Our medical thinking has become totally militaristic. It is not just happenstance that doctors proudly assert that they seek to attack illness, combat disease, kill infective agents, and create a war on cancer or on any disease. Physicians seem so entrenched in militaristic thinking that it is not surprising that they have a long history of attacking other viable strategies that seem to be less medical or less militaristic.
In order to treat a patient, the doctor must provide a diagnosis that determines the existence of a “Western medical disease” (what might be called a WMD), even if this diagnosis is sometimes based on faulty medical intelligence or just selective intelligence.
Doctors usually choose to “shock and awe” the body. An elaborate attack ensues utilizing sophisticated technological armamentarium, including the newest painkilling drugs, antibiotics, and chemotherapeutic agents. This militaristic medical solution takes precedence over other strategies that strive to re-establish health through a coalition of forces in order to augment the body’s own defenses. Although a minority of doctors voice dissident opinions and propose less invasive treatment strategies, these voices are muted by the powerful medical industrial complex.
The military industrial complex is but a dwarf next to its medical counterpart. In 2002, for instance, the combined profits for the ten largest drug companies in the Fortune 500 ($35.9 billion) were more than the combined profits for all of the remaining 490 companies ($33.7 billion).[i] Even though Big Pharma couldn’t maintain this same dominating margin in 2003, due to Big Oil getting a shot in the arm in profits from a significant increase in the cost of this commodity, the medical industrial complex is ready, willing, and able to declare a scientifically validated victory, even if this victory is temporary or simply provides symptomatic relief.
In fact, the shock and awe treatment “works” so that doctors proudly declare: “Mission Accomplished.”
However, much to our surprise, but obvious and predictable to many others, thousands of new “terrorist cells” are created. The shock and awe use of drugs create their own side effects:
* The painkilling drugs kill the pain but do not cure the underlying disease and create their own tolerance, addiction, and pathology.
* Antibiotics kill the bad germs but also destroy the good bacteria in our gut that are so important for digesting and assimilating our food.
* And the chemotherapeutic drugs poison and ravage the immune system, creating a perfect environment for new organisms to infect an increasingly weakened and susceptible body.
Side effects, however, are not really “side” effects at all. From a pharmacological point of view, determining which “effects” a drug has and which are its “side effects” are arbitrarily determined. Does a bomb that destroys buildings and kills people have one or the other as a “side effect?” Both are the direct effect of the bomb. Likewise, drugs may effectively suppress a symptom, but the cough we have is the way that the body was trying to clear its bronchial passageway so that you can breath, and our fever is a vital innate strategy that the body deploys to burn out infective organisms. Although the drugs provide helpful temporary relief (and bless them for that), they also tend to suppress the body’s own self-healing propensities and disrupt our inner ecology. Side effects and collateral damage are simply accepted as the price of our war on disease, even if varied strategies for creating the peace are inadequately explored.
Doctors may even be able to go the next step and surgically remove a symptom or an obstructive agent, but the assumption that removing a single symptom or pathological agent will create health is both simplistic and incorrect. Getting rid of a symptom, simply toppling a statue of the person, or capturing a political leader doesn’t create a cure or a revolution. As it turns out, conventional medicine often has no real tools with which to deal with the more complex problems at play…or simply has no plan to establish health once one symptom is removed.
The nursery rhyme about the fall of Humpty Dumpty may provide important insights. This old verse acknowledges, “All my King’s horses and all my King’s men cannot put Humpty Dumpty back together again.” Despite this unsuccessful effort, no one recommends the requisition of more horses and more men to solve this problem.
Our medical generals, however, have not been as insightful, and instead a “surge” in military/medical efforts has been prescribed. Typically, solutions to health problems have been the call for more doctors (and more specialists), more drugs (newer and more expensive ones), and more surgery (after all, medical insurance and the increasing national debt will cover it). And if and when critics assert otherwise, they are branded as unpatriotic…or worse, as unscientific. It is as though we are living under a “doctatorship.”
And if the treatment of one disease is not adequately effective, doctors instead apply treatment to another disease so that perhaps at least they could claim victory some place else. The allergy drug may not get rid of the allergy symptoms, but at least they will make you feel so fatigued that insomnia is no longer a problem, even if the person feels asleep during waking hours. And if the surge in Iraq doesn’t get enough popular support, perhaps a surge in Afghanistan will, even though the very need for a surge (or yet more treatment) is backhanded admission that we are not winning the war or affecting a cure.
But now that the body is seriously ravaged, we are told that we cannot just leave the body on its own. Physicians assert that it is essential that we be there to defend it against new attacks, even if our very presence creates the new increasingly more dramatic terrorist actions, a situation is akin to the increased risk of exposure to virulent strains of infection from hospitals today.
Strategies that nourish or nurture the body’s wisdom, treatments that stimulate or augment our inner doctor, and therapeutic modalities that help to establish a dynamic balance between the body-mind-nature are simply called quackery. This name-calling and reference to “quackery” is a wonderfully clever way to trivialize something potentially useful and important. And ironically, physicians often attack these alternative healing systems even though they have an inadequate understanding of what they really are, what history of use and efficacy that they been shown to have, or the high satisfaction rate that exists for their use by the public. The fact that physicians maintain such an unscientific attitude towards these alternative, complementary, and integrative treatment modalities is part and parcel of our “my country right or wrong” and “our medical care right or wrong” thinking.
It is now time to acknowledge and understand how much military thinking has invaded and occupied our medical thinking. And more important, it is time to explore new thinking to medical and military problems so that we can create greater health and peace.
Dana Ullman, MPH, is America's leading spokesperson for homeopathy and is the founder of www.homeopathic.com . He is the author of 10 books, including his bestseller, Everybody's Guide to Homeopathic Medicines. His most recent book is, The Homeopathic Revolution: Why Famous People and Cultural Heroes Choose Homeopathy. Dana lives, practices, and writes from Berkeley, California.
References
[i] Angell, Marcia. The Truth about Drug Companies. New York: Random House, 2004, p. 11. (Dr. Angell is the former editor of the famed New England Journal of Medicine and is presently a professor at Harvard Medical School.
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During my cancer treatment over a period of years from the best and well-meaning "experts" in the field, I experienced three false negative mammograms and a false negative MRI while I had a 9/9 (most aggressive) cancer regrowth; lymph nodes removed from my body being lost by the lab; an oncologist who a.) couldn't figure out that elevated liver enzymes meant Methotrexate toxicity, b.) thought there was no relationship between 10 weeks of chemotherapy and early menopausal symptoms, and c.) actually said to me "I know it's crude medicine but it's the best we have." And that's just the beginning. Medical plastic tubing with pthalates used to deliver chemo, nurses drawing around the exised tumor site daily with sharpie markers, etc.
The take-home for me? MD specialists in their chosen field of combat have no more knowledge than the latest studies showing 5 out of 10 rats didn't die. Most studies are funded by Big Pharma so you've got to question the validity of results anyway. Many doctors are blind to what's in front of them, much like soldiers carrying guns.
For the last 5 years I have been treated with nothing but homeopathy. I've never been healthier, happier, more productive, more alive. Long live homeopathy, homeopaths, and homeopathic users.
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I see little value in anecdotal reports. There may be even less in your case. Because as I read it, you got cancer, you got treated for it and you're alive today. That suggests the treatment had no effect or a positive effect. Some cancers respond well to treatment the first time only to recur some years later. If that's the type of cancer you had/have, your water plus magic isn't doing anything.
Flu Vaccination: Safe, effective and the most natural way known of preventing infection. While drugs and homeopathic remedies seek to change how your body works, vaccines work with your body's natural immune system to prevent infection.
He was simply making an analogy to the paradigm that conventional medicine undeniably finds itself in. it speaks more to the option for treatment itself (the weapon) as chosen for an enemy target (the disease)
A medicinal approach that has a biomechanistic scientific basis is historically rooted in man's attempt to control and in many cases dominate nature. The reaction to Rene Decartes work split our egos and minds even further from nature and our bodies.
Of course this has served us well in many cases, but just as the Americans like to blow up Afghan wedding ceremonies in taking aim for the enemy Taliban, it has been very destructive too, even in cases of emergencies. (which homeopathy IS suitable for in many cases) It has also been way too simplistic. What we need is a system of medicine that address the complexity of disease and its intimate interrelationship with us, nature, socioeconomics, politics, and the universe. The perfect system is homeopathy!!
Modern Medicine is extraordinarily dogmatic with a basic premise of "There is something trying to get us and we have to kill it, dominate it, or otherwise eliminate it before IT gets us!" Some would call that a rather paranoid stance in relationship to life. The paranoid viewpoint is a very primitive defensive structure that the psyche resorts to defend against psychosis and relies on the projecting of our own fears, insecurities, and forbidden desires on to an outside entity and identifies that object as a threat. Anyone who has ever tried to explore options with someone caught in a paranoid state knows that quickly you become the enemy of that person unless you agree with him/her.
Unfortunately, modern medicine is merely a reflection of the larger social consciousness and attitude, which until is evolves we will remain living in the LAND OF THE AFRAID rather than the land of the Free.
You would think that after the billions, (maybe trillions) in medical research that we would have a less barbaric way of treating disease and less mortality and morbidity from chronic disease. But we do not.
The incidence of chronic disease is on the rise constantly and you would have thought after these billions (perhaps trillions) spent that we would have a much better outcome.
A shift of strategy and public policy thinking is seriously called for. Alternatives like homeopathy provide a much important relief and it is time to publicly fund and support these more.
Flu Vaccination: Safe, effective and morally the right thing to do.
http://www.blip.tv/file/2839117
how come reporters aren't drilling the White House, CDC spokespeople, etc., with some real wisdom and hard questions?
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Mr. Ulllman is wrong. Those with expertise have been negligent in not telling patients that the weird practices patients have decided they now know more about than the expert opinion of medicine are wrong.
Unfortunately, part of the reason for not fighting bizarre practices is financial. Why should a medical center or a hospital allow the patient's money go to an unaffiliated quack when it could go to an affiliated quack or a quack renting space from which the hospital makes money for real medical care.
There has been some push back. Some pediatricians are turning away patients where the parents are so foolish as to not follow the vaccination schedule.
Vaccination: It works. It's older than homeopathy and more in keeping with an appreciation of the natural wonder of the body.
Haven't you noticed, sheldon, that the US is a democratic country (not a DICTATORSHIP)?
Pediatricians are turning away patients who refuse vaccinations? Is that so? In this area doctors are forming medical alliances because they can't bring in enough patients on their own. A few doctors have even retired or closed their practices because they weren't making enough money! And you think they're going to turn patients away!
Para 2: Yes, I've heard rumors of that. I'm skeptical because I've only seen and heard reports of elections.
Para 3: As limited to the "some" I used above: Yup.
Flu Vaccination: Safe, effective and in Canada, one 1/2 dose for kids 3-10 is now OK. Hurray for AS03!
And yet, the countries that have much better health status are the leading countries with such "quackery"!
My above article predicts that people like Sheldon101 defend conventional medicine at ALL costs...and it is at ALL costs. He and they attack other viable methods, just because they are not as militarisitic as his. He is a very scary person because he seems to never learn or never admit error.
It is almost as those he and these other skeptics do not even read my articles but just spew their ill-informed antagonism. Yuck. I hope that the Huffingtonpost readers willl read through their bogus logic and sheer militarism.
"He is a very scary person because he seems to never learn or never admit error."
As usual, attack the person, not the ideas. Makes it much easier than actually having to answer questions. You claim that skeptics never learn. Well, as a skeptic, I have a very open mind. I think anything is possible within the framework of the world we live in, but you have to demonstrate those possibilities. And if the idea you are trying to demonstrate requires extraordinary alteration of what is already known, then extraordinary evidence must be shown to prove it.
I don't discount homeopathy because its impossible. The evidence available does not support the hypothesis that homeopathy works. But if that evidence became apparent I would certainly agree that homeopathy works. The question is, if you are truly a scientist, what level of evidence would be required for you to believe that the evidence does not support the conclusion that homeopathy does work. If you are not willing to consider that possibility and have a point where you would change your mind, then you are not approaching the subject in a scientific manner. You are then dealing with belief and not science.
15 years ago I was diagnosed with cancer and given 2 years to live. I had an MD friend who was Chinese (educated in China) with a post-doctoral university degree in traditional chinese medicine. He advised a conservative approach with western medicine, supported with traditional chinese medicine. I was pronounced clear in 3 months. There is always the possibility of spontaneous remission - until the following happened.
I had a recurrence about 5 years later, took the same approach, and got the same result. I continue to brew soup medicine to support my body's systems, and I've now been clear for 10 years. Two spontaneous remissions in a row? Doubtful.
Using the best of both branches proved successful for me, one complementing the other. I would encourage people to consider a "best of both worlds" kind of approach to their health, rather than an all-or-nothing approach. Being a little open minded has kept me alive. That 2 years has turned into 15 years and still going...
From what I've seen & I live in a community of disabled & chronically ill people, is that those who have love in their lives seem to thrive as others who seem hateful go to their graves much more so than those who are kind & giving.
Our maintenance man whom I just love had cancer & the chemo was very hard on him. I sent him links that told him truth behind chemo & the fact if it doesn't kill you first it can kill the cancer cells but renders one's immune system defenseless.
http://www.naturalnews.com/027038_cancer_chemotherapy_cancer_industry.html
He said he wished he knew sooner & there's no way, even if it comes back that he'll allow that again.
His wife's a nurse & they have all kinds of alternatives now & precautions they take, the latest being eating hot peppers at mealtime.
We eat hot peppers in our family now daily, too, as a preventative measure. With my ex husband, who's my best friend, parents both dying from the disease I can't be too careful with my Grandchildren.
I'm learning about benefits of different fruits & vegetables & am especially impressed with all the things radishes are good for. We eat them daily too & I pack them in my grandchildren lunches & they love them.
http://www.organicfacts.net/health-benefits/vegetable/health-benefits-of-radish.html
Is anecdotal evidence from a single patient of any value to anyone else?. This ain't rhetorical.
Flu Vaccination: Safe, Effective, Morally obliged for a mensch and oh so natural as it uses God's blessing, the immune system to naturally prevent infection.
I think it is safe to presume my oncologist based her prognosis, and her remarks about my two recoveries, on the relevant literature.
That said, I do not advocate people's minds being so open that their brains fall out. I sought out a complementary medical treatment with a long and honorable history to support my systems while in tx by my oncologist. fyi: I hold a healthcare degree with 15 years clinical experience and another 10 years in QA/QM - I understand research models.
a 'civil' war. In the sense of brother against brother, not in the other meaning of civil.
(Interesting that the same word has such disparate meanings).
This article and its responses highlight the fact that allopathic medicine seems to be
in a 'civil war' with other healing methodologies.
If anyone wants to talk to me about it, I'll be available for that here: http://www.otherhealth.com/homeopathy-list-discussion/10887-when-militarism-invades-medicine-doctatorship-happens.html.
God bless!
For more than a generation we have heard that our students are deficient in science and math.
This is the result.
For more than a generation, we have read that American students are deficient in science, math, and just about everything else.
Why should anyone be surprised that such an uneducated population is vulnerable to quackery?
I'm here to say that the emperor has no clothes!! The delusion you have that this Western medicine actually works is a ruse!
Try actually looking at the scientific evidence and you will find that you are wrong.
For those who seem to be stuck in "duck mode" (quacking), and "sheep mode" (never question the status quo) there are plenty of high quality studies, and 200 years plus of amazing clinical results to show that homeopathy is a safe, gentle and effective healing art and science. However you won't be able to study them all in 5 minutes in order to appreciate their validity...
Viva Homeopathy!