by Malcolm P. Shiel
“AVOID DOCTORS if you want to live a long life” said a wise uncle of mine who just happened to live to the age of 82 with perfect health. He was writing imaginative fiction, penning incisive essays, and ardently pursuing a romantic relationship with a lovely fortysomething woman until the very last week of his life in 1947, when — you guessed it — he was persuaded to enter a hospital in Chichester over a minor complaint and came under the “care” of the medical establishment. That, as they say, is all she wrote.
Doctors know much more today than they did in 1947, and for some things they are indispensable. But note well the endless string of recalls and horror stories of drugs that, ten or 20 years on, have unexpected and severe side effects that the FDA somehow didn’t catch. And recall how many times they have flip-flopped on what is good and what is harmful to take into your body: There were times when Thalidomide and cigarettes were said to be A-OK, and butter and eggs were called positively dangerous. Up until a year or so ago they thought we needed a whopping eight glasses of water a day — until they discovered no one knew where that dictum had even come from. Medicine is not yet an exact science.
And doctors have, sadly, been captured by Big Pharma and Big Insurance and are (usually unwitting) collaborators with the psychiatrists in the effort to medicate us all to the limits of our sanity and our bank accounts. Most of this drug-a-thon is unnecessary. Giving Ritalin to millions of perfectly normal energetic kids is just one outrage out of thousands.
Today, with the collective intelligence of the Internet and the unselfish efforts of researchers and writers like those at the Life Extension Foundation (LEF), more often than not you no longer need to consult a licensed practitioner or take his licensed drugs to treat what ails you. An intelligent man or woman, armed with an inventory of symptoms and his or her own history, can easily cut through the dross (which is out there) and find informed and even advanced opinion on what should be done. And supplement providers are still more or less free to sell you the substances you might need to treat yourself.
But, just as in the fields of spirituality and politics, there are con men galore in the health field. They mostly fool the uneducated and the uneducable. American Mercury readers would probably never fall for their blandishments, any more than they fell for those of Boy George Bush or Barack Hussein Fetchit. But Big Brother wants to “protect” us all. They don’t think we’re able to make decisions about our own health care.
Every year, Washington bureaucrats overreach their mandate and try to increase their power to control what vitamins and supplements we’re allowed to buy. Every year, especially this year, Pharma-linked and Insurance-company-linked lawyers write laws (that the Congressmen seldom even read) designed to make medicine an ever more tightly controlled cartel with monopoly-like powers. They’ve even tried to regulate Vitamin B6 — and walnuts — and green tea!
Yes, I agree that frauds who prey on the ignorant need to be brought to heel. But the best way to do that is to eradicate ignorance as much as possible. And the worst way to do it is to give more power to the servants of the Drug Trust and the Insurance Cartel in Washington, DC.