The Illness Industry—You’re Not Meant to Get Better

If Modern Research Is So Advanced, Why Are People Sicker Than Ever?

Apr 15, 2025

Part One: You’re the Product, Not the Patient

We live in an age of miraculous medical technology. Heart transplants are routine. Robotic surgeons operate with millimetre precision. Gene therapy promises to rewrite our biological fate. Billions are spent each year on research, drugs, diagnostics, and public health initiatives. So why—despite all this advancement—are people, in almost every developed country, sicker than they have ever been?

This isn’t a rhetorical flourish. It’s a documented reality. Chronic diseases like type 2 diabetes, cardiovascular conditions, autoimmune disorders, obesity, and depression are not merely rising—they are becoming the norm. Half of all American adults have at least one chronic illness. A staggering 12% live with five or more simultaneous conditions[1]. Mental health disorders are now the leading cause of disability worldwide, affecting nearly one billion people[2]. The youth—supposedly the healthiest among us—are now grappling with anxiety, depression, and eating disorders at epidemic levels[3].

What went wrong? Could it be that the very institutions entrusted with protecting our health have, instead, profited from our perpetual sickness?

The pharmaceutical industry, once hailed as the saviour of mankind, is now among the most profitable industries on Earth—amassing over $1.5 trillion annually. Yet many of its largest players have been found guilty of suppressing data, bribing regulators, and knowingly unleashing harmful products. The opioid crisis—engineered in large part by Purdue Pharma—killed hundreds of thousands, all while executives laughed their way to the bank. If that doesn’t alarm you, it should. Because this same industry continues to fund and control much of the scientific research that sets public health policy today[4][5].

And what about the science itself? It too has been warped by profit. Studies have shown that industry-funded trials are significantly more likely to produce favorable results for the sponsor’s drug compared to independent studies[6]. Medical journals, once bastions of peer-reviewed truth, are now vehicles for polished corporate propaganda. Even editors from The New England Journal of Medicine and The Lancet have publicly admitted that much published research cannot be trusted due to commercial bias[7].

Still think you’re being protected?

Perhaps you’ve noticed how easily a doctor reaches for the prescription pad—how quickly your condition is given a name, followed by a pill to match. This is no accident. It’s called overmedicalization, and it is by design. The business model is clear: there’s no money in a cure, but an endless stream of treatments? That’s gold.

The elderly, for instance, are routinely placed on ten or more medications a day—a practice so common it’s been given a name: polypharmacy. But who benefits from this? Not the patient. The adverse effects, drug interactions, and cognitive decline are all well-documented[8]. But the system continues, because each prescription represents a sale, a transaction, a shareholder dividend.

Look further upstream, and the picture gets darker. We are surrounded—inundated—by endocrine-disrupting chemicals, heavy metals, microplastics, carcinogens, and synthetic compounds that the body does not recognise and cannot eliminate. The CDC has published extensive data showing over 200 industrial compounds present in the blood and urine of average Americans[9]. Fertility rates are plummeting. Hormonal disorders are soaring. Cancer is striking earlier. Still, little is done. Why? Because the industries responsible for the contamination are the same ones funding the research that allegedly proves it’s “safe.”

We are also eating ourselves sick. Most of what passes for food today is not food at all. It is a manufactured product—engineered in labs for taste, shelf life, and addictiveness. Ultra-processed foods now make up the majority of calories consumed in the West. They’re loaded with synthetic additives, refined sugars, seed oils, and preservatives linked to metabolic dysfunction, obesity, and inflammatory disease[10]. Meanwhile, corporate-sponsored “nutrition science” continues to confuse and mislead the public with changing guidelines and skewed priorities.

But the most insidious part of all this? It’s not that people are getting sick. It’s that they’re being blamed for it. The narrative suggests we’re lazy, unfit, undisciplined—too attached to our screens or too weak to say no to junk food. But how can personal responsibility be fairly assigned in an environment engineered to destroy health?

Even public health itself has been captured. We need only look at the COVID-19 response to see how easily “science” was weaponised for political and financial gain. Alternative treatments were suppressed. Healthy dissent was silenced. Safe, effective off-patent medicines were discredited to pave the way for billion-dollar emergency-use authorisations. We were told to “trust the science”—but only the science approved by those who stood to profit from our compliance. And if you questioned it? You were labelled a threat. A heretic. A danger to public safety[11].

Does that sound like science? Or does it sound like a cult?

If you think this is all just the cost of progress, ask yourself: why are ancient traditions of food, community, and movement—the very cornerstones of health—being stripped away and replaced with artificial substitutes? Why are spiritual well-being, connection, and human resilience so absent from the conversation? Why do we now live in a world where you can be plugged into machines, pumped full of chemicals, and called “treated”—while still feeling empty, disconnected, and chronically unwell?

Is it possible that the institutions who claim to guard our health are in fact guarding a system of profit built on our continued dependency?

While much of the data and examples cited focus on the United States, this crisis is not confined to America. The same patterns—corporate capture of research, overmedicalization, toxic food systems, environmental degradation, and manipulated public health narratives—are echoed across every Western nation. Australia, the UK, Canada, New Zealand, and most of Europe follow similar pharmaceutical approval pathways, rely on the same flawed studies, and permit the same industrial contaminants in their food and environment. This is not an American tragedy. It is a Western one.

The question now is not whether modern research is advanced. It is. The question is: to what end is it being applied?

Until we reclaim the purpose of science—from control to care, from profit to principle—this trend will only worsen. We are not looking at a failure of research. We are looking at its success—in the hands of those who do not serve you.

And until you understand that, you are the product.

Part Two: Behind the Curtain – How Medicine Was Captured

To truly understand why modern research so often fails to produce health, we must look back—not just at contemporary corruption, but at the very foundation of the modern medical system. For what if the crisis we are living through today was not an accident of recent decades, but the inevitable outcome of a century-old blueprint?

That blueprint was laid down in 1910, with the publication of the Flexner Report.

Funded by the Carnegie Foundation and backed heavily by the Rockefeller family, the Flexner Report was sold to the public as a noble effort to improve medical education. But what it actually did was far more insidious. It obliterated every form of healing that did not conform to the emerging pharmaceutical model of biomedicine[12]. Homeopathic colleges, naturopathic schools, chiropractic and osteopathic institutions, herbal medicine programs, and even psychiatric approaches that emphasized nutrition and community care were shuttered, defunded, or discredited by a single stroke of industrial policy disguised as science[13][14].

The man behind this medical revolution, Abraham Flexner, was not a doctor. He was not a scientist. He had never studied medicine. He held a degree in the humanities and had been a private school teacher. And yet, with the weight of the Rockefeller and Carnegie empires behind him, he was handed the power to redefine what counted as legitimate medicine across the entire continent[15][16].

And what did his definition include? Only what could be measured, monetized, and mechanized. The “biomedical model” that Flexner enshrined treated the human body as a machine, illness as a mechanical failure, and healing as the administration of chemical substances. In this new paradigm, the soul disappeared. The environment became irrelevant. Food, faith, family, trauma, and traditional knowledge were all rendered meaningless. Only lab-validated molecules remained.

Flexner openly denigrated non-conforming schools as “sectarian,” their treatments as “quackery,” and their practitioners as charlatans. He deliberately sought to antagonize and destroy anything outside the newly sanctioned model. And destroy he did. Nearly 80% of homeopathic, naturopathic, and alternative medical schools were shut down, often in poor and rural areas where conventional care was already absent[17].

This was not reform. It was conquest. And it was never about better health. It was about control.

Following the report, Rockefeller money flooded only those schools that aligned with the pharmaceutical and surgical paradigm. The rest were left to die. Over time, nutrition, herbalism, mind-body practices, and lifestyle-based healing were erased from medical training. Even psychotherapy was marginalized, replaced by a chemical-based model of psychiatry that saw emotional distress not as a human response to suffering, but as a “brain disorder” requiring lifelong drug treatment[18].

The ripple effects continue to this day. Psychiatry, once a diverse and holistic field, is now dominated by psychopharmacology, with selective serotonin reuptake inhibitors (SSRIs) and antipsychotics handed out as first-line treatments—despite mounting evidence of their limited effectiveness and dangerous side effects[19].

All of this set the stage for a medical system built not to heal, but to dominate. A system that evaluates your worth as a patient not by whether you recover, but by how reliably you return for your prescriptions.

And in this context, the COVID-19 era begins to make perfect, chilling sense.

Because a system built on Flexner’s foundation—one that discredits anything it cannot patent—will never embrace cheap, natural, or traditional approaches to health. It will suppress them. It will smear them. It will outlaw them. And when a new drug technology comes along—especially one that is patented, novel, and capable of mass deployment—this system will rush to adopt it. No matter the cost.

And that cost, we are only beginning to understand.

A new year-long study has shown that mRNA COVID-19 vaccines significantly altered cytokine levels in young, healthy adults. These changes included sustained increases in inflammatory markers like TNF-alpha, IL-6, and VEGF, a full year after vaccination[20]. The study’s authors suggest that this prolonged immune stimulation may be linked to continued spike protein production and the inflammatory properties of the lipid nanoparticle delivery system. The implications are staggering. If the immune system remains unnaturally activated for months on end, what happens to long-term health?

We were told these products would stay in the arm. That they would be metabolized quickly. That they would not affect fertility, inflammation, or immunity long term. But evidence now shows otherwise—and yet the system that demanded our compliance remains silent on the risks. Why?

Because a machine built on profit, authority, and monoculture cannot tolerate the revelation that it may have harmed millions. And it certainly cannot allow alternative perspectives—those grounded in nutrition, lifestyle, traditional healing, or environmental detoxification—to offer competing models of care. That would be admitting the model is broken. That it was always broken.

The Flexner Report did not improve medicine. It amputated it.

And as we face skyrocketing rates of autoimmune disease, anxiety, depression, infertility, metabolic dysfunction, and now immune dysregulation following gene-based injections, we are seeing the consequences of that amputation unfold before our eyes.

This isn’t just medical mismanagement. This is generational betrayal.

We were taught to trust the experts. To kneel at the altar of science. But we were never told who built the altar. Or what they burned to light the flame.

And now, as the smoke clears, the truth becomes harder to deny:

You were never meant to be well. You were meant to be managed.

Gaz’s Substack

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