Dr. Awais ZakaDecember 2024 shook the world of healthcare with an unprecedented incident. A nondescript fellow of no apparent significance, a typical American, killed the CEO of a multibillion-dollar health insurance company. But this was not the incident. This brutal murder, in fact, hardly raised any eyebrows. It was the general population’s embracing of the shooting and the shooter that took the world unawares. For the wise, this public glee in the gruesome killing reflects the rift between the healthcare and the people.
Being an active practitioner in two healthcare systems that are worlds apart, one in the East and the other in the West, my work comes packed with forceful reflections. I cannot help the sudden comparisons between the two systems that my mind automatically makes while I care for my patients. This spontaneous comparative analysis enforced on me by the nature of my work has given me deep insights into healthcare, patients, people, and the pivot that holds them all together, which is, unfortunately, not the health but the money.
As a well-wisher of healthcare, I have a wishlist for healthcare, a list of tangible changes that healthcare must introduce as early as possible. This move is the only way forward and the only way out of the current moral crisis of healthcare across the globe.
Patients First
Despite strong claims of “Patients First” by many modern healthcare systems, their services are tailored solely on a financial basis. For this purpose, healthcare in even highly educated and democratic societies don’t hesitate to use chicanery. As to the medical professionals in the third world, their charter is simple, “Patient fee first.”
An entrepreneur myself, I fully understand the importance of finances in a business. I have also realized that sometimes you have to accommodate another non-related service under your roof to make some profit. In the business model of modern healthcare, however, profits have assumed a preference over patients. Too often, it seems as if healthcare feeds upon the patients and their diseases to not only run their operations but also hoard wealth.
This model needs to change. Although this view of the financial side of healthcare remains hidden from the general population, but the growing knowledge of the market economy and increasingly visible financial metrics of the corporate world would soon drop the curtain, revealing the ridiculous amounts at play, up to billions of dollars annually, at the same time when an average patient has never held a hundred dollar bill in his hands.
How can this multibillion-dollar industry of equipments and instruments, pharmaceutical and chemicals claim to serve the general population? When you look at these corporates’ revenue profiles, the slogan “Patient first” seems to fall flat on its face.
Depolarization between Pubic and Healthcare
The killing of the United Health CEO and the ensuing applause for the killer confirms the growing mistrust between the patient and healthcare. The cynicism about healthcare and its operations has become more widespread than we care to believe.
The major dent in the reputation of healthcare and affiliated beneficiaries has come from social media health experts, gurus of healthy lifestyles whose free advice about food and exercise is changing the lives of millions every day. This magical reversal of chronic diseases and improvements in health—physical, mental, clinical—due to a healthy lifestyle has got the patients thinking “Why didn’t the doctor tell me all that.” And “Do the doctor, his clinic, or his hospital gain something by keeping me sick?”
The silence of the healthcare community lends credence to the conspiracy theories of healthcare leaders being in bed with pharmaceutical, insurance, and other medicine-related industries. If this goes on, that day is not very far when the public would start demanding the declaration of healthcare leaders’ assets, the day, I believe, would end all conspiracies, confirming the worst.
Healthcare is walking on thin ice. If healthcare cares about patients and, most importantly, about its own reputation in the community, it must make rapid reforms. A good first step is transparency in dealing with patients, allowing third parties access to their data. Such non-biased research can save healthcare and bring back its lost privilege. Next, healthcare has got to change its view of chronic diseases, embracing them as a continuum of unhealthy lifestyles rather than individual illnesses, a subject that requires another paragraph.
Healthcare and chronic diseases
The concept of insulin resistance has revolutionized our understanding of chronic diseases. Irregularities involving insulin appear to be the cause behind every single problem with metabolic health, be it high blood pressure or bad blood sugar, high uric acid or poor cholesterol, more weight or weak bones, inadequate erection or impaired fertility.
And yet, the term “insulin resistance” has not made its way to medical books. Millions of doctors will pass out of medical school in 2025 without a clue about insulin resistance, while more than ninety percent of their patients have insulin resistance. It is as if we are sending out the army to deal with an enemy without preparing them for enemy tactics and weapons. No wonder our doctors are completely failing the community against chronic diseases.
In December 2024, Canada updated its diabetes management guidelines, which mentioned every diabetic medicine on earth to manage diabetes but not the low-carbohydrate diet, perhaps the best tactic to fight and even reverse diabetes. This negligence is very, very, very serious.
In 2025, deliberate silence on the concept of diabetes reversal and the role of diet in this reversal is not acceptable. The medical community must either admit that the discipline of diet is beyond its expertise or offer a lack of evidence as grounds for its silence on diabetes reversal. If they delayed doing so, the patients would have no option but to think that omission is intentional and commissioned by pharmaceutical.
Final Words
People in the third world hate healthcare; people in developing countries mistrust healthcare; and the CEO incident indicates that the people of developed countries have also joined the club.
Across the globe, trust between the public and healthcare is rapidly eroding. I believe that healthcare cannot limit itself to treating the sick alone; it must commit itself to preventing disease. Until then, people have reasons to believe that healthcare benefits from their sickness.
