The Complete Patient

Richard Hebron tries to take an optimistic view of the Cass County prosecutor’s pending decision on whether or not to file charges in the Family Farms Cooperative raw-milk case.

He takes heart from the fact that many dozens of co-op members have written testimonials on his behalf—discussing the importance of civil liberties, the kind of agricultural system they’d like to see, and specific health issues raw milk has helped them deal with. He’s also heard talk that the Michigan Department of Agriculture (MDA) is being urged to withdraw the case, and has the power to end the entire affair.

“We’ve had a lot of good support in Michigan,” he told me today.

The reality, though, is that the Cass County prosecutor, Victor Fitz, still hasn’t made a decision about whether to file charges and, if he does decide to file, what charges they would be.

He told me today that he is still awaiting one additional report, from another state besides Michigan—“some other information that would be helpful” in the decision-making process. He wouldn’t be more specific about what that information is about.

He also wouldn’t speculate on when he’ll have a decision, and allows that part of the reason he hesitates to give an estimate is that he’s been overly optimistic a couple of times previously. The last time he made an estimate was Jan. 5, when he predicted a decision would come within two weeks.

This case has been dragging out well over three months now since Hebron was pulled over last Oct. 13 by Michigan State Police and MDA agents, and his inventory confiscated; later his home was searched and his computer and business records taken. He's received most of his coolers back, but his computer is still being held and Hebron recently invested about $1,500 in new computer equipment--certainly an expense he didn't need.

Fitz said lawyers in his office have reviewed the testimonials from co-op members. He also said that the MDA couldn’t decide independently to pull the case and not have charges filed. “The prosecutor is the sole determinant of whether charges are filed,” he stated.

So the waiting continues. Hebron continues doing the co-op’s business, delivering milk and other dairy products. Things are fine in Michigan, where he has set drop-off points, but he’s had difficulty arranging for new drop-off points to replace three he lost in the aftermath of the sting operation last October. He's only replaced one, and that is creating frustration among co-op members there. His challenge: “Should I continue trying to get sites back up” there in the face of the “risk of being shut down” at any time by the Michigan prosecutor?

Where has America gone wrong in its shift to unhealthy nutrition?

Michael Pollan of “The Omnivore’s Dilemma” fame tackles that question in an extremely informative New York Times Magazine article, "Unhappy Meals." Be prepared, though—it’s a very long article, and heavy duty in its writing, so I’ve tried to capture some of the salient points.

He sums up the thesis very well in the opening few sentences: “Eat food. Not too much. Mostly plants.” He then goes on to explain why these simple suggestions have gotten so badly screwed up:

--Since simply selling whole basic foods isn’t very profitable, businesses need to come up with ways to procecess and repackage what we eat.

--Powerful industry lobbies prevent the government from telling the truth about nutrition

--Scientists focus too much on specific nutrients and overlook the more complex issue of how nutrients within foods interact with each other.

--Many studies on nutrition are poorly conceived.

--Processing depletes the nutritional value of many foods.

--Factory farming has depleted the soil, and reduced the nutritional value of grains, grass, vegetables, and fruit.

--There’s a “fad-of-the-year” tendency in foods, beginning with oat bran in 1988. This year, he predicts it will be omega-3.

--He offers excellent suggestions at the end of the article, such as avoiding foods with more than five ingredients, staying away from anything with high-fructose corn syrup, and simply eating less.

Unfortunately, some controversial topics that are part of the problematic food chain he describes are glaringly missing:

--The role of the medical community in fostering poor nutrition, largely through its ignorance and preference for pharmaceutical and surgical approaches to health problems.

--The role of Big Pharma in undermining good nutrition by providing “cures” for diabetes, heart disease, high blood pressure, and other byproducts of poor nutrition.

--The role of insurance companies in upholding the previous two problems.

--And, not surprisingly, omission of the debates over raw milk, grass-fed beef (except via inference, where he explains in general how animal products are affected by what the animals eat).

--And omission of the impact of the food industry’s coming push into “functional foods.”

It’s also a bit simplistic in tracing much of the poor advice we’ve received, such as reducing fat and increasing carbohydrates, to a single change in words by a congressional committee. Surely the food industry (along with Big Pharma, big medicine, and others) would have found a way around the “problem.” In sum, though, this article is additional evidence of a greater willingness by major media to acknowledge the errors of our nutritional ways.

Today I received another one of those calls—this one from the American Cancer Society. No, I wasn’t being asked to give money, but rather to send out requests for donations to 14 of my neighbors.

This was the third such call I’ve received over the last couple weeks (or at least, the third such call I’ve answered). One was from the American Heart Association and another from the American Lung Association.

Each time, I briefly apologized to the solicitor and said I wouldn’t be able to help.

What I didn’t do is explain why I wouldn’t take on such a seemingly simple task. (I actually did do it a couple years ago, and it was pretty easy.) I hadn't articulated my feelings all that well, and the solicitors seemed to be paid contractors reading from a script, in any event.

But I now realize I was shying away because I don’t want to actively support these organizations...even though I'm a cancer survivor. Not because they are inherently evil. But because so much of their focus is on what might be referred to as “the medical-industrial complex” and its emphasis on Big Pharma and surgical solutions to the major diseases they stand for.

In so doing, they give short shrift to prevention and holistic approaches to heading off and treating disease.

Dave Milano touches on just that issue (in his comment on my previous posting) when he calls up a Center for Disease Control (CDC) statistical examination of breast cancer. It’s more about focusing on fear factors underlying the disease, than exploring lifestyle and diet habits that can aid in prevention.

These organizations, together with the federal government, are as much, or more, part of the problem than they are part of the solution. Still, I feel twinges of guilt about rejecting organizations that hold themselves out as our national solutions to cancer, heart disease, and lung disease. I know I shouldn’t—it’s just I’ve been so well conditioned.

I felt uncomfortable after I posted yesterday. Sometimes I write stuff, and it doesn’t feel right, and I don’t know why... If I let it sit a while, I usually come to understand the problem, but I was in a rush yesterday to post a followon to my BusinessWeek.com column on privacy concerns about RFID tags, and so didn’t let it sit.

Damaged Justice spotted part of the problem I only sensed: my kneejerk suggestion of putting the onus on government to solve this problem. He provides a philosophical argument for the flaw, which is fine.

I think a related issue has to do with how our society tends to deal with privacy-related problems. The tendency is to allow business to police itself—until some crisis occurs. So we’ve had this buildup in identity theft, and now that millions of people have had their identities misused, the Federal Trade Commission is talking about tightening data security and providing restitution to victims.

Without a crisis, businesses are allowed to do their thing in terms of taking advantage of the leverage technology affords into our privacy. Banks and credit card companies use our spending habits to decide how to market to us, sell our information, or even discontinue serving us if we don’t spend enough, pay our bills too quickly, or whatever.

I suspect what’s going to happen with these RFID chips, whether implanted in our arms or tattooed onto our wrists, is that businesses will provide incentives to people to be scanned. Isn’t that really the businesslike approach? You don’t “require” anything, but rather make participation a seemingly attractive business proposition.

So if you allow Walgreens, Wal-Mart, Safeway, or whomever, to scan for your personal health data as you shop—to decide based on your health history whether to throw aspirin, hemorrhoid medication, or vitamins in front of you—you’ll receive discounts, rebates, special shopping privileges.

So it could all seem not only harmless, but actually beneficial to many people. Hey, I’m saving money just by walking past a scanner. Isn’t that cool.

It’s when people start being denied life insurance or jobs because of a “problem” in their medical history that we’ll begin to hear the outcry. The question is whether the outcry will be loud enough to be perceived as a real problem, or just the whining of malcontents.

The founders of Somark Innovations Inc. are likely so enamored of their new technique for creating tattoos with RFID (radio frequency identification device) capability to appreciate the fact that affixing tattoos with numbers to people has a terrible history—it was the way the Germans marked concentration camp inmates during the Holocaust.

So I find myself wondering, in light of my latest BusinessWeek.com column on this next generation of RFID tags: What is the responsibility of entrepreneurs who contrive these fancy new technologies that threaten to make a shambles out of our privacy? Or maybe another way to express it is this: Do these entrepreneurs have any responsibility for policing themselves?

I’ve met enough entrepreneurs to know that most don’t want to be reminded about such questions, and the two founders of Somark appear to be no different. From their viewpoints, they’re under enough pressure simply to build their businesses—to obtain financing, hire employees, focus on the right markets—all in the face of unbelievably tough competition that would like nothing better than see them stumble. Besides, their primary focus is on “cashing out” in a few years as multimillionaires. So they concentrate on good news, and hope the criticism fades away.

I should say before going on that I don’t see any way of stopping these kinds of advances—and I’m not sure we should want to. They tend to have beneficial spinoffs as well. So given that these entrepreneurs are part and parcel of the capitalist system we live under, I think we have a right to expect some self policing, and also have a right to expect our government to establish guidelines that protect us from the inevitable abuses of the technology that will follow on.

I suggested in my column that these entrepreneurs consider taking a stand against certain applications of their technology. I also suggested they open up their web site to ongoing discussion of people’s concerns.

I offered my suggestions as part and parcel of a marketing strategy—in other words, as a matter of self interest, to stand out favorably in the marketplace and thus “brand” themselves positively. But do these entrepreneurs have a societal obligation as well? I believe they do.

I feel as if our government has an obligation to step in—ideally sooner rather than in response to some crisis—to establish guidelines. The National Animal Identification System (NAIS) fiasco justifiably has many people cynical about government help. But we don’t have a lot of other options. In the meantime, I suspect the blogosphere's concerns about these entrepreneurs will intensify as they get closer to finalizing their product, and that that concern will spread and snowball.