"Unless we put medical freedom into the Constitution, the time will come when medicine will organize into an undercover dictatorship to restrict the art of healing to one class of men and deny equal privileges to others; the Constitution of the Republic should make a special privilege for medical freedoms as well as religious freedom."
Benjamin Rush, MD., a signer of the Declaration of Independence and personal physician to George Washington
"At the end of times the merchants of the word will deceive the nations of the world through their Pharmacia." - Rev 18:23 “Pharmacy (from the Greek φρμακον = drug) is the health profession that links the health sciences with the chemical sciences, and it is charged with ensuring the safe use of medication” http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pharmacy
Interesting how these quotations have already come to pass…
Open any medicine cabinet in the houses of most “developed” countries and there they are: bottles of pills of any size, color and shape, allegedly purporting to heal but doing very little more than suck the life and energy out of our bodies and drain our finances.
Turn on the TV any day, at anytime, and some pharmaceutical company will try to sell you some miracle drug to counter the effects of years of ignorance, complacency and excesses. And what is remarkable is the honesty behind all those ads: none of them actually claims to “heal” anything. All of them warn of the inherent dangers of those drugs and of their potential side-effects. So, why are we buying them? What is it about taking a pill and obtaining a temporary quick-fix result that we, human beings with a brain, critical sense and the ability to discern, find so attractive?
Medicine is a huge business. Actually, for quite a long time, I have researched the proportion of illness-related careers held by the entire employed-population in the country (USA). I can’t seem to be able to track down any one number that would summarize it but it is enormous.
Think about this: physicians, surgeons, nurses, nurses aids, phlebotomists and all sorts of therapists already make up a large number of health-care employees, in hospital and clinic settings. Add to them the people working for health-insurance companies, starting with the agents and brokers selling us their policies. Bean counters and paper pushers processing health-related payments and reimbursements account for quite a few as well. We haven’t even yet touched upon the manufacturers of pharmaceuticals and medical devices, from the single syringe and catheter to the X-ray and dialysis machines, hospital beds, wheel-chairs and many others; the list is too exhaustive to make. No hospital can function without waste disposal equipments, laundry departments, restaurants and cafeterias. Let’s not forget the transportation business associated with anything medical: the shuttles taking you to and from the facilities, the EMTs and ambulances and the millions of people providing home healthcare. Pretty impressive. If one were to tell me that a quarter or even third of the population is professionally involved in a medicine-related field, I would not be overly surprised and it may even be a conservative estimate. A large portion of the legal mind handles medical-malpractice occurrences on the plaintiff or defense side. Casualty insurance companies provide the funds and the manpower necessary to handle claims and regulatory agencies such as AMA, NPDB, State Boards of Medicine and the FDA provide a living to hundreds of thousands of people. Medical newspapers and magazines as well as Health-related network and cable TV make up for a few thousand of working Americans. I am sure I missed out on a few groups, such as researchers, but the list, as it is, is already head-spinning,
And yet, people are increasingly sicker, at a faster rate and a younger age… According to the current statistics, 100 million American (including 31% of all children) suffer from a chronic illness http://www.ajph.org/cgi/content/abstract/82/3/364. A third of our population depends heavily on one or more people employed in the health-care related industry. Unfortunately, I was unable to find similar statistics for the other developed countries. So, a meaningful comparison is not possible at this time.
It is true that people do not die as easily as they did centuries ago. They do not succumb to massive bacterial and viral plagues in such enormous numbers. But can we qualify chronic illness as any manner of life? The French have an expression to describe the state of health of our nation: vivoter. To live in difficult material conditions, to live a small, unexciting and unproductive life, to live in a vegetative state, to live in slow motion, to barely function. We barely survive. Not because of our material conditions but because of our overall physical condition. Do you know why? Because our society is much more interested in illness than it is in health. Illness is where big business is.
Should it come as a surprise, then, that an increasingly greater number of people turn to nature for their well-being? On one hand, an enormous proportion of medical-related employees have a vested interest in illness: they make a living in taking part in prolonging a sad state of affairs. Imagine what would happen if they actually cured: many professions would no longer be useful or needed and those employees would have to find something else to do with their lives and their time. In order for a large segment of the population (probably a third… anyone with actual statistics, please contact me with the website where you found them. I would really want to know!) to make a living, the rest of the nation has to remain sick.
To be quite frank, I am among the many who have the vested interest I mentioned: I make a living as an interpreter/translator and it just happens that the medical field is where my services are required the most, way ahead of the legal or social service fields. Since I do need to eat, live and pay my bills like everyone else, I have no choice but be a willing participant in this gigantic system, even though I do not necessarily agree with everything it stands for.
This, however, does not mean that I must keep quiet: folks, until we all decide to regain control over our health, more children will be born with congenital and debilitating problems. The future of our species, already seriously at stake with the systematic destruction of our planet, will be permanently compromised so long as we do not use our brains as they originally were intended: to think, question, judge, discern and take action.
Our highly medically oriented society does not heal. It does not help us improve our ability to fight illness. It does not make us stronger. It does not restore us into wellness. It does not make us smarter. All it does is treat, offer external means to quickly zap unpleasant or even deadly symptoms without getting to their root cause or, worse yet, it forces us to submit to “preventative medicine” such as vaccinations against potential diseases our body is perfectly capable of fending off on its own when properly maintained. And lately, that same society has become increasingly despotic and dictatorial.
In order for me to now be allowed to perform a job for which I am highly qualified, and even though I am not by any means suffering from any illness, I do not come into any physical contact with any patient and I do not handle any contaminated products, it is required that I subject myself to mandatory immunizations against anything from chicken pox to hepatitis, tuberculosis, measles, mumps, etc. The alternative for me is to foreclose on making a living. If this is not dictatorship, I don’t know what is…
What I can assure you of is that whenever I receive one of those dreaded letters summoning me to yet another round of shots, I stock up on Colonix and Toxinout. I don’t have much control over our laws and over the society I live in. I can decide, however, how much damage I am willing to allow to be inflicted upon me. I can do the necessary research and take the products more likely to help me get rid of the poisons I am being injected as the price to pay for being employed.
That, my friends, is what freedom is all about: the right to think, the right to choose and the right to act toward my own wellbeing. The right to mitigate as much as possible whatever damages I am prepared to suffer in order to survive. So long as I function independently from any medical device or drug, I consider myself free. So long as there are natural products to choose from, I consider myself blessed. God willing, enough people will soon come together and petition their representatives to honor Dr. Benjamin Rush and to incorporate medical freedom to the Constitution as one of the most inalienable rights given to man. Wouldn’t that be grand?
Christine
Cbrightlife@aol.com