The Cure is the Disease
We built a system that can’t afford to heal you. It needs you almost well — just functional enough to work, consume, and comply. A permanent recovery would be a catastrophic event in the quarterly report.
So the cure became the disease.
Modern medicine doesn’t thrive on health; it thrives on treatment. Every pill, protocol, and copay is a monthly subscription to your own biology. The industry doesn’t sell outcomes — it sells continuity. Every refill is a dividend. Every chronic diagnosis is an annuity.
The more advanced our technology becomes, the more primitive our incentives remain. We can edit genomes, print organs, and simulate consciousness — but we still measure success in billable hours and recurring prescriptions. The system can’t self-cure, because its illness is profitability itself.
We created a world where remission is a rounding error.
🧍♂️ The Perpetual Patient
The miracle of modern healthcare isn’t that it saves lives — it’s that it manages to keep them billable. Diseases that could be reversed through nutrition, environment, or low-cost interventions are kept in ‘research limbo’ because no one owns the molecule. Cures that don’t compound interest never leave the lab. And substances that can’t be patented are exiled to the supplement aisle — stripped of legitimacy by the same regulators who partner with the companies they oversee.
A system designed to treat will never choose to heal.
(If this sounds familiar, it should — the same incentives drive our economic system. I break it down in The Armstrong Economic Code — how the money always follows the manipulation, not the merit.)
💸 The Economy of Sickness
Imagine if the auto industry made more money when your car broke down — would you still expect them to build something that lasts? That’s the healthcare economy. It’s not an accident; it’s design. Chronic illness is the subscription model of biomedicine.
Even wellness itself has been commodified — sold back to us as a premium plan: biohacks, detoxes, hormone therapies, longevity packages. You can’t buy your way out of a system whose profit engine runs on your fear of entropy.
🕊️ The Path Out
There’s no conspiracy here — just math. But math, when scaled to power, becomes theology. The system isn’t hiding a cure — the system is the disease. Every distorted incentive, every lobbyist-written law, every captive regulator, every conflicted journal editor — they form an immune system against disruption.
The cure isn’t another pill. It’s a paradigm shift. The act of reclaiming sovereignty over your body, your data, your biology. Owning your health the way you own your words, your art, your platform. Just as Substack freed writers from algorithmic manipulation, the next revolution will free patients from medical monetization.
When that happens, healing will finally become contagious again.