When I was a kid, most of my time was spent pretending. Pretending to be Superman, pretending to be a cowboy, pretending to be a hero and, at times, pretending to be a doctor. As I grew up I realized that pretend time was growing to a close and reality time was getting closer and closer at hand. Little did I realize that, for some, pretend is a way of life. How so, you ask? The following are some of my perceptions and observations into the ongoing world of pretend.
The way conventional medicine is practiced today, is pretend medicine. The doctors and the drug companies pretend to make patients healthier by giving them drugs. The Fraud and Drug Administration pretends to protect the safety of the public.
Medical journals pretend to print only peer-reviewed, scientifically sound research papers. Drug companies pretend to care about the lives and health of patients. Non-profit disease front groups pretend to be searching for the cure, while, in reality, most of them are only searching for more ways to recruit patients into conventional medicine treatments like drugs, surgery, chemotherapy, radiation, and above all, donations.
How do we know that this is all pretend? Besides the junk science, corruption, fraud, collusion, conflicts of interest and outright dishonesty that characterizes modern medicine, there is one more very salient factor to consider: The results! If modern medicine really worked and wasn’t just pretend, wouldn’t we be the healthiest population in the world?
We pay more for health care, per person, than any nation in the world. We take more drugs, undergo more surgical procedures and have more hospital visits than anyone else. If the drugs-and-surgery approach to medicine actually produced healthy human beings, we would be the “master race”.
Instead, we are the most diseased people on the planet. We have more disease, disorders and illnesses than any population that has ever been observed in the history of civilization. Why? Pretend medicine, that’s why!
So, where are we headed with all this make-believe in abundance? For openers, the U.S. of A still pretends to offer the best health care in the world, yet we pay the highest drug prices on the planet, have the highest rates of chronic degenerative disease and have earned top ranking for the most citizens without health insurance of any industrialized nation. We are also number 1 in mental disorders.
The politicians pretend to get serious about health care reform. These health reform proposals pretend to reduce health care costs through a shell game illusion that simply shifts the burden of paying for disease management services to whatever group hires the fewest lobbyists. And, once the reforms are complete, the corrupt politicians take the spotlight and pretend to have helped the American people.
Remember the recent Medicare drug benefit shibai? That was Washington’s way of pretending to help senior citizens save money, many of whom were left out in the cold due to massive failures in a government database that some highly paid consultant pretended would actually work.
As the plot thickens, mainstream media pretends to offer objective reporting on the health care crisis, relying on journalists who pretend to actually know something about health.
Conventional medicine exists in a pretend dream world. While cancer groups, researchers and drug companies promise a better quality of life and health, the reality is far different: accelerating chronic disease, skyrocketing health care costs that are putting U.S. companies like General Motors out of business and hundreds of thousands of Americans being killed by medication side effects – an atrocity that the Fraud and Drug Administration still hasn’t seemed to notice.
So, what do you think? Maybe it’s time we all stopped pretending? Maybe it’s time that conventional medicine stopped “playing doctor” and started helping patients heal with diet and lifestyle changes and natural therapies that are safe and effective and actually work? You see, once someone is killed by prescription drugs, we cannot pretend to bring them back.
Some time ago, I spotlighted, in general, the pretending that a lot of people make a lot of money from. Now, it’s time for specifics by looking at how the biggest pretenders pretend.
Conventional medical schools: They pretend to teach health, but, in reality, they teach disease diagnosis combined with a drugs-and-surgery treatment approach while excluding almost all other treatments, including ones that actually work.
The Fraud and Drug Administration: A highly corrupt agency that pretends to regulate pharmaceutical companies while protecting the health and safety of the American public. The reality: protecting the profits of the pharmaceutical industry at the expense of public safety.
Health insurance companies and HMOs: They pretend to offer coverage for health costs, but in reality, they are largely in the business of denying coverage, limiting payouts, and driving health clinics to the brink of bankruptcy due to late payments.
Non-profit disease groups: They pretend to be raising money to find “cures”, but in reality they are more interested in the business of promoting a particular disease as a way to increase disease screening, diagnosis and treatment with expensive drugs that just happen to be made by the same companies that help fund these non-profit front groups.
Medical Journals: They pretend to be the gatekeepers of scientific truth, but in reality most are for-profit publications that predominantly print pro-drug articles and which are funded by advertising dollars from drug companies.
Chemotherapy: This highly toxic cancer treatment that poisons the patient and compromises all future healing, pretends to treat patients for cancer. In reality, it destroys the artifacts of cancer while irreversibly damaging the patient’s internal organs, thereby harming the patient’s ability to ever heal again.
Drug companies: These devious corporations pretend to be working for the public good, charging outrageous prices for prescription drugs so they can fund expensive research to find cures for tomorrow’s diseases, which they will invent out of thin air in order to sell more drugs. In reality, the drug companies are in the business of fabricating diseases so more people can be diagnosed with something so they can buy another pill advertised on tv.
Clinical drug trial researchers: So-called scientists pretending to run honest, objective, clinical trials knowing that if the results don’t please their sponsors (usually drug companies), they will be blacklisted from the industry. Ever wonder why all these drug trials almost always produce results that support their sponsors?
Mainstream media: The press pretends to write honest, objective, well researched stories on health issues. In reality, however, the biggest publications and news outlets simply parrot the same old propaganda pushed by deep-pocket advertisers (Big Pharma), without bothering with any real critical thinking or skepticism on most stories. Too many journalists pretend to be health experts but are, in fact, largely illiterate when it comes to nutrition, human physiology or the truth about the health care industry. You don’t believe this? Try writing a letter-to-the-editor condemning drugs or doctors or the Standard American Diet and see what happens.
Psychiatrists: This bottom-of-the-barrel group of professional sickos, pretends to help children with their mental health “disorders” by drugging them with Ritalin and calling it “treatment”. Having sold its soul to the drug companies, psychiatry is now nothing more than a drug-dealing front group engaged in chemical atrocities committed against children and adults alike.
Old-school Doctors: Old-school MD’s pretend to treat patients suffering from chronic disease through a harmful synthetic chemical solution. The never ending writing of prescriptions to a never ending line of symptomatic patients is not real medicine. It is just old fashioned drug dealing.
Patients: Yes, patients are often a part of the pretend game. Pretending that eating a salad once a week qualifies as “health food, or walking across the mall parking lot equals “exercise”, or that taking a cheap multivitamin purchased at Long’s or Wal-Mart meets their nutritional needs is utter nonsense. I guess pretending to take care of your health is easier than actually doing so. Oh yeah, the word patient came about because the meds didn’t want to use the word customer anymore.
For me, pretending as a kid was more fun. It was innocent, creative, non-exploitive and never hurt anyone.
But now? Run for cover!
Aloha!
Sources:
www.americanprogress.org
www.sciencedaily.com
Medical journals pretend to print only peer-reviewed, scientifically sound research papers. Drug companies pretend to care about the lives and health of patients. Non-profit disease front groups pretend to be searching for the cure, while, in reality, most of them are only searching for more ways to recruit patients into conventional medicine treatments like drugs, surgery, chemotherapy, radiation, and above all, donations.
How do we know that this is all pretend? Besides the junk science, corruption, fraud, collusion, conflicts of interest and outright dishonesty that characterizes modern medicine, there is one more very salient factor to consider: The results! If modern medicine really worked and wasn’t just pretend, wouldn’t we be the healthiest population in the world?
We pay more for health care, per person, than any nation in the world. We take more drugs, undergo more surgical procedures and have more hospital visits than anyone else. If the drugs-and-surgery approach to medicine actually produced healthy human beings, we would be the “master race”.
Instead, we are the most diseased people on the planet. We have more disease, disorders and illnesses than any population that has ever been observed in the history of civilization. Why? Pretend medicine, that’s why!
So, where are we headed with all this make-believe in abundance? For openers, the U.S. of A still pretends to offer the best health care in the world, yet we pay the highest drug prices on the planet, have the highest rates of chronic degenerative disease and have earned top ranking for the most citizens without health insurance of any industrialized nation. We are also number 1 in mental disorders.
The politicians pretend to get serious about health care reform. These health reform proposals pretend to reduce health care costs through a shell game illusion that simply shifts the burden of paying for disease management services to whatever group hires the fewest lobbyists. And, once the reforms are complete, the corrupt politicians take the spotlight and pretend to have helped the American people.
Remember the recent Medicare drug benefit shibai? That was Washington’s way of pretending to help senior citizens save money, many of whom were left out in the cold due to massive failures in a government database that some highly paid consultant pretended would actually work.
As the plot thickens, mainstream media pretends to offer objective reporting on the health care crisis, relying on journalists who pretend to actually know something about health.
Conventional medicine exists in a pretend dream world. While cancer groups, researchers and drug companies promise a better quality of life and health, the reality is far different: accelerating chronic disease, skyrocketing health care costs that are putting U.S. companies like General Motors out of business and hundreds of thousands of Americans being killed by medication side effects – an atrocity that the Fraud and Drug Administration still hasn’t seemed to notice.
So, what do you think? Maybe it’s time we all stopped pretending? Maybe it’s time that conventional medicine stopped “playing doctor” and started helping patients heal with diet and lifestyle changes and natural therapies that are safe and effective and actually work? You see, once someone is killed by prescription drugs, we cannot pretend to bring them back.
Some time ago, I spotlighted, in general, the pretending that a lot of people make a lot of money from. Now, it’s time for specifics by looking at how the biggest pretenders pretend.
Conventional medical schools: They pretend to teach health, but, in reality, they teach disease diagnosis combined with a drugs-and-surgery treatment approach while excluding almost all other treatments, including ones that actually work.
The Fraud and Drug Administration: A highly corrupt agency that pretends to regulate pharmaceutical companies while protecting the health and safety of the American public. The reality: protecting the profits of the pharmaceutical industry at the expense of public safety.
Health insurance companies and HMOs: They pretend to offer coverage for health costs, but in reality, they are largely in the business of denying coverage, limiting payouts, and driving health clinics to the brink of bankruptcy due to late payments.
Non-profit disease groups: They pretend to be raising money to find “cures”, but in reality they are more interested in the business of promoting a particular disease as a way to increase disease screening, diagnosis and treatment with expensive drugs that just happen to be made by the same companies that help fund these non-profit front groups.
Medical Journals: They pretend to be the gatekeepers of scientific truth, but in reality most are for-profit publications that predominantly print pro-drug articles and which are funded by advertising dollars from drug companies.
Chemotherapy: This highly toxic cancer treatment that poisons the patient and compromises all future healing, pretends to treat patients for cancer. In reality, it destroys the artifacts of cancer while irreversibly damaging the patient’s internal organs, thereby harming the patient’s ability to ever heal again.
Drug companies: These devious corporations pretend to be working for the public good, charging outrageous prices for prescription drugs so they can fund expensive research to find cures for tomorrow’s diseases, which they will invent out of thin air in order to sell more drugs. In reality, the drug companies are in the business of fabricating diseases so more people can be diagnosed with something so they can buy another pill advertised on tv.
Clinical drug trial researchers: So-called scientists pretending to run honest, objective, clinical trials knowing that if the results don’t please their sponsors (usually drug companies), they will be blacklisted from the industry. Ever wonder why all these drug trials almost always produce results that support their sponsors?
Mainstream media: The press pretends to write honest, objective, well researched stories on health issues. In reality, however, the biggest publications and news outlets simply parrot the same old propaganda pushed by deep-pocket advertisers (Big Pharma), without bothering with any real critical thinking or skepticism on most stories. Too many journalists pretend to be health experts but are, in fact, largely illiterate when it comes to nutrition, human physiology or the truth about the health care industry. You don’t believe this? Try writing a letter-to-the-editor condemning drugs or doctors or the Standard American Diet and see what happens.
Psychiatrists: This bottom-of-the-barrel group of professional sickos, pretends to help children with their mental health “disorders” by drugging them with Ritalin and calling it “treatment”. Having sold its soul to the drug companies, psychiatry is now nothing more than a drug-dealing front group engaged in chemical atrocities committed against children and adults alike.
Old-school Doctors: Old-school MD’s pretend to treat patients suffering from chronic disease through a harmful synthetic chemical solution. The never ending writing of prescriptions to a never ending line of symptomatic patients is not real medicine. It is just old fashioned drug dealing.
Patients: Yes, patients are often a part of the pretend game. Pretending that eating a salad once a week qualifies as “health food, or walking across the mall parking lot equals “exercise”, or that taking a cheap multivitamin purchased at Long’s or Wal-Mart meets their nutritional needs is utter nonsense. I guess pretending to take care of your health is easier than actually doing so. Oh yeah, the word patient came about because the meds didn’t want to use the word customer anymore.
For me, pretending as a kid was more fun. It was innocent, creative, non-exploitive and never hurt anyone.
But now? Run for cover!
Aloha!
Sources:
www.americanprogress.org
www.sciencedaily.com
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