Has your health improved by 280% in five years?

No? Well check out this graph—The S&P index fund of U.S. healthcare business nearly tripled from 2010 to 2015. What does that say about the product delivered? Brand, spin and marketing has never been better. Even the stock exchange uses the word “healthcare” when the market measured is “disease management”. I recently presented this a Pecha Kucha in Austin, TX. You care for your health when you eat, exercise, sleep, breathe, and choose habits and lifestyle—A typical medical office is not a place to optimize your health. Health does not come from prostate biopsies and mammograms—profits do though.

Have you seen the study that reported that annual visits to conventional medical offices do not improve your health or prevent future illness? Slate covered it really well here

Disease management occurs as soon as you step into a Doctor’s office—even if you go without any complaint or illness. Because the doctor’s office gets no reimbursement for procedures like blood tests and extended office visits without a diagnosis, without you being tagged with an illness. That’s right, for the doctor-patient relationship to function; you have to be give an illness—better yet, the more illnesses you are given, the better the reimbursement potential. I recently received Amy’s medical record from her doctor, Amy is a 54 year-old woman on one medication for high blood pressure—page one of her medical chart listed thirteen active diagnosis codes. She saw them for the first time in my office and was stunned that she had illnesses in her chart that she hadn’t experienced in over a decade. Her diseases were being mined for cash value through the medical coding and billing systems—the more illnesses defined in her chart the better for billing.

But Amy wasn’t going to her doctor for diagnosis codes she was going, she thought, to return herself toward health so she could lose weight, eliminate her high blood pressure, and prevent the dementia that so affected her mother. Amy asked her doctor why her weight was stubbornly higher and why she could not, following medical advice, lower her blood pressure. He replied, “You’re getting older.

Amy packed left that doctor visit and called my office. She has since adjusted her diet and exercise based upon her moderate insulin resistance [see The Blood Code], lost 11 pounds of body fat, was taken off her blood pressure medication and doesn’t “crash” in the afternoon anymore. She asked me last week, “Why didn’t my doctor do any of this—it’s so simple.”

I explained that her doctor’s visit is better used for disease management and what she wanted was health restoration. And while management is the appropriate goal for many diseases, it fails conditions of metabolism—Weight gain, type 2 diabetes and pre-diabetes, migraines, fatigue and others. Medical business has no interest in eliminating a future chronic illness—it’s a harsh reality of how our medical incentive structure is set.

So what to do? Take more responsibility. Any test that is done, get your own copies, understand their meaning for you, Use The Blood Code to help understand the meaning behind your results. If you want to triple your health, you need to realize that the value you have in your health is yours, not that of your medical providers’ office. Healthcare, the restoration and care of your health, energy and fitness comes from the right mix of investments in your dietary and activity portfolio. With this kind of investment strategy, maybe you can grow your health 280% over the next five years.