatty tissue, and the intense stress, inactivity, and our lives—where we live without sunlight during the day and in full light at night—play a significant role in our illness. We fail to grasp the serious consequences of a deficiency in vitamins, minerals, antioxidants, and omega-3, which should be present in our diet but are often insufficient due to industrial production conditions. If the meat we eat comes from captive animals fed corn silage and beet pulp, we don't consider the impact that meat will have on our health. Do we think that spraying an apple tree 14 times before harvesting, then coating it with paraffin to ensure the apples can be stored for six months without spoiling, will cause no problems for those who eat them? Or do we realize this, but we just keep sipping our tea, thinking, "What can I do?" My goal isn't to simply bore you and leave you without a solution.

We'll of course discuss our proposed solutions and what we can do. But first, let's diagnose the problem. We all say health comes first, but we don't understand its value until it's lost. When health is lost, it's too late to address some issues. Some of you understand exactly what I mean, while others are in the fortunate minority and haven't yet experienced a serious health problem. In this series, I'll explain how global corporations disregard human health, manipulate scientific studies, and manipulate healthcare systems worldwide, leaving ordinary citizens, and even physicians, helpless. I'll also try to explain what we can do as individuals and as a society.I'll share what you should pay attention to to protect yourself from many diseases, especially cancer, or to fully recover from existing ones. For now, let me just say this: health is a state of complete physical, mental, and psychological well-being. In future articles, I'll primarily discuss the physical and mental factors that cause us to become ill, but psychological factors are just as important. When we look at our society, we see that most of us fail to properly understand life. On one side, we see people who have forgotten their reason for existence, anxious as if God doesn't exist, ambitious as if they will never die, and angry at life, our Creator, and, in fact, themselves.On the other hand, there's a group that lives life around pleasure, tethering pleasure to consumption, deriving pleasure as they consume, consuming as they enjoy, failing to recognize that what they're consuming is, in fact, their own lives. These people, experiencing numerous social difficulties, are also crushed by the workload and intense stress brought on by modernity. Regardless of all this, as a country in the Middle East, we struggle to navigate uncertainty and war, yet we have no time for rest, relaxation, or smiles.

This creates a highly favorable environment for disease. A person who is psychologically unhealthy often experiences a shutdown of many important functions, particularly in the immune, digestive, and nervous systems. For example, chronic stress can cause the adrenal axis to be constantly stimulated, leading to elevated cortisol levels and, consequently, insulin levels. Hormonal problems in both men and women arise from adrenal axis disruption.Chronic stress also directly weakens the immune system. Furthermore, the toxic load of chemicals and heavy metals in your body reduces the function of many enzymes, while the vitamin, mineral, and omega-3 deficiencies caused by the modern diet also impair many vital functions. Your liver's ability to detoxify and eliminate antioxidants decreases, and one day, wherever your genetically weak link is, the chain breaks. Your body, unable to withstand all this, eventually becomes ill.

Until this point is reached, that is, until the disease manifests, unfortunately, no one warns you. They don't tell you how to listen to your own body when something is wrong. Therefore, we believe that preventive medicine and functional medicine approaches must be widely adopted. To summarize the functional medicine approach in one sentence, it focuses not only on treating the symptoms of your disease but also on investigating and correcting the functional disorder that causes it. To expand this relatively new approach in our country, the Preventive Medicine and Functional Medicine Association (KOHEF) was founded in 2017. Educational programs for physicians and the public will begin very soon. Assoc. Prof. Dr. Mehmet Mahir Atasoy