Sick Care
Why are we all so sick?
Why are so many people ill or infirmed? In New Zealand and indeed around the world people are ‘living short and dying long’. Chronic disease is costing the country billions of dollars. Prevention is the cure for everything. We don’t need a fire engine if our house isn’t on fire.
Public health in New Zealand is much more about disease management (based on the almost exclusive use of pharmaceuticals) than it is about prevention and resolution of the problem This approach inevitably leads to significant expenditure as the end stage of this process is the need for a hospital bed. Approximately 10% of our health budget is spent on the last 6 months of life.
Pharmaceuticals will always be important, especially in acute care, but we must have full and free access to all options.
It would be hard to think of a chronic illness that would not respond well to nutritional interventions.
Diabetes – obesity – arthritis – heart disease – conditions of the eyes – allergies are just a few of the candidates.
For decades Western society has been lied to about the types of foods we should eat, resulting in extraordinary rises in preventable diseases.
As of January 2026 The White House has recreated the food pyramid to what we should be eating – how it should have looked when it was created.
Our bodies do not need processed sugars, processed grains, brightly coloured toxic foods and seed oils. We need unprocessed, unpackaged nutrient dense foods which prevent illness rather than fuel it.
This is part of our prescription for change to Make New Zealand Healthy Again.
News reports state that our health system is in crisis. We are spending upwards of $30 billion per annum on ‘health’, but our hospitals are overwhelmed, doctors and nurses are at breaking point. Plainly if our objective by spending $82 million every day is to have a healthier nation, the statistics certainly don’t suggest that we are even close to achieving this.
The problem is that instead of promoting health and everything that is involved with keeping people out of the health system, we keep pouring money into the treatment of sickness.
Over the decades, regardless of which political party is in power, very little has changed. Why? It’s because staffing at the Ministry of Health doesn’t change when the Government does and unelected bureaucrats are not answerable to the people. This is true in many other developed countries. We have reached a point where New Zealanders should have a lot more say in how their public health system functions.
We will never find what we are looking for if we keep looking in the wrong place