Grievous Faults We See in the Practice of Medicine Today:
- Predominance of the allopathic approach. Alternatives, often more effective
in restoring health, are neglected.
- Large segments of the less financially able are excluded from health care
services except in emergency, and then their quality of care is likely to
be sub-standard.
- Costs have skyrocketed, partly because of the overuse of expensive and unnecessary
testing is routine, and due to the penchant for elaborate settings. We've
come a long way from the days of the house call, but it can't be said that
the health of the average American has improved coincidentally. Something
important was lost with Medicine become more impersonal, more of a big business.
With the emphasis on a high-priced pharmaceutical or surgical solution for
every problem, costs are unnecessarily inflated over what they would be for
an alternative approach which would look at the whole person, with attention
paid to nutrition and lifestyle.
- Psychoactive drugs have become legal and commonplace, with physcians acting
out a role little different from that of drug pushers, pandering to those
who seek short-cuts to an escape from painful thoughts. Many people seek prescriptions
for brain-disabling drugs to dull their senses or alter their consciousness.
This is not a healthy or good long-term solution, and is similar to the 'self-medicating'
use of alchohol to blot out life's troubles. The widespread availablility
of such drugs which are often dangerous and poorly tested is a public scandal.
- Confinement (through the medical specialty of psychiatry or "mental
health"), and increasingly, court-ordered "medicating" as a
public menace persons identified with a particular set of disabilities ("psychiatric")
when the facts indicate only a tiny percentage of such people are actually
a real threat to the community. This is preventative detention or preventative
disablement by drugs, social control which should be under the venue of law
enforcement but is farmed out to medicine. It's a massive infringement of
Constitutionally enshrined human rights. The law has the premise you do not
do the time before you've done the crime. Psychiatry stands this principle
on its head. Not since leprosy was widespread have so many been segregated
and stigmatized with ostensibly medical justification. The mentally dis-labled
are treated as lepers. The media panders to and turns to psychiatric "experts"
for answers to the ever-increasing violence in our society and overlooks the
obvious: drugs. It is estimated that one quarter of the US population are
taking psychiatric drugs today. Most mass killers featured prominently in
the press and whom the press reveals to have had "a history of mental
illness or treatment" have been chock-full of legally obtained psychotropic
drugs. This is the cause of the violence, not any imaginary "mental disease."
They have become severely deranged by the so-called treatment. I have yet
to hear of anyone who has become a better person whose lifestyle included
daily doses of psychoactive drugs. Most of these drugs do cause long-term
irreversable brain changes.
- Blaming the so-called mentally ill for everything wrong in society comes
naturally from the corporate-owned media, who have ties to the profiteering
pharmaceutical industry. Every unpleasant quirk of the human psyche is explained
away as "mental illness" or a "chemical imbalance" to
be fixed by some false panacea or other devised in reasearch on barely or
non-consenting human guinea pigs. As if that explains it. As if that addresses
it. As if that solves it.
It is time to once more make the health care professional a servant of the
seeker for help and health, not a cog in a self-serving, unaccountable and all-too-powerful
industry, and lobby, that is like the tail that wags the dog of government.
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