submitted by jwithrow.
Journal of a Wayward Philosopher
On Allopathic Medicine and Universal Health Care
July 22, 2015
Hot Springs, VA
The S&P closed out Tuesday at $2,114. Gold closed at $1,103 per ounce. Oil checked out just under $51 per barrel, and the 10-year Treasury rate closed at 2.37%. Bitcoin is trading around $278 per BTC today.
Dear Journal,
The big news in the markets this week is gold’s staggering fall. The reason: nearly 5 Tonnes of gold was unloaded on the Shanghai Gold Exchange within a two minute window during the Asian trading session on Monday. This activity represented nearly 20% of the average daily trading volume in gold on the Shanghai Exchange – all within a two minute window. Nearly simultaneously, 7,600 contracts of the August 15 gold contract sold off on the COMEX within a two minute window as well. Somebody knows something. Nevertheless, this pullback looks like a great buying opportunity to me.
Las week we examined ways to disintermediate the State and I suggested holistic wellness as a means of distancing yourself from the corruption and cronyism that manifests in the relationship between allopathic medicine and its lobbies, big pharmaceutical corporations and their lobbies, big health insurance corporations and their lobbies, and the federal government and its regulatory agencies. You could potentially throw Wall Street and the big agriculture corporations into this mix as well for the roles they play in perpetuating the sickness paradigm.
Here’s how it works in a simplified nutshell: the allopathic medical establishment (AMA) preaches a hyper-interventionist mentality that focuses on prescribing drugs for every illness – real or imagined. Big-Pharma provides the drugs and constantly develops new drugs for the temporary treatment of symptoms. Big-Insurance sets the reimbursement figures for each drug and each treatment thus incentivizing certain practices. All three fund massive lobbies that exert influence upon the FDA and other State-regulatory agencies which in turn protect the established interests from competition and law suits. For their part, Big-Agra manufactures a huge variety of unhealthy food products that help keep people sick which leads to more doctor visits and more drugs. Wall Street keeps the pressure on Big-Pharma and Big-Agra to grow revenues which incentivizes marginal innovations and aggressive marketing campaigns. This system does not seek to improve health, it seeks only to treat sickness symptoms over and over again.
I do not mean to suggest that the players in this system are evil institutions conspiring against the populace. They are probably just like any other institution: full of some decent and some not-so-decent individuals. These large institutions are, however, operating in a manner sympathetic to their best interest, which just happens to be directly opposed to the interests of most everyone else.
To expect such a system to behave in any other capacity is simply foolish. There are a few angels in this world, but they are few and far between. Most people aren’t angels; they are just average people. Thus, they do what average people do: they pursue their own interests which are often monetary in nature.
This is the reason why the health care system cannot be reformed from the top down.
Universal health care is not the solution for a number of reasons; the first being immorality. It is simply wrong to confiscate money from people to pay for other people’s health care. Private insurance policies (ex-ACA) are voluntary contracts that people enter into willingly. Universal health care forces people to pay up even if they would prefer not to. Don’t hurt people and don’t take their stuff is a pretty good mantra to live by. I will pass this one along to my daughter as soon as she understands words.
The second reason being universal health care creates major disincentives. If people know they have to pay a fixed amount into a universal health care system no matter what then you can safely bet that they will use the system more themselves, no matter how marginal their need may be. That’s just human nature popping up again.
The third reason is that universal health care destroys responsibility on both sides of the stethoscope. Patients have less incentive to maintain their own health because someone else pays for their care and doctors have less incentive to provide prompt high-level service because they get paid the same and their job is secure no matter what. This is why it often takes six months or more to get an appointment with a specialist in countries employing universal health care – the interests of the doctors and the patients are not in alignment.
The fourth reason is that universal health care doesn’t automatically cut out the corruption. After all, government plays an active role in the current cronyism and it surely would not be quick to give up all of the lobby money coming to it from the medical establishment, Big-Pharma, Big-Insurance, and Big-Agra. In fact, this corrupt system can only exist on such a scale with the police power of government in place to shelter it from market forces and legal action.
The fifth reason is that universal health care does not follow tried and true insurance practices. Private insurance companies employ company-specific underwriting guidelines such that their actuaries can accurately estimate annual costs. This enables insurance companies to invest the float (premiums – expenses) in a responsible manner to strengthen their financial position. Universal health care eliminates underwriting guidelines entirely which sends annual costs to the moon and makes reasonable estimation impossible. Without underwriting guidelines, it is unlikely there will even be a float to invest though government likely wouldn’t invest any surplus anyway. Thus, universal health care is just another government-run Ponzi scheme where Peter is robbed to pay Paul over and over again which ties right back in with the morality problem from reason one.
So, as is often the case, the solution is individual in nature: disintermediate the corrupt medical establishment with holistic wellness.
But wait, what about the poor? What about those who cannot afford insurance or health care? Don’t we need universal health care to take care of them?
I must defer to a much wiser man to address these objections to free market health care. Here’s Jesus of Nazareth: “For the poor you have always with you: and whensoever you will, you may do them good.”
You see, we each have an individual responsibility to help those in need around us. Let’s not engage in universal theft to do so.
Now there is a difference between ‘disintermediate’ and ‘boycott’. If you get hit by a car you should probably go to the hospital even though you know the medical industry is corrupt. In fact, allopathic medicine is extremely adept at handling such emergencies. It is the non-emergency stuff that they are more or less clueless about. Note: your doctor will get extremely angry if you say this to his face.
So I am not saying boycott allopathic medicine at all costs nor am I saying to practice mysticism. Somehow holistic medicine has taken on the mystic connotation of “alternative medicine”, but nothing could be farther from the truth. Holistic medicine has been practiced for hundreds of thousands (maybe millions, we don’t know) of years. This means holistic medicine is actually ultra-orthodox and ultra-scientific according to the laws of Nature. Allopathic medicine is the alternative here.
Holistic wellness is really very simple – its exclusively about living a healthy and balanced life. The human body is an amazingly complex and interconnected organism that is capable of self-regulating. Any non-emergency intervention actually distorts the regulatory balance and fragilizes the system.
Antibiotics are the easiest example to demonstrate this fragilization. Antibiotics artificially suppress the immune system in order to kill bacteria on the immune system’s behalf. This dynamic actually weakens the immune system because it is denied the full functionality necessary to naturally strengthen. To add insult to injury, the excessive use of antibiotics actually helps bacteria mutate into antibiotic-resistant strains. So antibiotics fragilize your immune system and help create antifragile super-bugs.
Think about this dynamic next time you hear about Big-Pharma working on super antibiotics to kill the super-bugs. Where does that process end?
From my perspective, the allure of allopathic medicine is the same as that of Keynesian economics: the benefits are immediate and visible, though small, and the harm remains unforeseen for years. People will sign up all day long for a temporary fix to all of their problems, especially if they are sold the idea that there will be a new fix for any eventual harm down the road. Our economics in one lesson principle actually applies to personal wellness as well. We need to analyze both the short term and the long term affects of any action. We also need to be cognizant of both what is seen and what is unseen.
Here’s how to put holistic wellness into practice to take control of your own health and put yourself in a position from which you can disintermediate the medical establishment: Drink lots of water, eat mostly whole foods (meat, eggs, fruits, vegetables), be very skeptical of food products that contain ingredients you cannot pronounce, get plenty of low-intensity exercise by walking often, occasionally engage in very short high-intensity exercise, practice non-intervention and respect the healing power of your body, use nature’s remedies (herbs, essential oils, elderberry syrup) for minor symptoms, laugh and smile often, and get plenty of sleep (though not necessarily all at once).
Incorporating these items into your life should strengthen your immune system and thus increase your health tremendously. This would significantly reduce your need for allopathic medicine and its pharmaceuticals which in turn would reduce your need for qualified health insurance.
Obviously such disintermediation is much easier if you put holistic wellness into practice at a younger age. It is much more difficult to disintermediate once chronic illness and severe health problems resulting from a prolonged unhealthy lifestyle start creeping in. There’s a reason why centenarians are mostly concentrated in areas relatively isolated from modern medical facilities.
I will conclude this journal entry with a humorous account from Nassim Taleb in Antifragile: Things That Gain From Disorder. Here is Taleb describing his emergency room visit after suffering a broken nose:
In the emergency room, the doctor and staff insisted that I should “ice” my nose, meaning apply an ice-cold patch to it. In the middle of the pain, it hit me that the swelling that Mother Nature gave me was most certainly not directly caused by the trauma. It was my own body’s response to the injury. It seemed to me that it was an insult to Mother Nature to override her programmed reactions unless we had a good reason to do so, backed by proper empirical testing to show that we humans can do better; the burden of evidence falls on us humans. So I mumbled to the emergency room doctor whether he had any statistical evidence of benefits from applying ice to my nose or if it resulted from a naive version of an interventionism.
His response was: “You have a nose the size of Cleveland and you are now interested in… numbers?” I recall developing from his blurry remarks the thought that he had no answer.
Effectively, he had no answer, because as soon as I got to a computer, I was able to confirm that there is no compelling empirical evidence in favor of the reduction of swelling. At least, not outside of the very rare cases in which the swelling would threaten the patient, which was clearly not the case. It was pure sucker-rationalism in the mind of doctors, following what made sense to boundedly intelligent humans, coupled with interventionism, this need to do something, this defect of thinking that we knew better, and denigration of the unobserved.”
Of course what is true of swelling is true of coughing, sneezing, runny nose, and fever as well. These are all natural immune responses to whatever the real problem is. But of course allopathic medicine has sold us the idea that we need to immediately take drugs designed to suppress each of these symptoms as soon as they occur. Naive interventionism at work, as Taleb calls it. This same dynamic plays out over and over again in the field of allopathic medicine – do not be fooled.
More to come,
Joe Withrow
Wayward Philosopher
For more of Joe’s thoughts on the “Great Reset” and ways to disintermediate the State please read “The Individual is Rising: 2nd edition” which will be available later this year. Please sign up for the notifications mailing list at http://www.theindividualisrising.com/.