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On Allopathic Medicine and Universal Health Care

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. Continue reading “On Allopathic Medicine and Universal Health Care”

The Vaccine Bubble

by Michael Belkin – ICPA.org:

My business involves advising portfolio managers about asset allocation in global financial markets. During my career, I have observed several extreme speculative bubbles, including the Japanese stock market in the late 1980s, the NASDAQ frenzy in 1998–2000 and the U.S. housing bubble from 2006–2008.

These bubbles all ended in tears. I see the same elements now in the pharmaceutical industry’s preoccupation with vaccines. I coined the term “vaccine bubble” (in the book Vaccine Epidemic) to describe the economic and psychological factors that are driving the obsession with and over-investment in vaccines. The psychology of making big profits is causing a lemming-like rush into vaccine research and production. Ultimately, many of these companies and vaccine products will likely turn out to be flash-in-the-pan nobodies and nothings that simply waste investment and get discarded on the ash heap of medical history. In the meantime, families and individuals need to educate themselves and make informed decisions about vaccine acceptance or refusal.

The business model of vaccine manufacturers relies on compulsion—you must take their product, or else.

Investing in Health

Taking pharmaceutical company advice about vaccine safety and efficacy is like trusting a stockbroker or real estate agent to tell you the market is in a bubble. As investors and homeowners have learned the hard way, those with corrupt financial or professional incentives cannot be relied upon to provide trustworthy advice.

From a financial and industry perspective, here is what you need to know. Vaccines are licensed by the FDA and recommended by the CDC’s Advisory Committee on Immunization Practices (ACIP). Vaccine manufacturers perform (or outsource) their own efficacy and safety studies, so there is plenty of wiggle room for juggling the data. Manufacturers can choose their own placebo to either flatter efficacy or safety. If you think vaccine safety studies use saline solution for a placebo, think again.

The Merck Manuals (the pharmaceutical company’s best-selling series of medical textbooks) defines an adverse reaction to a vaccine: “Encephalitis is inflammation of the brain that occurs when a virus directly infects the brain or when a virus or something else triggers inflammation…. Encephalitis can occur in the following ways: A virus directly infects the brain. A virus that caused an infection in the past becomes reactivated and directly damages the brain. A virus or vaccine triggers a reaction that makes the immune system attack brain tissue (an autoimmune reaction).”

Thus, an adverse vaccine reaction that causes brain damage (encephalitis) has the same result as a complication from an infectious disease like measles. In vaccine safety studies, manufacturers can disguise the neurological damage caused by the vaccine they are testing by using another vaccine (or another substance that contains an aluminum adjuvant) known to cause neurological adverse reactions as placebo. The standard language they use is: “Adverse reactions were no different than placebo.” They don’t mention that the placebo causes neurological adverse reactions.

Another trick they use is to compare adverse reactions to a fully vaccinated population that has neurological damage from those vaccines. They claim it is unethical to compare vaccine adverse reactions in their new product being tested to unvaccinated controls, because the unvaccinated would supposedly miss out on all the great benefits of vaccines. This is a cheap statistical trick to camouflage adverse neurological reactions from vaccines.

Products in the Pipeline

The Pharmaceutical Research and Manufacturers of America’s (PhRMA) 2010 Report on Medicines in Development for Infectious Diseases boasts, “Among the medicines now being tested are…145 vaccines to prevent or treat diseases such as staph infections and pneumococcal infections.” The report didn’t include “medicines in development for HIV infection,” and stated, “A 2009 survey by PhRMA found 97 medicines and vaccines are in testing for HIV/AIDS and AIDS-related conditions.”

The current CDC-recommended vaccine schedule contains 70 doses of 16 vaccines by age 18. PhRMA obviously would love to double or triple that vaccine burden by cramming the new vaccines under development into the ACIP-recommended schedule.

A Government-Subsidized, Captive Market

ACIP vaccine recommendations are a godsend to pharmaceutical manufacturers. The simple ACIP recommendation that so many doses of such-and-such vaccine should be given at such-and-such age is transformed into public school attendance mandates by the alchemy of drug industry sales reps, state health officials and gullible state legislatures. The business model of vaccine manufacturers relies on compulsion—you must take their product, or else. Imagine you were in business selling something and you could snap your fingers and compel everyone to be your customer. Normal businesses have to attract customers with an attractive product and compete with other providers of that product. Compulsion is a nice way to capture an involuntary market, isn’t it?

Since most people won’t pay hundreds of dollars out-of-pocket for every vaccine, manufacturers must find someone to foot the bill. They have been very effective in coercing federal and state governments and health insurers into subsidizing their products. One little-noticed feature of the Affordable Care Act (the Obama administration’s healthcare reform program) is that health insurers must provide subsidized vaccines to their customers. Big Pharma’s vaccine business model consists of taking choice away from the individual and getting someone else to foot the bill.

Filling the Profit Void

Pharmaceutical companies are losing patent protection on about $140 billion of blockbuster drugs (such as Lipitor) over the next few years. Their research departments have produced few product replacements with blockbuster potential (sales greater than $1 billion/ year). This pending loss of business is causing a wave of layoffs and restructurings within the industry. Also, disastrous drugs like Vioxx have caused between 88,000 and 139,000 heart attacks and about 40,000 deaths, according to FDA estimates cited by epidemiologist David Michaels, current head of OSHA for the Obama Administration, in his excellent book Doubt Is Their Product.

According to Michaels’ book, Merck exploited the FDA drug approval process by gaming the placebo and claiming that the higher rate of heart attacks observed in Vioxx clinical trials was due to the placebo (naproxen) preventing heart attacks. According to Michaels’ book, “Merck chose the interpretation that implausibly credited naproxen over the one that more plausibly indicted its own drug and it embarked on a four-year defense of this almost ridiculous hypothesis.” Incidentally, Merck is a primary manufacturer of U.S. vaccines. Its corporate behavior with Vioxx certainly discredits its ethical credibility with regard to pharmaceutical safety studies.

Pharmaceutical companies now tout vaccines as the Holy Grail that will help replace the lost revenues from expiring patents on blockbuster drugs that will face generic (cheap) competition. But the numbers don’t add up. Vaccines are currently about a $25 billion market. As previously mentioned, patent expirations amount to about $140 billion. Pharmaceutical companies desperately need to grow that $25 billion vaccine market in a hurry. Hence the big push to create, license and mandate new vaccines.

Popping the Vaccine Bubble

Now, if you are in the pharmaceutical industry charity market, you can donate your body to Merck and other vaccine manufacturers by volunteering to be a human pincushion for every vaccine recommended by the ACIP or in development. That is your decision, and I fully support your right to vaccinate yourself into oblivion.

However, if you (like me) do not agree with forced medication using products that may have been approved using safety studies involving bogus placebos, then you probably face persecution by your allopathic doctor, public school or employer (flu vaccines are now mandatory for many healthcare workers). I fully support your right to refuse vaccines. In fact, the position of the American Medical Association (AMA) on informed consent states that with regard to patients, “He or she can make an informed decision to proceed or to refuse a particular course of medical intervention.” Please notice the word refuse. It is our right to refuse “a particular course of medical intervention.” Notice it doesn’t say “except vaccination.” Informed consent is the backbone of medical ethics. You have the right to say no. Doctors who assert that you do not have a choice about vaccines are violating this medical code of ethics.

Contrast that AMA official position on informed consent with the American Academy of Pediatrics (AAP) position on “terminating” vaccine refusers: “If, after discussion about the importance of vaccination and the risks of not vaccinating, the parent refuses, the pediatrician should document the discussion and have the parent sign a waiver affirming his/her decision not to vaccinate (i.e., AAP Refusal to Vaccinate Form). If the situation becomes such that you are no longer comfortable having the parent/patient in your practice, the AAP manual, Medical Liability for Pediatricians, Chapter 3, offers resources for risk communication and termination of the physician-patient relationship.”

The Basis for My Choice

My daughter Lyla died within hours after receiving her hepatitis B vaccine at the age of five weeks. We subsequently had two more children and I looked closely at the rate of vaccine adverse reactions contained in the FDA Vaccine Adverse Event Reporting System (VAERS) versus the risk of contracting an infectious disease and the risk of complications from that disease. As a professional statistician who provides econometric forecasts for institutional investors, I am qualified to make decisions based on statistical models. That is what I do, day in and day out. My conclusion? I would have to be a total idiot to vaccinate my children.

If mainstream pediatricians are going to “terminate” patients like me (like a pest control company), then perhaps my family is better off not being a captive of such a totalitarian doctor in the first place. For others in favor of vaccine choice, I’ve written an article entitled “How to Terminate a Relationship With an Uncooperative and Combative Pediatrician.” Sadly, most pediatricians wouldn’t know what to do with themselves and their practices if they weren’t vaccine pushers. As mentioned above, they are simply the agents of a medical system that is addicted to a vaccine bubble. Vaccine refusers should find trustworthy medical professionals who support the AMA’s position on informed consent.

Ghosts in the Machine

Bubbles always have corruption hidden under the surface. Look how the mortgage and banking industries are now choking on lawsuits and destroyed reputations. Corruption in the vaccine bubble probably exists in ghostwritten medical journal articles (penned by pharmaceutical companies but supposedly authored by respectable doctors). Ghostwriting has recently become a huge issue in medical research. We have yet to find out which vaccine studies were ghostwritten by industry flunkies.

Another area of corruption is front groups. Front groups using straw-man citizens are a standard PR technique to hype a product. Full Frontal Scrutiny, a joint venture between Consumer Reports WebWatch and the Center for Media and Democracy, describes the technique as such:

A front group is an example of what is known in the PR trade as the “third party technique.” The idea behind the term is that when one person (the first party) wants to persuade someone else (the second party) to believe or do something that benefits the first party, it helps if the message comes from a seemingly disinterested, independent source. As Daniel Edelman, the founder of Edelman PR Worldwide, has stated, “A third party endorsement can position a new brand so that it’s poised for great success or, conversely, can blunt a serious problem before it gets out of hand and proves disastrous for a particular product or for a company overall.”…

“The best PR ends up looking like news,” bragged one public relations executive. “You never know when a PR agency is being effective; you’ll just find your views slowly shifting.”

When you see supposedly grassroots groups lobbying for vaccine mandates, you may be seeing the invisible hand of just such a PR agency.

Another prime example of corruption in the vaccine bubble is Paul Thorsen, a Danish epidemiologist who is under federal indictment for fraud. Thorsen allegedly absconded with millions of dollars of CDC money. Thorsen’s Danish data forms the backbone of several scientific studies the CDC uses to claim that vaccines and thimerosal (a mercury-containing vaccine preservative) do not cause autism. So far, no one seems to care that a principal author of those studies stands accused of fraud.

One other noteworthy fact with regard to vaccines and autism: In the DTaP package insert, autism and sudden infant death syndrome (SIDS) are listed as “adverse events reported during post-approval use…. Events were included in this list because of the seriousness or frequency of reporting.” So much for CDC denials of a vaccine/autism link.

Vaccines are in a bubble. Pharmaceutical companies are working on hundreds of new vaccines that they are drooling to make mandatory to replace their vanishing blockbuster drug patents. If you choose to resist the vaccine bubble, many people (and doctors) will regard you as loony, in the same way people looked down at those who didn’t buy into the NASDAQ bubble in 2000 or the housing bubble in 2007. But look how those people turned out when the bubbles burst—postponed retirements, foreclosures and underwater home equity. Is that what you want?

Article originally posted at ICPA.org.

How Big Pharma Disease Mongering Works

submitted by jwithrow.

To this day, a central disease-mongering tactic is to attach long, clinical-sounding names to what used to be seen as trivial, transient health problems. In most cases, the new, formidable names come complete with acronyms, which add even more gravitas.

How Big Pharma disease-mongering works:

– Occasional heartburn becomes “gastroesophageal reflux disease” or GERD
– Shyness becomes “social anxiety disorder” or SAD
– Restlessness due to boredom becomes “attention deficit hyperactivity disorder” or ADHD
– Fidgeting legs become “restless leg syndrome” or RLS
– Premenstrual tension becomes “premenstrual dysphoric disorder” or PMDD

The most famous example is from the 1920’s when, according to advertising scholar James Twitchell, the maker of Listerine mouthwash began to associate bad breath with the obscure medical term “halitosis”. Of course Listerine was marketed as the sole cure for this dreaded disease and revenues grew from $115,000 to more than $8 million in less than a decade.

Pharmaceuticals are designed only to treat the symptoms rather than to cure the underlying problems. Rather than drugs, the best remedies are almost always lifestyle modifications: eat healthier, exercise more, reduce stress, sleep eight hours a night.

True, the U.S. population has become very sickly but there are very logical reasons for this. A corrupted food culture featuring cheap, processed carbs and unnatural fats; sedentary screen-addicted lifestyles; chronic sleep deprivation; and other divergences from our evolutionary past have made diabetes, cancer, Alzheimer’s, and other “diseases of civilization” skyrocket.

Pharmaceuticals are Gateway Drugs

by Colleen Huber, NMD – ICPA:

Gateway drugs to more serious substance abuse have often been thought of as just the illegal drugs: marijuana, amphetamines, cocaine to begin, and worse drugs, such as heroin, later. However, there are other gateway drugs, and these affect a much larger proportion of the population, and are perfectly legal.

You probably know all too well that pharmaceuticals often have side effects that result in the prescribing of additional pharmaceuticals.

One of the most common problems I see in my practice is the over-prescription of beta-blockers. These are utterly useless drugs. Sure they lower the blood pressure, which is why they’re prescribed. But they do that by weakening the whole cardiovascular system. So much so that at times, I have had patients who were then diagnosed with congestive heart failure. Furthermore, beta-blockers, because they weaken circulation, destroy libido, which then leads to the prescription of Viagra®, a drug that has been shown to cause blindness in some men.

Beta-blockers also cause weight gain, for which pharmaceutical corrections are then desperately sought. And perhaps worst of all, the beta-blockers cause fatigue, which is then interpreted by an incompetent or rushed physician as depression, and an anti-depressant is ordered.

In fact, anti-depressants seem to be gaining ground as the treatment of choice for doctors who simply have no idea what to do with the patient in front of them. The doctor’s inadequate understanding of the patient’s health is interpreted as “all in the patient’s head,” which then justifies the prescription of antidepressants. Some illnesses, not yet understood by conventional doctors, are treated this way more than others. Fibromyalgia, chronic fatigue syndrome, Epstein-Barr and Lyme disease are especially treated with unhelpful antidepressants.

But anti-depressants are not at all innocent. Just the psychological symptoms of them include suicidal thoughts and attempts and anxiety. (Don’t worry; there are more drugs to control the anxiety.)
The first drug opens up one wound, and then as sloppy bandaging of that wound begins, other wounds develop, until there are multiple wounds, and multiple inadequate bandages.

Many times the first pharmaceuticals are prescribed for someone else. According to the 2006 National Survey on Drug Use and Health, published September, 2007, every day 2500 teenagers, aged 12 to 17 years, try a painkiller for the first time. This is often right out of their parents’ medicine cabinet, such as drugs left over from a surgery or simply left unguarded. Teens are finding drugs and taking large amounts so they can get high. In fact, for 12- and 13-yearolds, prescription drugs are the drugs of choice. For teens, prescription drugs are second only to marijuana for getting high. Unfortunately, because they were acquired legally, and were prescribed for a family member, kids assume they are safer.

But the problem is these kids don’t realize that prescribed drugs can be just as dangerous as illegal drugs. So, even if your kids would never try street drugs, they may be getting high out of your medicine cabinet.

In the specific case of painkiller abuse, which is the biggest accelerating problem for youth, these drugs are often opioid derivatives. A huge problem is the well-known mental impairment from these drugs. Another problem is the severe constipation that such drugs can cause. The rockhard constipation that can result from these drugs is not so easily resolved with fiber, and may require stool softeners and lead to accumulated toxicity in the body.

Sometimes the prescription or legal drugs are gateway drugs, not just to other pharmaceuticals, but to street drugs as well.

For example, Ritalin® and others in the methylphenidate class, such as Adderall®, Strattera™, and Concerta® have an identical molecular structure to amphetamines. Although these drugs are designed for the short-term palliation of hyperactivity or inattentiveness in kids (ADHD and ADD), patients never feel that they are permanently healed from these drugs. So, if the doctor after some years stops prescribing the ADD drug, the teenager very often ends up on a methamphetamine afterward. There are naturopathic physicians who have had numerous young men consult them in order to break the addiction to both Ritalin® and to the secondary addiction to crystal methamphetamines.

Both legally and morally, the pharmaceutical industry and the physicians who carelessly prescribe these drugs should be held accountable for this whole expanded branch of the street drug trade.

One of the main reasons that people come to naturopathic physicians is that they are tired of being on so many drugs, with the side effects and the expense. One of the main things we as naturopaths do is to taper people off poorly prescribed drugs. This is usually a gradual process because some drugs will cause a possibly dangerous rebound effect if stopped suddenly.

For every human ailment there are natural treatments. In fact they can treat more human ailments than drugs can resolve. So, consider this option for yourself and your family.

Article originally posted at ICPA.org.

Rethinking Modern Medicine’s Germ Theory

by Daniel A. Middleton, DC – ICPA:

The germ theory states that diseases are due to specific microorganisms, which are capable of transmission from body to body. Yet although it is widely accepted by medical professionals, forming the basis for billions of dollars of healthcare spending (actually sickness care, but that’s another article), the fact that so many people believe it to be true doesn’t make it so. This is one of the classic logical fallacies: argumentum ad populum, the appeal to the majority, where a thing is stated to be true simply because so many people believe it.

That didn’t work for the belief that the earth was flat, and it shouldn’t work for a theory of disease that is increasingly coming under fire from the scientific community and whose fundamental premise was known to be flawed almost from the beginning. I am reminded of the famous quote by Anatole France: “If fifty million people say a foolish thing, it is still a foolish thing.”

Everyone has heard of the Black Plague that swept through Europe in the Middle Ages, resulting in the death of nearly a third of the European population (25 million people dead over the five-year period between 1347 and 1352). What is most interesting, however, is the other two-thirds—the ones who didn’t die. Many times the survivors were members of the same family as the victims, sharing a home and meals across the same family table. What about them—why didn’t they ‘catch’ the disease? Were they just lucky?

I’m not denying that the disease itself existed; it’s well-documented. The Bubonic Plague, associated with the bacterium named Versenia pestis, was one of the deadliest pandemics in human history—and one of the most studied. Instead, my argument is against the ‘germ theory of disease’ itself, the overriding idea in many people’s minds that exposure to a germ almost always equals disease, when common sense tells us that this simply is not the case.

The germ (or virus or bacteria) might well be the agent of disease, but the cause is much more complex than that. Otherwise, as chiropractic pioneer B.J. Palmer said, eventually no one would be alive to tell you about it! If our bodies can be kept whole and healthy, then the germs, which we come into contact with every day, would have no purchase. One of the goals of chiropractic is to have your body function at such a level that you don’t get sick very often—and that when you do, your immune system, stronger because of more efficient body-brain communication, is better able to fight off the disease, letting you recover more quickly.

Chiropractic is a vitalistic way of looking at our ideas of health and wellness, of how we get sick and why. Very often, it’s at odds with the predominant (mechanistic) model of health that everyone is used to. With the number of drug ads on television and in magazines, and news shows touting the latest medical advancement to treat this or that disease (many of which show up later with unpredicted—maybe even unpredictable—side effects or problems) and the countless TV shows idolizing medicine (e.g. House, ER, Grey’s Anatomy, Nip/Tuck, etc.) all the way back to the early days of television (City Hospital and The Doctor first appeared back in 1951, with the more well-known and iconoclastic Dr. Kildare and Ben Casey showing up ten years later).

Is it any wonder that we all grew up believing in the medical model of health care? After all, surely we could trust Robert Young’s kindly and grandfatherly Marcus Welby, M.D. In fact, we trusted him so much that Young made a subsequent commercial for a popular pain reliever (“I’m not a doctor, but I play one on TV…”) that became a well-worn cliché. But what if the foundation on which the entire medical model rests is flawed? What if the “germ theory of disease” is not quite so cut and dried as we’ve been led to believe? Highly controversial when it was first proposed, the germ theory is now the cornerstone of modern medicine, and its chief proponent, Louis Pasteur, a demigod in the medical canon. But is what we remember Pasteur for the last he said on the subject?

Everyone is familiar with Pasteur’s name, but one of his contemporaries and chief opponents was a scientist named Claude Bernard (1813–1878), who argued that it was not the ‘seed’ (the germ) that caused disease, but was instead the ‘soil’ (the human body). Bernard argued that germs are nothing more than opportunistic organisms. It was an argument that persisted throughout their careers, and for his entire life Pasteur was convinced that germs lay at the cause of all disease. Only on his deathbed—with Claude Bernard present—did Pasteur finally admit that Bernard was right. In the end, Pasteur came to realize that the germ was not the only element in determining who became sick and who remained well.

What this tells us is that modern medicine (or Big Pharma, as the pharmaceutical companies with revenues exceeding $3 billion are often called) has based its fundamental premise on a theory that even its most well-known proponent—as Pasteur arguably was—recanted in the end. For the past one hundred years, modern medicine has pursued a theory that is, at best, only a single aspect of the cause of disease and, at worst, a theory flawed at its core.

How much better spent would our health dollars be—in treatment, education and research—if they supported instead research into how to make the “soil” less hospitable to the “seed,” rather than chasing cures and potions for every collection of symptoms that can be named? Just as in a court of law deathbed confessions are given an extra weight, so too should we regard Pasteur’s final comment on his most famous theory: “Bernard avait raison. Le germ n’est rien, c’est le terrain qui est tout.” (“Bernard was right. The seed is nothing, the soil is everything.”)

Article originally posted at ICPA.org.

A New Healthcare Model?

submitted by jwithrow.

Journal of a Wayward Philosopher
A New Healthcare Model?

November 5, 2014
Hot Springs, VA

The S&P opened higher at $2,019 this morning, gold has been hammered down to $1,143, oil is hanging around $77, bitcoin is up to $341, and the 10-year Treasury rate is coming in at 2.36% today.

Gold continues its decline despite this philosopher’s staunch support. Nothing has changed with gold’s fundamental role within the financial system; gold’s price decline is directly due to the U.S. dollar temporarily rising in strength. In fact, thinking of gold in terms of its dollar price tends to be misleading – the dollar fluctuates up and down depending on which way the breeze is blowing while the yellow metal continues to plug steadily along much like the fabled tortoise against the hare. Slow and steady wins the race.

Last week I shared with you wife Rachel and my childbirth experience. The focus of my previous entry was on the actual birth experience itself and I described the fantastic healthcare service we received from our midwife and doula.

What I failed to emphasize was that our healthcare team provided so much more value than simply helping us through the birth process. They provided sound counseling, education, support, and wellness monitoring throughout the entire nine month period leading up to the birth. They offer these same comprehensive services for an entire six week period post-birth as well. Additionally, our midwife has been a reliable resource for us at all hours of the day – wife Rachel has sent her many questions via text message both before and after birth to which she received a prompt answer. Further, our midwife has offered to answer any questions we may have at any time going forward, even beyond the six weeks of post-partum services we paid for.

And speaking of payment – we paid for these services in cash without having to deal with any insurance companies. The entire experience harkens me back to a by-gone era of relative freedom in which small-town family doctors made house calls and actually cared more about their patients than their pharmaceutical sales rep.

What seems to be forgotten is that health insurance was designed to mitigate major catastrophes; it was not designed to pay for every dime of medical care and every new drug that rolls off the production line. Of course the entire health insurance industry has been corrupted, twisted, convoluted, and mangled into some form of a socio-fascist system that seeks to govern and dictate all manners of health care to individuals. Oh, and in exchange for such a tyrannical system individuals get to pay skyrocketing prices for their insurance policies. I read that employer open-enrollment periods were pushed back this year until after the midterm elections – presumably so voters wouldn’t know how high their premiums were planning to jump prior to the election.

The only possible result of the cartelization of the healthcare industry by the big-government/big-insurance/big-pharma alliance is a drastic reduction in the quality of care available and a drastic increase in the price of this care. I don’t know what the solution is for the poor Baby Boomer generation that will see their healthcare costs skyrocket at the exact point in time they need care most. I suppose they can continue trying to vote the system away and I wish them the best of luck in that endeavor. But I don’t think there are political solutions to political problems.

There may be a little more hope for the younger generations: they may be able to “opt” out of the system as it gets worse by avoiding insurance and paying cash for medical care. I suspect we will see certain doctors offer contractual services similar to how our midwife runs her practice. Instead of going through the insurance company, people could pay monthly installments to their doctor in exchange for personalized service. This service could include an open line for phone calls and text messages, house visits as needed, or maybe even after-hour office visits with no waiting room to sit in.

To my knowledge (and I am certainly no expert) there is nothing illegal about such a model at the current time – the Obamacare mandates apply specifically to insurance-related care. Of course this model would become obsolete if the gun-toting health enforcers start kicking in doors and hauling people off to jail for taking charge of their own healthcare. Until then, why not regain individual sovereignty and opt out of the system to the greatest extent possible?

More to come,

Joe Withrow
Wayward Philosopher

For more of Joe’s thoughts on the “Great Reset” and regaining individual sovereignty please read “The Individual is Rising” which is available at http://www.theindividualisrising.com/. The book is also available on Amazon in both paperback and Kindle editions.