Just Say No—To Healthcare
The healthcare debate is as boring and stupid as every other debate in the United States. Republicans accuse the administration of plotting to impose socialized medicine and compulsory euthanasia, while Democrats retort that their critics, who have not read the proposed legislation, are resorting to demagoguery because they have no effective counter-argument. Suffice it to say that both sides are lying, though some of the mud they are slinging is tacky enough to stick to the wall.
Of course the Republicans have not read the bill, but, then, neither has the President or most Democrats in Congress. Politicians do not read bills or think thoughts. It is their votes that are bought, not the minds they do not have. All that counts is what side they are on and who has bought it.
I really cannot bring myself to care who says what about whom. If Palin and Gingrich are to be the standard-bearers of any conservative movement, we had better ignore the entire issue and do something useful. Read the poems of Leconte de Lisle, smoke a cigar, say nice things to pretty women in a bar, take your kids fishing. Do anything, but enjoy yourself while you can.
The rudeness of the protestors is appalling. Yes, I know I know, the Left does it all the time. Leftists also do drugs and murder their babies. If this is the freedom of speech protected in the First Amendment, then damn Jemmy Madison and the Congress that passed the Bill of Rights. Just in case you were not already revolted by democracy American-style—the tyranny of demagogues based on consent of the stupid—we have the spectacle of these Town Hall meetings. What is there to get excited about? Yes, they are spending the country into the poorhouse, and yes we shall undoubtedly have an even worse system of medical care.
But, what did you think? That you could live for ever? Two weeks ago I quit taking my blood-pressure medication. I don't feel well, but I am no longer a slave on the Swedish American health-plantation. The last time I went in to see the doctor, he said my blood pressure was a lethal 220/160. He wanted an explanation. I told him that his staff had treated me like an inmate in an asylum. After filling out a form they already had on file, a technician came into the room they had stuck me in and wanted to take it orally. She had forgotten the form in the office down the hall, and going through it again was easier. "Easier for you, but not for me." Her obvious hostility to the white man--she was African American--only intensified. I told the doctor--a nice Filipino--that the Swedish American staff had the kind of manners that could kill a heart patient. He shrugged his shoulders and said he knew they could always improve. If diet, exercise, and (ugh) clean living cannot save me, I can at least die free.
Nonetheless, there are two words used by conservatives in this debate that are worthy of closer scrutiny: one is socialism (or socialized medicine), and the other is euthanasia. It is, in fact, the link between the two that is most interesting.
It is important to distinguish between welfare policies and socialism. A people and/or a government may provide food and medicine to the indigent or set up a retirement insurance plan without embracing Marxism. For a health plan to be truly socialistic, it must be, at the very least, universal and it probably should be mandatory. Under socialized medicine, no one is exempt from payments into the program and in a perfect plan, no private medical care should be available. Obviously, people will find ways of cheating: Russian women offered sex to doctors willing to put them ahead in the line of women waiting for abortions.
But in principle, at least, under a socialist system everyone is in the same boat. A Canadian friend told me of the case of a friend of his, whose brother-in-law was chief-of-surgery in a major hospital, but could not get an urgent bypass operation scheduled in less than a year. His brother-in-law, who knew he would die long before that, put him under sedation until the operation.
Where socialism has been most successful is in Northern European countries, with a hard-working and fairly uniform population. Though there have been many problems in Scandinavia—decline of productivity, disappearance of marriage, an erosion of the work ethic—they come as close to succeeding as is possible for an anti-human ideology. In the 1950's—and here I am just guessing—something like 90% of the Scandinavians were disciplined hard-working people.
What would be the figure in the USA today? We have an infantile and retarded under class that makes up something like 40-50% of the population—roughly, a third black, a third white, a third Hispanic. Some of these people work occasionally or even frequently; some are even hard-working, but they are morally incapable of accepting responsibility for their own lives. They do not pay health insurance, even if they can afford it, and do not save up for the rainy day when they come down with the flu, so they simply clog emergency rooms with every imaginable petty complaint. They know they are owed free treatment.
If socialism does not really work with Swedes, Norwegians, and Germans, imagine the nightmare it will be in this country, where the socialist programs we already have—Medicare, welfare, and some Social Security programs—have so corrupted the lower classes that they have become entirely servile.
But, as I said above, there is not reason to panic. We are all going to be dead some day. The American medical system, however, teaches us to live each day in bondage to death. Not dying—as opposed to living well--is the big objective, followed only by being healthy. This is exactly like our educational system that is not at all concerned with training minds to be intelligent and creative but is only interested in propaganda, basic literacy and job skills. Since they cannot really improve the performance of the stupid, they create equality by stultifying the intelligent. The result of the American Health Education and Welfare State is three generations of Americans who are stupid, timid, and servile, incapable of appreciating anything better than Michael Jackson and Desperate Housewives. They cannot even roll their own cigarettes; indeed, they don’t smoke, not because it is a stupid vice but because it will cut short their entirely pointless lives. There is truth in what we used to say in the good old days, "Anyone can quit smoking, but it takes a man to face cancer."
Universal healthcare is like universal anything—education, food, gasoline, booze—it will have to be rationed. The simplest way of rationing is the queue: People get tired of standing in line and waiting for their operation. Some of them will die before getting treatment, which reduces the number of patients. One can also ration treatment at the beginning and end of life. In the beginning, it will be seriously defective babies, born and unborn, and terminally ill old people.
These people are not especially cruel. Zeke Emmanuel may be a perfectly kind man, as he claims to be, but there is no escaping the logic of Garret Hardin and Dick Lamm—honest men, both of them. In treating human life as organic material, they will find it necessary to distinguish between healthy, productive organisms (babies who are wanted by their parents--by whom they will be given proper indoctrination--and who will grow up to contribute to the IRS) and so much Soylent Green. That is the path they have walked part-way down in the Netherlands, but we can and will go much farther.
"That's just what we're saying," scream the lying conservatives. But it is not. Apart from a few radical libertarians, conservatives support some form of the welfare state, some form of socialized medicine. The only questions they ask are questions of quality: How much? How costly? How fast? Without faith or joy in their lives, they too are obsessed with keeping their carcass out of the jaws of death. The only practical solutions would be quite simple—break up the government regulated insurance monopolies, set up Health Savings Accounts, provide low-cost basic treatment for the poorer classes, and, most important, give up the delusion that we can live forever.
I have already started my own moral and spiritual revolution. For the medical care this aging hulk might require, I am going to take an annual vacation to a free country like Mexico, where the price for pretty-good care and medicines is so low, it will pay for the vacation. I only hope I don't have " the big one" before I have a chance to take the trip. But if I go, what of it? My wife will miss me, but I won't much miss what the world has turned into or rather what my generation has made of it.
My father, in his later years, used to say that he was happy that it was up to me, and not him, to live in this world. I am beginning to understand what he meant. He made the mistake, when the big one hit, of having bypass surgery, pacemaker, etc., which enabled him to drag on for six months of zombified existence. He should have been permitted to die quietly, in the fishing cabin where they found him.
As a people we have become so servile that we expect institutions to take care of us from birth to daycare to schools to college to support groups to hospices. Death with dignity cannot be managed in a government subsidized hospice that encourages you to anaesthetize yourself to death, listening to their bland professional reassurances. If I cannot die as a human being, with my loved ones gathered about me listening for the last pearls of wisdom to come slobbering out of my toothless gums, at least let me die as an animal. The song has it exactly wrong: I would like to be buried out on the lone prairie, where the coyotes howl and the wind blows free. In the meantime, I intend to live, not just to avoid death. As the fine old tribute to Rye Whiskey has it:
I eat when I'm hungry, drink when I'm dry,
And if whiskey don't kill me, I'll live till I die.
That is all anyone can hope for.
Entries(RSS)
Clark Gable once said, "Show me a man who's afraid of dying and I'll show you a man who's afraid of living." Gable was no saint but he lived life hard, was a good friend of the liquor industry, loved to fish with Robert Taylor, and even fought for his country unlike that great patriot Duke Wayne. Thank you, Dr. Fleming, for a pleasurable read.
Regarding Dr. Fleming's suggestion that taking your boys fishing is a wiser use of time than listening to Newt Gingrich's babble, let me brag a little about the fishing prowess of the teen-age boys of St. Athanasius who caught several rockfish and bluefish last Saturday on Chesapeake Bay. The boys did swell. But what a world they will inherit.
The protests have fortified my already solid contempt for democratic politics, although I do not feel very sorry for the liberal pols taking the fire. This is a clear case of chickens coming back to roost: establish lavish entitlemenets and create a class of dependents, and it becomes impossible to adjust those programs without popular hysteria. The real death panel is our mass democracy itself: in order to get elected, one makes extravagant promises; in order to stay elected, you work in vain to deliver on those promises, all while your country "rolls with exceeding smoothness down hill, making paper money and spending it", as Dickens might say.
In a way, this topic reminds me of my own isolation during the Schiavo case. The left are moral monsters.. but the psuedo-right has become almost childishly sentimental. People say you're playing God when you unplug the machine. May well be true, for all I know. But I think you're playing God just as much when you built that machine. I am appalled by the conservative embrace of the increasingly technocratic and progressively minded "health industry", which is rooted in an adolescent culture that wants desperately to prolong life by any means possible, regardless of the costs to dignity.
Cheers,
Neal
All you need to know about the healthcare "debate" is asking how many of the protesters get Medicare. I think you'd be shocked, perhaps just as shocked as how many people think we don't already have socialized medicine or are up to our eyeballs in socialist programs already.
What place on earth is there that doesn't interfere or has institutions that take care of its servile populations? Shangri-La?
Thankfully there's Chronicles for those not who wish to avoid the madness.
I can recall clearly the time before there was any involvement of the federal government in health care, when the doctor would come to your house for ten dollars.
Dr. Fleming, I hope you live life fully for many more years.
Your wit and intelligence will certainly be missed. You still have a great deal to tell your readers.
Oh, Tom, Tom! Please do not cease talking your blood pressure pills. Do not risk our losing you! Stick around for at least a decade or two more, then go "gently into..." God knows, you're needed!
Please!
Tom,
This is an excellent piece of thinking. Like some of the fine wines you have enjoyed in your brief life, there is indeed timing and purpose to the civilized life. You and your friends have lived in an age when telling the truth or having the courage to speak as if there was one, was an extraordinary virtue. A time when the best are taught to despise conviction while the worst are put forward as our leaders. If you died tonight the solemnity of the occassion would make me wonder more deeply than ever what in the world I ever did to be blessed by such a friend and teacher as you. But of course if you live to be a hundred, I hope I am not around to think about you at all.
Dr.Fleming,
Just today, my friend and I discussed this very topic. I had this past weekend attended the funeral of a man who struggle with cancer for a year, a year away from his home and his church family, in a hospital some five hours away. The doctor's "gave him a lease on life" for a year. My father always said that doctors did not prolong life but merely postpone death through pain and robbery.
We decided that Satan's greatest coup, if he could stage one, would be to get men to live forever in fallen and corrupted bodies. I do believe that this temptation is as old as the serpent's advent in Eden:
Genesis 3:4&5" 'You will not surely die,' the serpent said to the woman. 'For God knows that when you eat of it your eyes will be opened, and you will be like God, knowing good and evil.' "
Face lifts, lung transplants, the list goes on.
I interrupt this chorus of sycophancy to opine that overdone curmudgeonliness is just like most anything else that is overdone: It's tiresome and lame. I did not, for a moment, mistake the TJF rant above for timeless wisdom. Mediocre schtick, at best. (He can, and has, done so much better.)
So quit taking your BP meds, Mr. Fleming. Pardon me while I politely cover my yawn.
Mr. Peters,
Your analogy of the prolonging of life to the eating from the tree of knowledge is spot-on. Focusing on our own health and bodies, rather than concerning ourselves with our neighbors and families, has depersonalized the American people. Now we are abstractions rather than human beings.
“That’s just what we’re saying,” scream the lying conservatives. But it is not. Apart from a few radical libertarians, conservatives support some form of the welfare state, some form of socialized medicine.
I doubt that conservatives in general support socialized anything. Republicans perhaps
A few perhaps relevant points. Everybody over 65 is on Medicare. You have no choice. It does not mean that you like it.
If the Republicans were a real opposition party they would be asking really hard questions and clarifying the issues as matters of principle. For instance, how exactly will illegal aliens be treated and what will be the cost. Who is an American in this matter? Instead, as Dr. Fleming says, we have the inevitable boring and stupied diversionary debate. Whining about what they might do to ME when I am old and about the manners of the disputants.
You can bet that what Palin and the protestors have to say are the direct result of Republican operatives and their pre-designed talking points. They are mere cynically calculated tactics designed for political profit and have nothing to do with the real issues.
They badgered my paw-paw into bypass surgery. The result was he lived a couple more years and lost his mind and ended up being stuck in an afro-run and hatian-staffed nursing home where he got to listen to rap music all day(he loved Opera), was treated with contempt, and was repeatedly robbed of his (minor) possessions.
I plan to have the big-one when I'm in my 70's.
You know, it doesn't have to be that bad. Public health care is just like public schooling: not just worthless, but actively harmful, and something to be avoided. But, just as with education, there are other options. Standard western medicine is only good at fixing trauma -- treating these chronic modern diseases, such as high blood pressure, is not where it excels. Google the Weston A. Price Foundation. Their argument, which I find persuasive, is that our modern diet is responsible for our modern diseases. If we can eat like our ancestors -- who ate well, and all the wonderful and delicious things we're told not to eat now -- we can recover our ancestors' good health, and skip all those harmful medications our modern doctors like to sell us. What do you have to lose? Their healthy diet is truly pleasurable, as opposed to the nasty cardboard stuff our government-controlled "health care" system wants us to eat. Frankly, I think it's all one with the nasty cardboard education they dish out to our children. If you figure the government wants a servile people, how better to get it than to adulterate the diet to make them weak and dependent rabbits?
Yes, Medicare is, like unemployment and some parts of social security, an insurance system. It is government run and compulsory, but people who have paid in have a perfect right to collect benefits.
I did not intend to alarm anyone. I use my own case because it is the example I know best. As I explained to my wife and colleagues, medication is too often a palliative that discourages us from doing the right thing, which, in the case of so many people with hypertension, is to eat better, exercise, relax, and avoid irritations like the rudeness Mr. Higdon has displayed. As our mothers all taught us once, it is not polite to yawn in company, especially when the purpose is to express boredom with a tedious old fool. Here in Illinois, a man who yawned during his cousin's sentencing got thirty days. Thus it is only fair that Mr. Higdon be exiled from this site for 30 days. As for me, I intend to see 80--or die trying. One does not have to be an organic kook to understand, as Kate does, that living well and eating right are the best medicines. If I break my ankle another time, I will not do as I did the last time and walk off the pain for six months, with my leg laced up in a brace and a boot. (I thought it was a bad sprain and not a spiral complex fracture). If I need surgery or a treatment with a good chance of success, I'll do it.
PS I use conservative in the conventional sense that includes people like Gingrich, Palin, and the boys at the Weekly Standard and National Review.
Take those meds!
Mr Higdon is a living example of St. Thomas Aquinas' observation that schism is a sin against charity not unity. ( And of course unity does not mean uniformity in this theological sense.) I think thirty days is a just sentence for a man who uses another man's property to calumniate, assassinate and defame his character. (Heck, why not just run for congress!) But since Tom is a Christian and a determinate number of his readers are as well, I would suggest that mercy which is twice blessed and give Higdon two weeks in the solitary confinement of his own blogosheres.
As for Kate and Clyde, as always it is good to read your thoughts.
There was an interesting story reported on the radio here in Illinois at some point late last year. It was about a physician in the Midwest who had become alarmed that many of his regular patients who had lost their jobs, and therefore their medical insurance, had stopped coming to see him and stopped taking their medications. He knew that many had chronic diseases and that for many this required regular medication and monitoring. As such, in order to ease the burden he converted his practice, or at least a part of it, to a cash only business. This meant that he offered regular service and any discounted pharmaceuticals he could get his hands on for a fixed rate that was higher than typical PPO co-pays but much lower than what he would charge out to payors (insurers) for the typical patient visit. I believe the charge was something like $30-40 per visit. What he found was that not only did his regulatr patients return, but many new patients started arriving. Pretty soon his practice became cash only. He found that he could get rid of the two employees he previously had who were entirely focused on dealing with insurers and government agencies (actually, I believe he moved them to patient care roles) and actually made MORE profit as a cash business and had many more patients that were thrilled with his service.
I realize that this would not necessarily work for high-cost medical procedures or hospital stays, but it is illustrative of the mess that is the insurance business today. It is so complex that ordinary doctors offices have to have dedicated staffs that deal with payments.
Dr. Fleming, can you address some of the moral aspects under which this issue should be considered? I only ask because, while I obviously do not love the modern state and its control over all life, I often hear arguments from otherwise sane Christians supporting some form of universal health care. My instincts tell me that it is liberalism pure and simple that has poisoned the well of tradition, but you always excel at placing the arguments in a wider context.
Also, I just received a copy of The Politics of Human Nature in the mail and I am enjoying it immensely thus far.
The ethics of health care is the same as the ethics of any welfare system. Pagan philosophy, the Jewish tradition, the Christian Scriptures, and the teachings of all non-heretical Christian theology down to the Enlightenment emphasizes our primary obligations to ourselves, our family and kinfolk, our neighbors. As Christians we have an additional obligation to provide for holy men and women who have devoted their lives to God. We have charitable obligations to all other Christians and even, in a weaker sense, to non-Christians, but no one is rich enough to discharge such obligations except as alms to the beggars who come our way. Of course, we owe special duties to members of our parish or congregation.
The notion of a universal obligation, imposed on everyone by the state, is the outgrowth of classical liberalism and its Marxist offshoot. The early liberals argued that the state had to remove barriers to individual fulfillment--class barriers, religious tests, etc., but when it became apparent that the English poor would remain poor, no matter what barriers were torn down, liberals began arguing for a positive obligation to render people more likely to succeed, e.g., by giving free education or improving diet and health care. This was liberalism's left turn, and they soon joined forces with non-revolutionary Marxists, to produce the leftism we call liberalism in America.
What makes the universal health care argument more pernicious than the welfare argument is that it is brimming over with a fear of death that arises from the conviction that the here-and-now is all there is. In this respect it is like opposition to the death penalty in assuming that human life is a purely material phenomenon.
In an ideal society, healthcare would be the exclusive preserve of families, local communities, and religious societies, and if the churches in America would quite spending all their resources in corrupting minds, they could work out alternatives to socialism by setting up medical schools, as Aaron Wolf suggests, or recreating the insurance societies that have turned into nothing better than competitors with the secular companies. In a very imperfect world, we could institute some state-run charity to provide minimum treatment, aimed especially at pregnant women and children, though I do not see why local communities cannot do it. Because this is how welfare works. I am taxed, say, $10,000 to support various welfare programs, and this is sent to Washington. By the time it reaches any poor person, it has shrunk to perhaps $1-3,0000, as it pays for politicians, bureaucrats, and grafters at several levels of government. But why should Rockford money not stay in Rockford and be spent by our local gangsters? We are an average city in an average state, which means that we can easily pay for everything we need. Taxes would be lower because there would be fewer layers of bureaucracy, graft, and corruption, and we could also impose rules that reflected our "values" and waiting periods for eligibility to discourage bums from Chicago moving in. It makes obvious sense and can never be implemented because the whole point to the system is a) to increase the power of the national government and b) to pay for the bureaucracy, graft, and corruption for which big government exists.
People who say that universal health care is required by Christianity are either completely cynical or completely ignorant of Christian teachings or so incorrigibly stupid it is not worth talking to them.
The core issue, I suspect from experience, is that blood pressures medications often affect brain function in a way incompatible with daily intellectual production. Unfortunate when one's work demands that. Even at lower levels of blood pressure, say 170/120. Some types of drugs seem worse than others. I suspect also that a period of some weeks or a few months is required to adjust one's blood pressure, by drug or by regimen, to a new lower level, and that adjustment by any means also affects mental function. The proper drug (usually, unfortunately, discovered by trial and error) should speed up that adjustment, and dosages can in the end be lowered or eliminated. The mental side effects of the drugs tend to partially fade away with time anyway. I don't see the issue as different from treating a broken ankle, except that the cerebral effects of stroke, the real worry, do affect our humanity substantially.
That said, I must say that in this context, even the most sensitive and thoughtful clinicians at a Catholic medical school still tend to aim for maximum life expectancy rather than good cerebral function!
"That said, I must say that in this context, even the most sensitive and thoughtful clinicians at a Catholic medical school still tend to aim for maximum life expectancy rather than good cerebral function!"
Every medical student in every Catholic Medical college today should be required to work for Mother Theresa's Sisters of Charity for six months or a year before graduation. Not only would they learn something about death, but also about life -- which Socrates described as a meditation on death. Of course the first in line should be the disturbed neurotics writing columns for the neo-con kingdom, folks like Christopher Hitchens who get paid to emote in public, "secular conservatives" and the kids posing as republican leadership. So no worry, proud Protestants are way down on my list of folks needing "saved". Pace
#15. Why not define as conservatives everyone who is against the Marxists? All conservatives should be protesting this Marxist assault on our liberties and one of the very few ways left to protest is to go to the town hall meetings. The Marxists are extremely well organized, they know how to twist language and they know how to exploit our weaknesses including the internecine conservative squabbles.
Republicans, as usual, are missing the point, this time on the "death panels." This makes it easy for their fake sparring partners, the Democrats, to score easy points by denying that Obamacare would impose "death panels."
In fact, the "death panels" already exist. A good priest I knew was snuffed out by the hospital back in 1995. I have a few more details on my blog (link at upper right under "blogs"). It's not yet as bad here as in Holland, but as Dr. Fleming said, it soon will be.
If the Democrats were honest, they would put Dr. Kevorkian in charge of the entire socialized medicine system.
My apologies for not realizing Medicare, like Social Security is not a voluntary program, but it still makes my point of the ignorance of saving the USA from socialism while living in a socialist state and benefitting from various socialist schemes. No one is seriously advocating getting rid of medicare altogether or making it voluntary and it would surprise me if opportunistic Republicans try to rile up senior citizens against health care reform by arguing that such reforms would come at their expense of their benefits. After all this was the same party that illegally bent House rules to hold open a vote in order to give seniors prescription drug benefits.
Just before his death last month at 113, Henry Allingham, the World's Oldest Man, attributed his longevity to "cigarettes, whisky and wild, wild women."
As a scientific experiment, for the first two I'm substituting cigars and bourbon.
And in the nightmarish future, politically incorrect enemies of the state who resist indoctrination and groupthink will be sentenced to recycling. Tripes will be harvested from the customers of the justice system and the nomenklatura will be the prime beneficiaries. Robert Heinlein may have written a novel on the subject.
Or else there's the Idiocracy scenario, where in a dumbed-down fututre world, all scientific research taking place at Saint God's Memorial Hospital will be dedicated to curing baldness and prolonging erections.
Ask your doctor, there's a 50-50 chance he speaks English.
Thought provoking, Dr. Fleming.
The question that must be asked of liberals/Democrats/Republicans and all forms of modern day, mainstream, political creatures - Where do you want to surcease government control of human activity? What is your endgame? Ask them 4 years later and invariably the threat, problems or crises have shifted and the government must act now to solve or mitigate them. This, in spite of the fact that the majority of such issues have existed since the beginning of time and have either been mitigated - to the maximum salutary limits - with private charity or else viewed by society as aberrant, reprobate, or worthy of shunning. Yet, Leftists will always find new forms of discrimination, bigotry, or inequality to wage war against. Meanwhile, our faux-conservative, thoroughly leftist and no less deluded, opposition will continue to scour the globe for monsters to destroy. In 21st century Babylon, we call this democracy. The health care debate(sic), is no different. Nowadays everyone is a utopian, whether its the magical Free Market Fairy coming to lower prices and give everyone world-class health care, or a puissant government.
Dr. Fleming,
Take your darn meds. cause if you are gone I'll miss all of this heavy water you are toting.
The world is lacking any measure of profound common sense which is an item you supply in great amounts.
Course if you do wish to go out in a fury then might I supply you with some of north Georgia's finest likker?
Non-taxed of course.
McCallum
Thanks for the good responses and the misplaced concern. If I can't find a natural way of controlling BP, I'll bite the bullet and go to a free-market doctor in Mexico. I have an excellent health plan with an HSA +PPO but I cannot abide the doctors and their office staffs. Since dropping the meds, I have lost 6 pounds, toughened up, and cut back on the demon that was invented to repress the Celts. No sign, however, of a lowered BP, but these things take time. In the meantime, when it soars, I break down a take the pill at night. I'd rather have the likker. A little anecdote. I was once visited by two Serbian Orthodox bishops. The senior man was the Metropolitan of Montenegro, a most impressive monk who had entertained me several times in Cetinje. The routine in Serbian monasteries is to provide sok (jice), kafa, mineral water, and some form of rakija. What do do in America? I made some good coffee, poured out local apple cider and some mineral water from Wisconsin, and luckily had a quart of moonshine from Western Virginia, given by a reader. When the Metropolitan bolted down the first two ounces in a gulp, he smiled, rubbed his chest, and remarked "Vruce je," (It's hot) and held out his glass for another. <br.
Mr. Whitmoore is exactly right, as are the other commenters. I would say to Mr. Bailey, though, that any alliance built upon common opposition to some principle or group is doomed to fail. That is the history of the Fusionism of the 50's and of the conservative movement that, in the 80's, allowed the neoconservatives to take over. I knew a writer once who hated Marxism because in his country the Commies cracked down on pornography and fornication. Then there are the libertarians who simply want a license for cruelty and vice. Tell me what you are for, and I might join in some conspiracy. I don't really care about what you are against.
Dr. Fleming:
I would recommend checking all the alternative medicine books you can. I used them find that, for acid reflus, I could replace Prevacid with digestive enzimes, which I soon didn't even need except on occasion. And, for arthritis, and cetyl myristoleate for Celebrex. So I went from two Big Pharma drugs with heavy side effects, especially the Celebrex, to one over-the-counter oil. (Some people can give up the cetyl myristoleate after a couple of months, but I couldn't.)
Two good books ones are "Dr. Atkins' Health Revolution" and "Prescription Alternatives" by Earl L. Mindell. Celery is supposed to be good for lowering BP.
The government doctors recommend low-fat, high-carb diets for BP, but I think Dr. Atkins is right that the opposite is true, especially for Northern Europeans. Our ancestors, if wealthy, feasted on mutton and veal; if poor, got by on squirrels and rabbits. Everyone drank or ate dairy -- raw. But they didn't eat rice or grains.
So feed the granola to the birds and dig into a good steak.
#31. My problem is that by discounting both Obama and Palin, Obama wins. The Marxist attack is in full swing and on all fronts.
Nr Seiler,thank you for posting the two books. My wife has scleroderma and acid reflex is one of the symptoms. I'll be checking out your suggested books,again thanks. There was a time when my parents took me to the Doctor and paid cash for the visit,what changed?
I had the doctor badgering me to take bp medicine, because I feel like I am backstage prior to playing "Aranjuez" when I am at the doc's office and my bp rockets 30 or so numbers higher. Now, a good garlic soup works wonders, as does choppping raw cloves up and washing them down with water. Boil five whole heads of garlic for about 20 minutes. cool them down and squeeze the bulbs into a quart of chicken broth. Add whatever you like to this. Eat frequently.
@19"Pretty soon his practice became cash only."
I have often wondered why, with all the technological advances in manufacturing, there isn't a "MRIs R Us" and a "Wal-Mart Imaging Center" in every town. One would think that a cash-only business would would defeat third-party payer operations handily. The cost of every other consumer technology eventually comes down (computers, flat-screen TVs, etc), why not diagnostic medical equipment? It is obvious that our health care regulatory and insurance agencies have a lockdown on who can offer such services to the public, but it shouldn't cost two thousand dollars every time someone gets a snaphot of their body with a technology that has been around for decades.
That is like saying, "By discounting Hitler, Stalin wins." In the line-up Palin v. Obama, it is the choice between bone cancer and heart attack. Either way, you are dead.
Mr. Scott you stole my line with the MRIs are Us. Last year I had experienced some sudden hearing loss and after a hearing test and such the doctor suggested strongly for a MRI to rule out a tumor.
The prescription was to the local hospital's MRI unit where I went soon after when I couldn't find out about any alternative sources or even nailing them down for a price.
Weeks after the procedure I received my bill for $2600. They had billed the hospital $5200 which was negotiated down by my insurance company to $3200 which the insurance paid $700 after my deductible was satisfied. The rest was up to me.
I tried to negotiate that down directly but they can't work hardship or any other method since I brought insurance into this.
Well right after this I see commercials for basically MRIs are us on television, options I didn't know existed until now. I called to see what I could have paid had I offered cash with no option of insurance. They finally put me in touch with the doctor that owned this imaging lab and he told me he could do it for $1400.
I wish I had left insurance out of this from the beginning but when one feels he is under duress you make somewhat rash decisions. Oh well, next time.
I would like to second WAPF (Sally Fallon's "Nourishing Traditions" is a great health book, and interesting reading) and the Price-Pottenger Nutrition Foundation. Having said that, some corrections to what was said above are required. First, if you have acid reflux, you (nost likey -- 99+%) need to take digestive acid, Betaine HCl is the most commonly used. Next, if, like most people, anyone has eaten mostly well cooked (actually overcooked) food, then he will benefit significantly from taking digestive enzymes; 50+ plus year olds eating the Standard American Diet (SAD) who don't take these enzymes are slowly starving to death from lack of nutrients. Then, ALL of these modern prescription medicines whether for high BP or other degenerative diseases are toxic to the liver, and many of them have "effects" of less than 5% which is usually insignificant. Lastly the quickest way to naturally and healthily (?) reduce high BP is to eliminate sugar (which also includes high fructose corn syrup, our modern breads, pastas, pastries, potatoes, and rice, all of which our stomachs reduce to sugar in the stomach in less than 20 minutes, plus eliminate vegetable oils, so-called omega 6 fats, (exclusive of olive, coconut, palm kernel, avocado and some essential oils) and include in the diet essential fats (so-called omega 3 oils) which are found in wild fish, and pasteured (no corn fed stuff) animals. If you need more bulk in your diet include lightly steamed vegetables smothered in butter. And, I understand that there are a number of farmers near Rockford that produce and sell pasteured beef, lamb, swine, chickens and eggs -- no excuses there.
Of course if you put it that way. But this is not about health care only. It is about Obama being able to shove whatever he wants down our throats from and we are gonna like it. So to me, standing aloof and watching the ongoing spectacle while being amused by it is not eoungh. From reading Pat in the earlier column, I did not think he felt that way either.
Concerning what MR Sheeley wrote at 35, fresh Garlic will lower blood pressure and bad cholesterol levels, but I'm not sure how effective it is.
I've never eaten it for my health, only because I like it, but at any rate, my advice is not to go too heavily on the garlic lest you reek of it. I know from experience.
As for the general thrust of the article, it appears that, it light of what appears to be coming, it would be a good idea for us all to begin researching for effective alternatives to mainline health care, wherever they may be found or whatever they may be.
I very much appreciate all the advice on alternative health care, but I should suggest one caveat: The problem is not that we die but that from fear of death we refuse to live and spend too many waking hours brooding about our test results and blood pressure readings. It profits us very little if we transfer AMA inspired anxieties to an obsession with eating right. If we find ourselves refusing to eat ordinary food with friends or have to pour fish oil or beet juice on top of decently prepared food, then we would be better off going to the physicians once a month and let them bear the burden of worrying about our health. Socrates once said, famously, that while other men lived to eat, he ate in order to live. The same rule should be applied even more stringently to diets, exercise programs, and food fads. We Americans, because our lives are both shallow and hollow, are forever running the risk of turning a moderately good idea into a ruling passion and a ruling passion into a religion. Donald Livingston's wife, also a philosopher, has a little sign over her computer: "Eat right, stay fit, die anyway."
PS, and yes to Allen Wilson. Modern medicine is a valuable resource, but we should treat it as we treat any other technology--with suspicion and with full awareness that we can become as dependent upon physicians as we are on our computers or recorded music. The better we live right now, the less dependent we are on all these technologies and the better able we shall be to cope with life, if or when the system begins to break down.
Comment number 19 by Eagle above is interesting. One of the few things I learned as an engineering student many years ago is that the federal government will not pay a discriminatory rate. The context was not health care, but computer time. A professor explained that, because the university was paying for its mainframe with sponsored research funds, students' computer time cost the university real money. Therefore, we undergraduates got short shrift. It surprises me that a physician could offer lesser rates to cash customers than to Medicare customers without finding himself in the gulag.
In Washington DC for many years, we were afflicted with one Dr. Gabe Mirkin, a health radio talk radio host who lectured his listeners on the benfits of eating the food of rabbits rather than the food of men. No thanks. Yes, eat a balanced diet but if the choice is a diet of bean sprouts and bran and a few extra weeks of life or a diet with the occasional steak, jambalaya, crab cakes or shrimp and grits, give me the latter diet.
That diet fads can effect the quality or length of life is a Puritan heresy that appeared in the 19th century at the same time as other manias like abolitionism, prohibitionism, anti-Catholicism, gun control, free love, and vegetarianism. Assumes that some special human knowledge can purify Creation and that Sin is in the object rather than in the human heart.
Dr Wilson, I think you just put into a simple nutshell what I have been trying for years to state to myself and others with less clarity and brevity.
Amen, Dr. Wilson. And thank you Dr. Fleming for putting some sensible perspective on the health craze we are engulfed in.
I used to get pulled into the diet fads. Alas, I was reared in a Pentecostal holiness (a movement of Puritan descent) home. There was a long list of sinful things: drinking, smoking, chewing, playing cards, dancing, ad nauseum. Almost everything was a sin; not the doing of it or the motivation for doing it, as much as the thing itself. I was a prime candidate for the salvation of diet fads. And diet fads almost universally lead to binging (a.k.a. gluttony). Until I understood that my attitude toward food and health was “that Sin is in the object rather than in the human heart,” I too was a binger, not to mention being an on-again-off-again exerciser.
For the last few years I have been focusing on my heart instead of my stomach, and I have actually been losing weight and getting healthier. I eat less. I usually stop eating when I am full. It is much easier to say “no” to desserts and snacks. It is easier to follow my mother’s advice and eat my vegetables. I exercise mostly in the fresh air and sun when I am gardening. I still “celebrate” occasionally, but even my celebrating is more temperate—I hate the bilious hangover I get from gorging. And I do this without having to be a prig at restaurants, family gatherings and potluck dinners. For a while I used to spout some of the rude things like “Oh, I don’t touch beef fat, or refined sugar.” Now it’s more a matter of reining my gluttonous nature. Of course I still have occasion to overeat or binge on sweets, but I do so less frequently.