NYTimes: The Island Where People Forget to Die
The entire allopathic model is essentially geared to modeling sickness and disease, not health, so most are sadly ignorant of the factors that actually contribute to good health. In that article you will learn that the reason why Ikaria is a pocket of longevity is because it has been isolated from the normal shipping lanes of Greek islands for longer, that the people there dislike clocks and watches which reduces the tyranny and stress of mechanically measured time, that they relax, exercise frequently by walking or gardening, that they often nap, eat a mostly plant based diet, have strong community(which Greeks have a more encompassing term for κοινωνία). So what makes you live longer, must almost necessarily be bad for the God of almost everyone in this forum pretending to be Buddhist or atheist, economic Growth.
Medical canon has little or no mechanisms to recognize that people have dysfunctional families, poor paying jobs that also have an associated low social status, lack of community, no true friends, that they live in environmentally degraded areas, etc. It cannot factor in social and other conditions caused largely by capitalism, since the medical field is structured to ignore that people are sacrificed as externalities to economic growth. If things were otherwise, health professionals like doctors, psychiatrists, therapists, physicians, surgeons would have to be at the forefront of fighting economic growth by primitive accumulation, capitalist maximization and other methods. Instead the medical fields systematically teach their too numerous victims that their health is bad because of their personal failings manifested as an innate genetic defects unique to themselves and not situated anywhere in actual social space-time or as Buddhists would say, independently arising. That is a grave crime... The system is designed, so that when you are down, if you are poor, you are mentally damaged, you are genetically predisposed to disease, it is your fault. Thus medical victims are not recognized as the sacred sacrifice to the God of Growth. Too convenient.
Here is an example from a totally alien type of society to ours, where sickness could not be perceived as individual or arising from the discrete and separate self:
Overall the medical profession does mostly net harm in anything outside of emergency care(IE. If I saw off my finger, they are excellent at sewing it back) and their purpose is to adjust people to capitalist growth and progress. You don't see many doctors out there at the front line presenting medical objections against pollution from the new factory opening near a residential area, opposing new highways which will cause lung problems from all the increased particulate matter in the air, opposing the increasing work hours most people are undertaking which always takes a bodily and psychic toll, opposing nuclear plants, or doing anything in general to promote health in a preventative matter. Actually there are a few exceptions which I could name, but they are too few. What they do instead is damage control for the God of Growth on the tail end by dis-empowering people from taking steps to prevent health problems before they arise, emphasizing an approach laden with invasive testing, pharmacology and surgery. If it were otherwise every time anything that leads to more growth or commerce would be proposed to be built, the doctors and physicians would have to take the lead in preventing it on the grounds it is an obstacle that would have be subsidized in terms of public and private health, less life expectancy, and that it would cause more stress and decrease life satisfaction.Charles Eisenstein wrote: The Ascent of Humanity: Chapter III: The Way of the World
We can hardly conceive of an origin of life that does not start with an original living creature, discrete and separate from its environment, because that is how we conceive an organism, a "being". Yet other cultures recognized a more fluid identity in which the defining unit was the family, the tribe, the village, the forest. The very meaning of "I" is culturally determined. The shaman Martin Prechtel speaks of a culture in which a person beseeching a medicine man to cure his ailing wife says not, "My wife is sick" but rather, "My family is sick."V The sickness is as much his own as his wife's. Or if a few individuals in the village are sick, he might say, "My village is sick." Even if a Western doctor might judge him a magnificent specimen of bodily health, he would not agree with the statement "I am healthy" because to him, "I" means something different than it does to us. Its boundaries are more fluid. For him to say, "I am healthy but my family, village, forest, or world is sick" would be as absurd as to say, "I am healthy but my liver, kidneys, and heart are sick." Someone immersed in such a culture might not see the appearance of a replicator as the key event in biogenesis at all.
V. Talk to the Green Gathering conference, September 2003.
Here is what an alleged founder of Western medicine said:
Today that sounds so quaint and foreign to modern ears. In 1910 business interests interests conspired in the United States to release the Flexner report which backed by the American Medical Association cartel, created the modern allopathic system based on the public as passive observers consuming only pharmacological pills and surgery. Thus today on average American doctors receive only 23.9 hours contact hours on nutrition during their whole mis-education. Now if Hippocrates was really the founder of medicine and doctors were really on our side in terms of health, would this be the case? Health in our society is not something you participate in via your diet or lifestyle, it is something you consume as an insipid type of dis-empowered consumer known as a medical patient. They cannot question the social construct of food, which allows food conglomerates to make huge profits by allowing the public to be mislead that any processed or pre-cooked garbage from company A is good as company B.Hippocrates wrote: http://www.greekmedicine.net/hygiene/Fa ... ation.html" onclick="window.open(this.href);return false;
Everyone has a physician inside him or her; we just have to help it in its work. The natural healing force within each one of us is the greatest force in getting well. Our food should be our medicine. Our medicine should be our food. But to eat when you are sick is to feed your sickness.
Finally a prominent dissident within the medical community:
Dr. Robert Mendelsohn wrote: http://www.whale.to/vaccine/quotes20.html" onclick="window.open(this.href);return false;
The door to the doctor's office ought to bear a surgeon general's warning that routine physical examinations are dangerous to your health. Why? Because doctors do not see themselves as guardians of health, and they have learned precious little about how to assure it. Instead, they are latter-day Don Quixotes, battling sometimes real but too often imaginary diseases. The disastrous difference is that doctors are not tilting at windmills. Rather, it is people who are damaged by their insistent search for dubious diseases to conquer.
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Greed plays a role in causing unnecessary surgery, although I don't think the economic motive alone is enough to explain it. There's no doubt that if you eliminated all unnecessary surgery, most surgeons would go out of business. They'd have to look for honest work, because the surgeon gets paid when he performs surgery on you, not when you're treated some other way. In pre-paid group practices where surgeons are paid a steady salary not tied to how many operations they perform, hysterectomies and tonsillectomies occur only about one-third as often as in fee-for-service situations." ---- Robert S. Mendelsohn, MD. Confessions of a Medical Heretic (1979) Chapter 3 ("Ritual Mutilations"), pp. 58-59.
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Modern Medicine would rather you die using its remedies than live by using what physicians call quackery.
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Medical students are further softened up by being maliciously fatigued. The way to weaken a person’s will in order to mold him to suit your purposes is to make him work hard, especially at night, and never give him a chance to recover. You teach the rat to race. The result is a person too weak to resist the most debilitating instrument medical school uses on its students: fear.
If I had to characterize doctors, I would say their major psychological attribute is fear. They have a drive to achieve security-plus that’s never satisfied because of all the fear that’s drummed into them in medical school: fear of failure, fear of missing a diagnosis, fear of malpractice, fear of remarks by their peers, fear that they’ll have to find honest work. There was a movie some time ago that opened with a marathon dance contest. After a certain length of time all the contestants were eliminated except one. Everybody had to fail except the winner. That’s what medical school has become. Since everybody can’t win, everybody suffers from a loss of self-esteem. Everybody comes out of medical school feeling bad.
Doctors are given one reward for swallowing the fear pill so willingly and for sacrificing the healing instincts and human emotions that might help their practice: arrogance. To hide their fear, they’re taught to adopt the authoritarian attitude and demeanor of their professors. Confessions of a Medical Heretic
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Doctors turn out to be dishonest, corrupt, unethical, sick, poorly educated, and downright stupid more often than the rest of society. When I meet a doctor, I generally figure I'm meeting a person who is narrowminded, prejudiced, and fairly incapable of reasoning and deliberation. Few of the doctors I meet prove my prediction wrong.