My doctor brother worked in a charity ward in the 1950s, and he would always say that they got better MEDICINE than the luxury hospitals did.
The reason for this was that back then you could try new drugs out on charity patients but not on those who paid up front. By the last few YEARS a drug is being judged by the FDA and the courts, it is as ready for use as it will be when they clear them.
So paying patients got drugs that were several years behind
Now everybody gets drugs that are years behind.
My point is that everybody knew this, everybody KNOWS this, but it does not affect policy. This is because of another point I keep trying to make: drugs are an institution, and no one is going to be concerned with what the FDA does except those who make their living from it.
Medicine is not practiced for doctors, it is practiced according to rules laid down by a much larger institution, the legal profession, what I would call the legal institution.
The legal institution employs three million lawyers DIRECTLY. Then are the staffs and the enormous power of the Courts.
People know that we elect a lot of lawyers, but no one seems to notice that only one “branch of government” requires someone to get professional approval. The judiciary may be independent of the voters, but it is not independent of the ABA.
People think they are very practical and they say “Follow the money” and then they don’t.
How much money does the NRA represent and how much money do three million lawyers represent? But that is not a “follow the money” subject because it is not on Mommy Professor’s agenda.
The car salesman asks, “What would it take to get you behind the wheel of this car?” because he knows cars and this car is the one for YOU. Yes, he’ll make a profit, but he’s doing it for YOU.
Nobody falls for THAT crap. But when it comes to anything regulated, no one gives a SECOND’S thought to who makes his living on it.
I mean it doesn’t come up.
At all.
When the Air Force was created, the new branch got the same fifteen four-star generals that each of the other services had. And the same forty-five three stars, and the same 135 two stars, and so forth.
If you combine all the pharmacists and doctors and especially lawyers who make their living from prescriptions, directly and indirectly, you have a total that absolutely dwarfs any of the major industries that Practical Men and Mommy Professor so wisely “follow the money” about.
But it never comes up.
There is more money in the legal drug cartel by far than in all the illegal ones combined.
But no one even thinks about following the money there.
#1 by BGLass on 12/12/2010 - 9:05 am
Anti-psychiatry comes closest, maybe, but it’s amazing the source of most critique is Scientology. People like Peter Breggin, also, (“toxic psychiatry”) then MindFreedom which is grassroots against forced drugging, or False Memory Syndrome Foundation, with emphasis on coercive memory tactics and legal cases of victims. Jeffery Maisson (“Against Therapy”) may have touched more on overlap, revolving door of board members on DSM making diagnoses, pharm companies, Fda and other orgs, the ‘war on drugs,’ and the effect to bring street drugs under the rubric of state, etc., but can’t remember. –Very noticeable in “de-industrialized” places where university-and-hospital complexes emerged (often now surrounded by ghettos), as the “Solution” to “de-industrialization.” –places like Baltimore, Cleveland, Pittsburgh and so on, the “rust belt” –naming places our citizens live such a thing is terribly uncharitable and point up the loss of society, in itself, maybe.
Anyway, it does correspond with rise in arguments to bring back “psycho-surgeries” and a spike in performance of electric shock treatments, which have become re-packaged and marketed in a more upbeat way (many average therapists, who may not necessarily be licensed –something many don’t realize but depends on state— are all for them and think they spiked when medicare said they’d start paying for them, etc. In turn, many ‘healing gestures’ exacerbate problems and cause the situation in which drugging sees reasonable.
Anti-psy has a long history, but it’s gotten somewhat popularized in msm. Tana Dineen’s “Manufacturing Victims” is popular easy read, for instance. And sites s/a “The Orange Papers” is a sort of response to the support group scene and efforts to co-opt it (into lockdown rehabs and so on).
Parts of this are in the public consciousness, but people don’t know what to do. It’s the system. Healing systems calculated to make patients worse so they can be healed-for-a-fee forever —and which DOCTORS cannot, or simply refuse, to see through it– is something average citizens just have no response for, and often something not seen until they are sick (or someone close to them), and then, since this is rarely everyday, they write the experience off to an anomaly at first. And to whatever extent they intuit it, they just pray none of it (“health care”) ever happens to them. The middle class winds up paying top dollar for insurance fees (“just in case”) and simultaneously avoid going to doctors.
This looks illogical to the doctors. And the people look “stupid,” like they don’t “care about themselves.”
#2 by Dave on 12/12/2010 - 1:32 pm
Trafficking in suffering is as old the hills. It is a permanent endemic feature of society.
There is no solution to this problem. There is no policy solution. There is no black market solution.
There is no solution, period.
All I know is this: The vast majority of players – be they the business consultancies behind the hospital industry and physicians practices, be they the hordes of lawyers involved, be they insurance company and pharmaceutical industry executives, be they the state and Federal regulators and funders, be they the hordes of lobbyists, be they the doctors, nurses, and pharmacists themselves – are not fit for the totalitarian game they are playing.
This lack fitness is what needs to be understood from the standpoint of Mantra thinking.
There are heavy duty consequences to this trafficking. And the heaviest of the heavy duty consequences stem from race relations.
For example, Obama care is nothing but an upping of the tax on white people to support non-white people. It is a policy of the oppression of white people on behalf of Political Correctness aimed at the destruction of our race and the theft of our homes and lands. It is absolutely a South African style “anti-apartheid” policy with the very same politics behind it.
It is a direct assault of totalitarian dictatorship upon us, aimed at our destruction.