The Elephant in the Swampy Room
Responsible Health VS. the Awful Incentives of the ‘Military Medical Complex’
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Long ago, elephants roamed freely in what is now New Jersey on the eastern seaboard of North America.
By long ago, I mean the 1880s.
And it was only one elephant.
The peregrine pachyderm escaped from a circus train and vanished into the swampland. It was reportedly never found.
The surrounding marshland became known for the legendary Loxodonta. And when the train tracks were removed a century later, the Elephant Swamp Nature Trail took its current shape in the vacated terrain.
A young man upgraded the signage and overall condition of the trailhead and several miles of pathway late last year for his Eagle Scout project. I had visited his Scout troop for a panel discussion in early 2024, and finally made time a couple of weeks ago to check out his work.
It was a multi-mile hike along road shoulders simply to get to the trailhead from where I live, and after walking about a mile on the trail and noting the improvements, I made the long trek home. On the way, I stopped at a farm market for some fresh produce that I roasted simply with olive oil and salt for dinner several nights that week.
Getting outside, walking and jogging, and eating simple foods that have been minimally (or not at all) processed, help fulfill two-thirds of what I call the Three-Legged Stool of Physical Health:
Rest (including, but not limited to, sleep);
Activity (the human body is designed to move; do it!);
Nutrition (consume for quality, not merely quantity).
Neglect any one of the legs, and the stool tips over. Keep them all well-maintained, and the seat is stable, strong, and resilient.
The ‘elephant in the room’: bad incentives
Unlike the literal elephant in the swamp, the figurative “elephant in the room” in modern U.S. healthcare is quite discoverable: perverse incentives promoted by a government-crony system.
I’ve found myself paying more attention over the years to the things I can do to keep myself healthy. And part of my motivation is avoidance of the Military Medical Complex (akin to the Military Industrial Complex of technology and manufacturing).
As I said near the end of Part 3 of my latest visit to “The Jeff Macolino Podcast,” published June 9, 2025 (listen at Spotify, Apple, YouTube, ListenNotes, Amazon, Podchaser):
The incentives in the modern medical system in the U.S. are not designed for patient health. They’re designed to make everybody sick-but-manageable and to convince people that sick-but-manageable is the same as healthy.
Having prescription drugs and a top-down regimen that someone else provides to you, is considered by some people to be even better than healthy! For evidence of this twisted mindset, see the derision heaped upon all the comparatively healthy people who decline provably risky, but widely promoted “vaccines.”
I continued my remarks on the podcast, explaining how my extremely rare bouts with illness are traceable to lapses in rest, activity, and/or nutrition. And I quickly recover my good health as soon as I recommit to my good habits.
Jeff then relayed some of his difficulties navigating the corruption in the Military Medical Complex. He encountered a doctor who became fixated on some boilerplate assessment and trying to prescribe him long-term drugs for something that wasn’t ailing him. Thankfully, Jeff stood up for himself and declined the doctor’s repeated advances!
The role of professional healthcare
When I was three years old, I was run over by a car in the street in front of my house. I needed immediate care for obvious trauma and some reconstructive surgery in the following days, and then a final bit of reconstructive surgery when I was 13 and had mostly stopped growing.
I still have some physical scars.
I’m grateful for the emergency care I received. That’s what the medical profession is best used for: competent, attentive people helping solve problems that immediately threaten a patient’s life, and from which the body can’t simply recover on its own.
For everything else, including “preventative care,” contact with the healthcare industry should be at a minimum, if at all. As my favorite webcomic, Rat Says, suggests regarding those pill bottles, “keep tightly closed at all times!”
But that isn’t as lucrative a model as the systemic intrusions into people’s lives from an early age, including harmful synergies between pharmaceuticals and food producers (I covered some of this in an article last year).
And despite so much hype about the new presidential administration “draining the swamp” of murky, crony, government-affiliated interests in the medical field and beyond, the problems persist. Pills and other ingested products, injections, surgical procedures, topical applications, sedentary lifestyles, and heavily processed foodstuffs still dominate popular culture.
I’m an outlier in how I engage with — or, rather, don’t engage with — mainstream U.S. healthcare and its fallacious “expert culture.” Instead of relying on decrees from a dubious industry, I opt to demonstrate my good health and the individual responsibility that makes possible my lively condition.
I don’t give “medical advice.” I give anti-medical advice; it’s a replacement for the protocols and awful incentives of the Military Medical Complex.
They never did drain the swamp to find that escaped elephant in New Jersey nearly 150 years ago. Likewise, I doubt the government “swamp” will be drained any time soon, and I won’t hold my breath waiting for officials to acknowledge their “elephant in the room.”
Individuals who want positive change will have to reclaim responsibility for their personal health. Override the system’s compliance-based, crony-citizen incentives with your own consent-based, good-neighborly habits and goals.
The Comments section is a no-swamp zone …
… and I promise to acknowledge your elephants (or non-elephants).
What do you think of the three-legged stool description for physical health?
Have you ever escaped from a circus? Ever gotten lost in a swamp?
Been on any good hikes lately? Visited any farm stands?
Anything else on your mind from this essay?
Let me know your thoughts below …
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And, as always: Be a good neighbor, even if it makes you a bad citizen.
I did spend a lot of time with the local carnivals one summer In the early 90s
Agree 100%. I have avoided Doctors and all pharmaceuticals for many years. Great technology for trauma, although I view hospitals as dangerous places. I have suffered some accidents, but on the whole have managed to take care of them myself with good results, and still active and fit at 80.