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Money is the root of all evil.
-- common saying

I'm an American woman and my country is infamous across the globe for having a broken medical system. I'm getting well in part because that's largely got nothing to do with my life.

I have been a military dependent most of my life. Military dependents get most of their medical care for "free" by flashing their ID card and even hospital stays involve a nominal fee of a few bucks per day.

I jokingly call it "The communist country of the American military." My life is distinctly unlike that of MOST Americans, especially with regards to my relationship to the medical industry.

There is a very long historic association between military organizations and medicine. People who go into battle and get wounded need care afterwards.

So while much of America has trouble affording medical care at all and then the care it gets isn't that good, most of my medical care was FREE and also met a standard of excellence not commonly found in most civilian medical facilities.

And it's part of a larger cultural fabric -- for lack of a better expression -- in which the cash pay is not real high but you get a lot of benefits.

Many active duty members are provided housing on base, plus military facilities have their own grocery stores and other shops where you can reliably find goods valued by military families that may not be readily available off base and the costs are typically less, if only because they don't charge sales tax.

When I lived in military housing, we were expected to keep the yard up. And I could go to a place on base, flash my ID and check out a lawn mower and get free sod (sometimes) or free grass seed (more reliably) to keep my yard in the state they expected in spite of them wanting grass in the backyard in a DESERT where grass died regularly.

The military makes sure you eat well and have a roof over your head. Poor diet and poverty housing cause a lot of health issues and then Americans have trouble affording to see a doctor.

None of that applied to my life for most of my life.

So my approach to managing CF with "diet and lifestyle" is rooted in a larger context of coming from a healthy culture that prioritized adequate nutrition and decent housing for all of its people. And then IF you had an issue anyway, medical care was free or dirt cheap.

And it was not a military facility where I was treated like an abusive mother because my son lost five pounds. I never got treated on base with the kind of hostile crap I was met with off base where the default norm assumption seems to be "You must be an abusive parent."

The fact that I come from a culture where you don't PAY for medical care AND you get GOOD medical care where they actually FIX stuff because there is no profit motive involved in keeping you coming back next week for another visit and another round of shots makes me especially aware of the fact that HOW we monetize our civilian medical system is a big part of the problem.

It's also a factor in me not knowing how to make adequate income from my own work.

Much of the world is focused on finding "a drug" to treat CF and the most recent "miracle" drug for CF -- Trikafta -- can cost more than $300,000 annually for a condition that makes it challenging to hold a job AT ALL, so most people with CF aren't exactly rolling in dough.

I'm not a doctor so I can't charge people for medical care. You can go to jail for practicing medicine without a license and while I could theoretically set myself up as some kind of "consultant" to get around that fact, I fundamentally don't want to follow the model civilian doctors follow which boils down to:

They make money off of TREATING you, not from actually fixing your problem, which means it's more lucrative to NOT actually fix you.

I didn't pursue this path to "make money." I pursued it to get myself healthier and it worked.

And now I know something useful but don't know how to readily get money for sharing what I know.

The longstanding standard means to magically get money from the internet without charging your audience money is with advertising. A site like this where I talk about alternative medicine and supplements tends to attract quack remedies trying to make a fast buck.

I'm clear that pwcf are more prone than average to metal poisoning and my best understanding is there is no known means to chelate silver out of your system once you have silver poisoning.

So if I had ads on this site and that meant sometimes colloidal silver got advertised here without me knowing it, I can't even fix you if you stupidly think "She is okay with that remedy. I saw that ad on her site." and buy colloidal silver and take it for some damn reason.

The entire world is already thrilled to pieces to poison the hell out of people with CF and then tell them to quit their bitching about "The Normal Progression of CF" (a code phrase for "just get used to the idea that you are dying a slow, gruesome death and no one fucking cares about you and your quality of life, so stop annoying your doctor with ridiculous demands to do something effective").

As someone who has CF and also has a child with CF, there is no way in hell I will ever take money to help kill people and ruin their lives so I can pay my bills, sorry. That's a no from me.

My preference would be for people to support my Patreon or leave me tips via PayPal. To my mind, that's the ONLY means for me to ACTUALLY talk about stuff that works and you can TRUST that info and not wonder if I'm "just selling something."