It seems to me that anytime anyone recommends an invasion of my body as beneficial, whether it be a drug, radiation, a food or surgery, I would want to know why this person believes it will be beneficial and I would want that any reason given makes sense to me.
Why should I believe someone wearing a white lab coat and who knows big words? Because he/she has nurses and administrative assistants attending to him/her? Because there is a certificate on the wall? Because he/she has a legal right to administer "treatments"?
Should I not instead refer to history? Medical history is a continuum of harmful treatments, from bleedings to unnecessary surgery to psycho-active drugs. There has not been a sudden or even gradual break in medical history where treatments have become based on sound scientific research. Only the usual facade of legitimacy and scientificacy.
Medicine's main stratagem is appeal to authority. You want a benevolent parent, someone who knows and is fair, well here you are.
And it's not like the clinicians themselves understand the medical research or statistical analysis of research results or are in any way equipped to critique the constant flow of peer-reviewed career-motivated medical journal drivel... They are not.
Nor do these lobotomized assembly-line clinicians trust their own observations or perform their own evaluations of treatment merit. They only order tests and apply the recipe of "recommended treatment" prescribed by the test results, based on published medical journal pronouncements. They do not probe their patients beyond the canned questions on their checklists of assignable (and billable) "treatments".
It is sad to have reduced medical doctors to this role of drug pushers and selectors for the surgeon's knife, the chemist's poison and the radiologist's dose. Where are the thinking-feeling independent agents of good that we might reasonably hope for?
How did medical school become entry-level gang-membership indoctrination instead of a place of learning about the human body and its metabolism?
Why can't there be any discernment between the obvious and any excuse for some recommendation or drug prescription?
Medicine seriously needs to be democratized. We all need to get to know our own bodies and the human body's remarkable ability to heal itself, given the needed conditions.
I think the first step to knowledge is to rebel against those that feign and hoard knowledge. This rebellion can take many forms: boycott, challenge, punishment...
Take charge. Seek a solution to your oppression. Alleviate or repel your oppression and your health will recover. If it does not then, in any case, you most-probably have an ailment that medical science can do nothing about. Accept this fact and do the right thing.
Its a problem as old as the state, or maybe even more correctly the tribe, because as long as the mentality of group-adherance has existed people have made decisions based on acceptance to their tribe rather than objective fact, even if that fact demonstrates a better path to their individual happiness. Maybe its even traceable to the nuclear family, and even more specifically the idea of filial piety whereby we reward abusive rather than nurturing parenting.
ReplyDeleteThe state has grown and grown to be more insidious over the past few millennia by taking advantage of our progress in productivity and technology while discouraging moral discourse through lies about the Hobbesian state of human nature, and the 'original sin' of man – all sorts of lies to convince us of our need for retributive masters. The state is, after all, fundamentally an institution founded on coercion.
So my fundamental point is that the medical profession, despite being profuse in advanced technology and informed by many scientific disciplines, is nonetheless a 'profession' and thusly gains its credence in name only. The medical profession is just that, and is distinct from the goal of attaining or maintaining health or any other goal you might accidentally presume to be commensurate with it.
This type of (critical) thinking can be taught easily with the ancient Greek texts, even just the well known works of Plato and the pre-Socratics. I don't think its an accident that these types of texts are almost always left out of school curricula.
Likewise there are those who might think professional politicians are in the business of representing or helping their 'constituents' but in reality, their profession is to delay and lie while collecting taxpayer funds at all costs.
Like much of modern civilization, the title and the veneer are separate from the actual content of the thing, and its our lack of moral scrutiny, bashed into most of us from a young age by our family and tribe, that has allowed this continue.
The solution can be nothing less than peaceful parenting and an end to hierarchy in the household, if we accept that the formative years really are the determining factor in whether one accedes to the lies of social hierarchy.
For this reason I'm quite afraid of the consequences of a social/economic collapse, because a breakdown in high tech infrastructure would make it more difficult to disseminate this type of information to those who need it. But maybe the collapse of our civilization or at least a major contraction is exactly what it has wrought, making much of its progress in name only though we claim to be so far more advanced than our progenitors.
I liberated myself from the tyranny of medical authority many years ago. In fact, my health improved greatly once I took my body in my own hands.
ReplyDeleteThe Medical Maffia is as a preisthood that has flourished since the Middle Ages. Once guilds, associations, institutions are formed, they become self protecting as parasites upon their hosts.
Sometimes, I think that the only way to have good health is to be totally outside this Health minus the care system.
Take care,
Mike
It seems to me that doctors used to do more research: they would try the treatment that had worked on other patients in the past, follow up, and always try to make it better. Doctors were scientists, naturalists and artists all rolled into one. I am picturing healers from hundreds of years ago, in a rural setting.
ReplyDeleteToday, part of the problem is that the actual "health-care workers" are not the same people who, in the labs, design pills and treatments. Health-care workers are trained as technicians rather than artists, which is what they should be and how they should view themselves.
Furthermore, due to the mafia-like associations of doctors which plague our society obsessed with the illusion of security, our doctors are too afraid of being sued or of having their licence revoked to work and think outside the box: listen to their instincts, develop and try new treatments based on their experience, etc.
Instead of feeling like you are going to someone who knows about your body, you feel like you are going to see someone who got their medical training out of a Happy Meal box. I understand that many doctors study many years... but why doesn't it show?
Hi Denis: I'm blogging again (yayacanada.ca) and have added Activist Teacher to my "Interesting Places" list. I'm more of an anarchist than a "leftie" these days, but I agree with your caution that it can't be practised as a fundamentalist religion but rather as a guide to outlook and practice.
ReplyDeleteI'm also in total agreement with your antipathy to medical intervention. I haven't consulted a physician in 20 years and am in better health than when I was getting annual checkups - they always found something that "we must keep an eye on". I decided that was how they made their real money - return customers - and why they could eventually put up a "No New Patients Accepted" sign.
I'm also still very skeptical of the "Climate Change/Global Warming" spectre. Wrote a piece on it recently (Climate Change:Both Sides Now) in which I linked to your article: "On the Gargantuan Lie of Climate Change Science".
Glad to see you are still your own person!