Helpful comment. I have an overactive immune system and I'm always on the lookout for ways to get it to relax.
I've done elimination diets and had blood tests to determine foods I react to. I've also met with nutritionists to create meal plans. But over the long term I tend to gravitate back to foods that my family and friends tend to eat which includes stuff that jacks up my immune system (kid didn't finish her mac and cheese? I'm on it!...visit my Italian mom? pasta time!)
So how do you keep to what you know you should do when other people in your life are doing things to the contrary?
It might not be magical, but I wouldn't underestimate the complexity of replicating even simple cells. We haven't been able to replicate an amoeba let alone neurons let alone a brain.
+ have a lot of close friends. According to an 80 year Harvard study, the quality of close relationships was among the biggest factors in long term health.
“The surprising finding is that our relationships and how happy we are in our relationships has a powerful influence on our health,” said Robert Waldinger, director of the study, a psychiatrist at Massachusetts General Hospital and a professor of psychiatry at Harvard Medical School. “Taking care of your body is important, but tending to your relationships is a form of self-care too. That, I think, is the revelation.”
I have other autoimmune disorders and I've looked into getting stem cell treatments outside the U.S because of limitations of what American doctors are willing to do. I found a center in Panama with American trained physicians where you pay out of pocket for treatment (~$25k+ for a week of treatment of umbilical cord stem cells). https://www.cellmedicine.com/ You can apply for treatment on their website and if the doctors believe they can help they will let you know.
When I talked about the tradeoffs of this treatment with traditional American physicians they said they are concerned about stem cells multiplying into the wrong thing. They claim they need more studies showing safety and effectiveness.
I'm undecided if I will go this route, mainly because of cost. In the meantime I'm focusing on dialing in my diet (Wahl's protocol has been mentioned here), meditating (hypnosis has been mentioned here), and intermittent fasting (which has been shown to help improve one's own stem cell generation).
Jordan Peterson, a popular professor, and his daughter are following a carnivore diet with self reported good results. Doctors generally do not recommend this diet but it seems to be reducing autoimmune issues for a small group of people. There is speculation that this diet could be working not only because of the elimination of the offending foods, but because of caloric restriction, which has been shown to have good effects on several health conditions.
It's not just that. The system has ballooned on top of itself: the arms race that is higher education is in no small part a result of government issued loans that seem great at the time but turn out to be a nightmare in practice. Students get caught up in the hype of needing to be a part of the arms race (go to a "good" school) and borrow exorbitantly from their future without understanding what they're actually getting into. Then many companies that pay the best only recruit at the "best" schools, which fortifies the entire system and leaves many students from lower tier programs with a degree, a mountain of debt, and no job.
"Decades of research substantiate the devastating effects of social isolation. Loneliness is equivalent to smoking 15 cigarettes a day and increases the risk of death by 26-45%, which is on par with risk factors such as high blood pressure, obesity, and lack of exercise."
The thing I don't understand is that you can already do this for much less money and arguably in a more fun way. Get a nice-ish real bike ($1,000), some rollers or a trainer ($200), and a subscription to Zwift ($14.99/month). Zwift allows you to create a biking avatar that rides around virtual racecourses with other bikers who are also using the service (usually there are thousands of people riding at any one time). You can do races, talk to other people, and more, for a fraction of this cost. Plus you have a real live bike you can take outside and enjoy.
Professionally:
We designed and built a program that keeps patients with congestive heart failure out of the hospital. We had a ton of autonomy and figured out how to get old, sick people to do new things every day. Then we built an online tool for nurses to track their patients. This ended up reducing days spent in the hospital and saved a ton of lives.
I’ll never go back to a less impactful job.
Personally:
Working through a brutal custody battle that lasted for years and cost as much as a college education. Never wavered from what I thought was best for my kid, never attacked the other party, and ended up with an imperfect but fair agreement. Kid is doing great.
Going through something this difficult ended up being the major inflection point of my life.
The big issue, as you mention, is health insurance companies themselves. They aren't actual insurance companies—they are payers, like others in this thread have called out. Real insurance exists when unlikely but disastrous events occur, like a house fire or a car accident.
Payers act more like surrogates—they bargain and make purchasing decisions on behalf of users like us. This is the fundamental problem in healthcare because surrogates cannot make financial decisions as well as a free market can.
Goldhill’s proposal for changing the industry is to eliminate the role of surrogates and replace it with a version of a health savings account that everybody would be required to contribute into and carry indefinitely, and require everybody to have a very high deductible catastrophic insurance plan. For example, all healthcare payments under $30k would be paid for directly by the patient and come out of the savings account. When something truly big and expensive occurs in a patient’s health (e.g., a cancer diagnosis) is when catastrophic health insurance would kick in and cover it.
This would allow for patients to make active decisions about which type of care to choose, and would force providers to become more competitive to earn the business of actual customers.