by Dr.Harald Wiesendanger– Klartext
What the mainstream media is hiding
Modern medicine makes us believe that “precaution” is to undergo as many expensive examinations as early as possible, which will then lead to more expensive measures. Few see through the ugly game with their insecurities, worries, and fears, and understand that real precaution means one thing above all: to live healthily.
Why pay attention to diet and exercise when you can instead try out state-of-the-art devices at short intervals that are guaranteed to detect any flaw? Doctors now even offer flat rates – fears of illness are now available in a cost-effective subscription model. How boring would a life be if you weren’t regularly surprised by exciting findings and expensive therapies?
Avoiding illness requires tiresome, persistent self-discipline and constant sacrifice. How much less stressful is it to have your illness diagnosed before you know it? Being sick is unpleasant – but at least it’s an opportunity to finally experience firsthand the fabulous advances modern medicine has once again made. Who has enough time for preventative Care worthy of the name, and who wants it? We’d rather live comfortably unhealthily.
Healthy people who refuse to go for regular checkups are simply acting irresponsibly towards a pillar of our economy: the disease industry, which thrives on a guilty conscience. The earlier you start to feel ill, the more you ultimately fulfill the economic purpose of a preventative medical checkup. True prevention today requires helping the top performers of the medical-industrial complex as early as possible, securing their jobs, and satisfying investors. Doesn’t it border on selfishness to deny the healthcare market a chance to profit from you? After all, doctors, pharmacists, and pharmaceutical managers also want to make a living, not to mention their employees. Entire professions whose existence is based solely on our laziness and ignorance, our excessive anxiety and hypochondria, would be mercilessly destroyed if we suddenly began to emulate the notoriously unrealistic ideal of notoriously exercise-crazy whole-food apostles? What could be better than cheering up your favorite doctor with vague complaints in economically difficult times?
If you think you’re healthy, you probably just haven’t had a thorough enough checkup. You think there’s nothing wrong with you? Then, you’re simply missing a diagnosis.
Perverted preventive measures are all too often useless; they burden and frighten for no reason.
Appeals for “health care” constantly harass the average person from all media channels. Cleverly crafted with psychological advertising and reinforced by medical authority, they play on their primal fears: Who wants to become terminally ill, endure pain and limitations, or even die prematurely – simply because they failed to get a thorough checkup to counteract a dangerous development in time while it causes little to no symptoms?
And so, in good faith, they fall into a trap that more often brings them unnecessary physical, psychological, and financial burdens than real benefits – especially if they neither belong to a risk group nor are there any concrete suspicions. They are threatened with overdiagnosis – the “discovery” of diseases that would never have caused symptoms or damage. A “false positive” result, even though no disease is present, or a “false negative” that misses it, even though it is present. Preventive Care, as promoted by our ailing healthcare system, actually reduces the risk of death in a barely measurable, if not measurable, way.
Want examples?
Anyone who goes to an orthopedist, because their back hurts, is all too quickly given an x-ray. In most cases, the doctor will subsequently recommend the same conservative measures they would have recommended even without an x-ray: exercise instead of rest – physical activity such as walking, cycling, backstroke, or gymnastics; avoiding bed rest; physiotherapy to strengthen the core muscles, stretching exercises, posture training, and avoiding unnecessary strain on the back, joints, and muscles. Unless other warning signs, such as paralysis or numbness, occur, imaging studies would actually be indicated after six weeks at the earliest. Most back pain will have long since disappeared by then. In up to 90% of all cases, it is considered “nonspecific” anyway: There is no apparent organic cause, such as a herniated disc or fracture. In these cases, psychological factors such as stress, depression, anxiety, and excessive demands are often partly responsible.
An elevated level of prostate-specific antigen (PSA) is widely considered a reliable biomarker for prostate cancer. But it also rises due to harmless inflammation or an enlarged prostate, which affects one in three men over 50, at least one in two men over 60, and three-quarters of all men over 70. PSA testing in older men can indicate slow-growing tumors that would never have caused problems. False-positive results lead to unnecessary biopsies, incontinence, and impotence. Almost every senior over 80 carries benign prostate cancer but dies of something else.
How often would tonometry really be appropriate: measuring the pressure inside the eye? If it’s too high, the optic nerve can be damaged. This can lead to glaucoma and blindness. The likelihood of this increases with age. However, some ophthalmologists also like to perform tests on younger adults with poor vision, who are almost never at risk of a dangerously elevated value.
For no particular reason, many general practices include a stress or long-term ECG in their routine checkup, even if it had previously been unremarkable year after year. Cardiologists are all too happy to perform a complex catheter examination unnecessarily – not only when symptoms indicate an impending heart attack but prophylactically to inspect the coronary arteries.
What about mammography screening in women? Modern magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) techniques are so sensitive that they find more often than necessary when examining the breast. They often reveal precancerous lesions, and whether they will ever become malignant is unclear. Nevertheless, they consistently cause stress and anxious uncertainty, often fueling fears of death – which then lead to repeat imaging, unnecessary biopsies, and mutilating surgeries, even amputation as a precautionary measure because you never know. An MRI reveals all breast abnormalities – even those that pose no danger to the patient. Especially in younger women, the glandular and connective tissue of the breast is denser. On mammograms, it appears similar to tumors – both are white.
Furthermore, technical factors can distort the findings: poor image quality, incorrect positioning, or motion artifacts. Some calcium deposits – “calcifications” – can indicate cancer – but not every microcalcification is malignant. One in four women receives false-positive results from breast MRIs. https://www.bmj.com/content/341/bmj.c5513 Conversely, some tumors grow so rapidly that they are not detected in time during biennial screenings. With more frequent mammograms, especially with CT scans, radiation exposure increases – and thus the very cancer risk they supposedly reduce.
A whole-body MRI or CT scan of healthy individuals as part of a checkup often reveals incidental findings – so-called “incidentalomas” – that seemingly require further investigation and tempt unnecessary procedures. Benign changes – cysts, fibroadenomas, scar tissue, calcifications – can resemble carcinomas.
Speaking of computed tomography: Radiation exposure from CT scans could be responsible for around 5% of all new cancers, according to a brand-new study.
Ultrasound examinations of the carotid arteries, used for “stroke prevention,” often detect harmless narrowings that do not require treatment. They cause uncertainty and tempt patients to undergo unnecessary procedures.
And where is the evidence that bone density measurements prevent osteoporotic fractures (1) – and that colonoscopies lead to fewer colon cancer victims? (2) What data prove that in healthy, symptom-free patients, ovarian screening https://www.zentrum-der-gesundheit.de/news/gesundheit/allgemein-gesundheit/eierstock-untersuchung – a vaginal ultrasound examination of the ovaries, with or without an additional CA-125 blood test – reduces the number of deaths from ovarian cancer? (3)
Why frequent blood tests without a specific reason? Many parameters are nonspecific, vary significantly from person to person, and invite misinterpretation and unnecessary follow-up tests.
Genetic signals can now be detected in blood plasma samples, which are said to enable early Detection of cancer – 3 to 4 years before it is diagnosed. (4) What on earth is someone supposed to do if they test positive? That cancer is not an inevitable fate; That you can drastically reduce your risk through a healthy lifestyle, which is why cancer doesn’t have to break out with relentless necessity in three or four years, nor in thirty or forty years: Does a doctor really need a hyper-far-sighted blood test to convey all this to his patient emphatically?
Savings endanger growth
But warnings only reach a small number of patients – medical advice carries far greater weight, especially the prospect of shedding psychological baggage. “These often very expensive campaigns are hitting a population that is deeply afraid of cancer,” explains Ingrid Mühlhauser, a specialist in internal medicine. The author of the book Nonsense Preventive Medicine (2017) has been researching the sense and nonsense of medical interventions for more than 20 years. From this horror, “there arises the need to do something about it, to prevent it, to escape death from cancer. That’s why one is grateful when one can take advantage of promises of salvation, such as preventive medical examinations. It gives one hope of escaping death from cancer. It’s a kind of medical voodoo ritual to banish fears of death. But these are false hopes being stoked. The doctors behave like the bank or savings bank advisors who also promised us excessive returns without clearly stating the risks.”
Engaging in this ritual is particularly tempting when one doesn’t have to pay for it out of one’s own pocket, as with mammograms and colonoscopies. Admittedly, one has to dig into one’s own wallet more often – because preventive Care, as defined by the medical industry, is usually “iGeL,” an individual health service for which insurance companies don’t cover it. But what does it matter when life and limb are supposedly at stake?
Instead, truly practicing preventative healthcare could avoid enormous costs. A study by HSH Nordbank shows that genuine prevention—that old-fashioned, uncool thing called a healthy lifestyle—would save up to ten billion euros annually. (5) Ten billion is, after all, the equivalent of a few new clinics, a giant hall full of MRI machines, or half a dozen medical conferences in tropical climes.
As the Austrian Institute for Health Technology Assessment (AIHTA) calculates, every euro spent on prevention generates a social return of 15 euros.
According to the London School of Economics, sensible risk management could prevent 1.2 million deaths from heart attacks and strokes in Europe within a decade. A nightmare, at least for shareholders of pharmaceutical companies and rehabilitation clinics.
According to the German Cancer Research Center (DKFZ), around 60 percent of cancer deaths could be avoided through prevention—apparently a worrying prospect for an industry whose growth is based on tumor growth. For them, oncology must remain a medicine based on repairs and pills. In this area alone, its most profitable, the pharmaceutical industry earns well over $200 billion annually (6) – by 2028, this figure is expected to rise to almost $385 billion, by 2030 to around $485 billion, and by 2032 to almost $520 billion.
Severe obesity has long been a global public health problem. In Germany, one in eight women and one in ten men are considered obese – a risk factor for diabetes, high blood pressure, cancer, and muscle or joint diseases. The World Health Organization (WHO) estimates the global costs at almost $1,000 billion (!). (7) How much of this would a balanced diet and more exercise save?
Take type 2 diabetes, for example: Approximately 8.5 million affected individuals in Germany generate direct costs of approximately €39 billion annually – through diagnostics, treatment, and hospital stays. Intensive lifestyle interventions can reduce the incidence of type 2 diabetes by up to 60%. Osteoporosis, for example: Approximately 5.7 million affected Germans generate annual treatment costs of approximately €11 billion. Targeted prevention could prevent many osteoporotic fractures and the associated costs. (8)
Example: Non-alcoholic fatty liver disease (NAFLD): One in four Germans suffers from it, usually unnoticed. It puts one in four Germans at risk of liver cirrhosis and liver cancer, type 2 diabetes, and cardiovascular disease, which leads to enormous subsequent costs. (9) If fatty liver disease has progressed, its treatment costs an average of over €13,000 per year per patient; A liver transplant costs around €120,000, and follow-up care costs €20,000 annually. A healthy diet and regular exercise could prevent almost all cases – and ensure that the liver doesn’t become fatty in the first place.
Rheumatoid arthritis (RA) is one example: Around 700,000 adults in Germany suffer from it. Its treatment costs €28 billion annually. RA is also preventable: Those who don’t smoke, consume little alcohol, eat an anti-inflammatory diet, improve their vitamin D intake, avoid obesity, engage in regular physical activity, get enough sleep, and avoid chronic stress are almost guaranteed to be spared from RA.
Real prevention could save up to €8 trillion worldwide – per year.
The savings potential through real prevention – a healthy lifestyle – is enormous. Because this would drastically reduce preventable chronic diseases such as type 2 diabetes, cardiovascular disease, and certain types of cancer, according to the WHO, the OECD, and studies from The Lancet and Harvard Magazine, €7 to €8 trillion less would be spent worldwide each year – €80 to €120 billion in Germany alone, almost a third of the total cost of healthcare. According to the WHO, the cost of unhealthy lifestyles – through sick days, lost productivity, and early retirement – amounts to approximately 5 to 7% of global economic output. (10)
But those who pull the strings in the healthcare system have always turned a deaf ear to this. Thus, it remains a farcical theater in which prevention means allowing health to be lost in order to seek it out subsequently. Only “when the horse has bolted and patients have become seriously ill do we reach our peak,” https://pharma-fakten.de/news/unbezahlbar-das-gesundheitssystem-als-reparaturbetrieb/ Professor Dr. Christof von Kalle from the Berlin Institute of Health (BIH) at the Charité. And why is that? Because health, this extravagant, completely unspectacular state without symptoms, is economically completely unsustainable – including for the Charité, by the way. Yes, prevention may be sensible – but common sense doesn’t pay salaries. An epidemic of good health would severely disrupt our delicately constructed “disease economy cycle.” It would deprive it of its most important resource: the chronically ill.
No, true patriots eat fast food, continue to smoke and drink heavily, and, at most, move to the refrigerator. Anything else would be a betrayal of the national economy. “You are only healthy,” as the unsurpassed Viennese satirist Karl Kraus once quipped, “when you can once again do everything that harms you.”
The wise man prevents
The wisest of all medical fee schedules originated at least two and a half millennia ago. According to the world’s oldest medical textbook, the “Huangdi neijing,” a doctor in China received full compensation only as long as all members of the clan to which he was assigned remained healthy. If someone fell ill, his fee was reduced, if not eliminated.
If this type of doctor still existed today, what would his consultation hours be like? Certainly, there wouldn’t be an assembly line worker issuing prescription vouchers every five minutes. He would take plenty of time to explain: What diverse factors endanger health? How can risks be avoided or at least minimized as much as possible?
No one can choose their own genetic makeup – at our conception, an egg cell and hundreds of millions of sperm played a lottery. However, we are not helpless when it comes to all the other factors on which our health depends – we can influence the role they play in our lives. And we should, instead of shirking responsibility.
Good medicine doesn’t just occur after health has been lost. It aims to prevent this loss. Prevention saves worry. In addition to treatment, my AUSWEGE /Ways Out foundation is therefore committed to prevention.
Medicine takes Care of your illness – that’s what it thrives on.
You have to take Care of your health yourself – that’s what you live on.
There are only two days when you can’t do anything about it. One is yesterday, and the other is tomorrow.
(Harald Wiesendanger)
Notes
(1) Siehe KLARTEXT: Osteoporosis- Hoax“.
(2) Siehe KLARTEXT „Eher Oh je als Juhu“
(3) Mehrere Studien sprechen eher für das Gegenteil: Usha Menon, Mahesh Parmar et al., Ovarian cancer population screening and mortality after long-term follow-up in the UK Collaborative Trial of Ovarian Cancer Screening (UKCTOCS): a randomised controlled trial. The Lancet, 2021; DOI: 10.1016/S0140-6736(21)00731-5; Buys SS u.a.: Effect of screening on ovarian cancer mortality: the Prostate, Lung, Colorectal and Ovarian (PLCO) Cancer Screening Randomized Controlled Trial. JAMA 2011; 305(22): 2295-2303; University College London, Screening for ovarian cancer did not reduce early deaths, ScienceDaily, 13. Mai 2021; Institut für Qualität und Wirtschaftlichkeit im Gesundheitswesen (IQWiG), Ist eine Ultraschalluntersuchung zur Früherkennung von Eierstockkrebs sinnvoll?, s. https://www.iqwig.de/presse/pressemitteilungen/pressemitteilungen-detailseite_10016.html
(4) aacrjournals.org: “Detection of cancers three years prior to diagnosis using plasma cell-free DNA”: https://aacrjournals.org/cancerdiscovery/article-abstract/doi/10.1158/2159-8290.CD-25-0375/762609/Detection-of-cancers-three-years-prior-to?redirectedFrom=fulltext; sciencedaily.com: “Johns Hopkins blood test detects tumor dna three years early” , https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2025/06/250613013845.htm#google_vignette
(5) https://arxiv.org/abs/2409.02888; https://bhvverband.infomaxnet.de/effektive-praevention-spart-10-milliarden-euro-im-gesundheitswesen
(6) https://www.iqvia.com/insights/the-iqvia-institute/reports-and-publications/reports/global-oncology-trends-2024; https://www.evaluate.com/thought-leadership/world-preview-2024-report/
(7) Siehe KLARTEXT „Big Profit “.
(8) Siehe KLARTEXT: „Der Osteoporosis-Hoaxl“.
(9) https://www.aerztezeitung.de/Medizin/Bei-NASH-drohen-hohe-Kosten-308688.html; https://www.ugb.de/ernaehrungsplan-praevention/nicht-alkoholische-fettlebererkrankung/; https://www.kautzhoch5.de/files/kautz5/news_materialien/NASH_Positionspapier_Feb_2021.pdf
(10) Näheres hier: https://iris.who.int/bitstream/handle/10665/326302/9789289050425-eng.pdf?sequence=1, https://www.harvardmagazine.com/2014/02/the-price-of-healthy-eating, https://www.paho.org/en/topics/economics-ncds, https://www.americanactionforum.org/research/the-economic-costs-of-poor-nutrition/, https://www.oecd.org/en/publications/integrating-care-to-prevent-and-manage-chronic-diseases_9acc1b1d-en.html, https://www.ft.com/content/f0d67cff-8507-498a-91cc-30fbfa65c1c3, https://www.thelancet.com/journals/lanplh/article/PIIS2542-5196%2821%2900251-5/fulltext, https://www.thelancet.com/article/S0140-6736%2819%2930041-8/fulltext.
Harald Wiesendanger,