SUMMARY
OF LEARNERS INTRO &
VOCAB
“Should medicine ever fulfill its great ends, it must enter into the larger political and social life of our time, it must indicate the barriers which obstruct the normal completion of the life cycle and remove them. Should this ever come to pass, medicine, whatever it may then be, will become the common good of all.” Rudolph Virchow quote in The World Encyclopedia of Peace, Volume III, p. 362.
There should be a thousand
times more medics.
The first but least
apparent benefit of this reinforcement of medical personnel may become apparent
during the next pandemic. Instead of
collapsing once a third or more of healthcare professionals fall sick, this
service could ramp up rapidly to serve the required number of hospital beds by
recruiting healthcare providers newly trained to replace losses among everyday
hospital staff. Otherwise, we can expect
to face this 21st century challenge with 19th century
levels of care and corresponding casualties.
Learners of healing should
treat a broad spectrum of human conditions, most of which are ignored these
days. These treatments would range from
internal factors (psychic and physical) to external ones (social and
environmental). Every aspect would
receive due reverence.
Robust public health
promotes human genius. Failure to
promote the best of its kind reduces a civilization’s IQ and multiplies its
other problems. Its excellence would
reduce those problems to a fraction of their current bulk, in direct proportion
to that improvement.
Learners will legislate a
constitutional guarantee of quality care and organize a universal healthcare
system to fulfill that mandate.
Privileged corporations, (insurance, pharmaceutical, teaching, nursing
care, etc.) will be stripped of healthcare profits and converted into public
utilities. Psychic and other forms of
alternate healing will be researched much more thoroughly, especially studies
in the preventive benefits of sleep and hydration.
These days, only a
shrinking third of American doctors belong to the American Medical
Association. Its innate conservatism
spells its doom, and it is gradually fading as we speak. In truth, its membership could increase once
again, based on waves of American doctors recently recruited for perpetual
warfare.
I may have been too
optimistic about this decline. By hook
or by crook, right wingers seem to have swept every morsel off the American
smorgasbord. Reactionary chic has become all the rage these days: complete with
useless wars, homegrown ineptitude and disaster, ambidextrous handouts to the
rich, and fraud at every level of government.
Is there any crime or misdemeanor these good people haven’t gotten away
with? They keep insisting that
government must be incompetent; man, have they confirmed their claim to
ineptitude! No-one could better serve as
a poster children of ideology-driven incompetence.
The AMA recruited its
first adherents from bloody aproned military surgeons who got their weapons
catechism during the American Civil War in the 1860s. In alliance with embryonic drug companies,
the AMA suppressed its sister medical discipline, homeopathy.
During the early 1800’s,
Samuel Hannemann brought back the idea that administering minute doses of drugs
induced specific symptoms and thus cured ailments with similar symptoms.
Despite homeopathy’s early
success, the AMA championed allopathy, which prescribed drugs in massive doses
(at or just below toxic levels; and let’s not mention toxic drug interactions!)
strictly to suppress symptoms. Even
though homeopathic hospitals and colleges had flourished until then, the AMA
and allied drug companies hounded most of them out of existence by World War
II.
Like our weapon religions,
AMA conservatism has exhausted any usefulness it could once claim. Today, the primary goal of AMA conservatives
is to boost their profit margin, by denying the advantages of universal
healthcare to all but the rich and the military.
Weapon medicine contends
with disease and trauma deliberately inflicted.
Soldiers in the field suffer like abused farm animals. Out in the weather and layered in filth, they
are forced to devour whatever garbage they can loot, dig up or drag from the
rear. In combat, hordes of agonizing
casualties, pandemic infection, exhaustion, sleep deprivation, exposure,
malnutrition, sorrow, frustration, fear, rage, separation anxiety and psychiatric
emergencies make up the daily routine.
In addition, seniority and combat survival determine promotion among
military leaders. Therefore, orthodox
medicos attempt as best they can to suppress symptoms of illness, trauma and
old age, as well most emotional reactions.
For weapon medics,
reducing stress to promote health is absurd.
Instead, warrior societies practice social triage, ostracism of patients
and post-insult, high-stress invasive treatments. No such medical system can maintain the health
of a population undergoing greater and greater stress. As overall health deteriorates, medical
expenses skyrocket. After all, there is
no ‘rear area’ to which casualties may be evacuated for more civilized
treatment. Hospitals become repositories
of every infection known and unknown to mankind, and kill as many people as
they save.
Western medicine evolved
just off the battlefield. Alexander the
Gross brought surgeons along with his much-lauded, pincushion phalanx. Occidental medics didn’t investigate oriental
acupuncture until after French military surgeons followed their Army into
Indochina. The American Army didn’t
establish a semi-adequate ‘Golden Hour’ of helicopter emergency response until
the Korean and Vietnam Wars. As a gesture
of mercy, Napoleon’s chief surgeons equipped horse-drawn ambulances with sprung
axles. Previously, those special
vehicles were reserved for the delicate behind of nobles.
Space-age ambulances
continue to bounce screaming and/or dope-zombied casualties along too many
bullet-swept and crash-crowded highways.
More people die on our highways than in our wars, and far too many wars
overseas. Every war on this planet,
every insurrection, every redundant massacre of innocents, every suicide bomb
and car wreck, is one more, ‘too many’ and largely avoidable despite everything
we've been told.
Even today, the medical
community hasn't quite decided whether to keep shock victims warm under
blankets or pump their chests with a freezing cocktail of lifesaving
fluids. Flash-cooled trauma and drowning
victims appear to have a longer survival interval, reduced bleed-out rates,
greater resistance to infection and extended immunity from brain death, while
awaiting delayed but crucial care from doctors out of reach. This was seriously documented by British
combat doctors among their wounded patients during the Falklands War, also by
army doctors during the invasion of Murmansk by allied forces in 1918.
Victorian era tropical
medicine and insect eradication programs protected white colonial garrisons,
only aboriginal peoples as an afterthought (and many of them not even
today.) Yellow fever and other tropical
infections were finally conquered for the first reason alone. This racist neglect continues today. It engenders, among other abuses, the mass
genocide of Aids that engulfed Africa and the poorest corners of the Third
World. Aids spread predictably into
every poor district—just like terrorism will.
Presumably, once all those Third World babies, child parents and
twenty-something grandparents die from AIDS, mass terror or mere malnutrition,
they won’t require so much pesky international aid.
Sooner or later, these
prejudices will bring similar plagues down on our heads. The best public health is that deployed at
great distance from the richest nations.
If you can guarantee that someone living at the antipodes from your
world benefits from public healthcare as good as your own, yours would improve
proportionately.
Today, much more research
money is devoted to finding cures for the trivial complaints of rich societies
(baldness, geriatric impotence, foot fungus and pet neuroses) than on cures for
lethal tropical diseases.
The underlying causes of
most of these diseases – chronic malnutrition and bad water – are carefully
ignored or even fostered. This global
neglect is largely caused by corporate investment in export monocultures to
satisfy luxury consumption demands. The
revenue from such enterprise is unpredictable and incapable of addressing these
causes once and for all.
Almost every civil war
since the Cold War has had this in common.
It involved some country’s restricted export: diamonds, timber, oil or
some other monoculture or mining activity.
Elementary autarky in those countries would have blunted most of those
wars.
I can hear officials of
the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund scream bloody murder rather
than allow this to happen. Learners will
suggest that they change their mind—with speed and enthusiasm. They will discover, tardily but beyond
dispute, that more profits accrue from this policy. Practical charity can provide ten times more
return than the ornate swindles they venerate these days. Who knew?
Weapon medicine took off
during the Great Paroxysm (World War I) when most doctors had to rotate through
years of combat internship. If not World
War I, then WWII; and if not those, wars since.
As a result, general practitioners vanished, most physicians became
specialists, home visits were cut short, every health service became a hospital
routine, and preventive healthcare was dismissed as irrelevant.
This recession to the
militarist mean is not hard to understand.
On a battlefield, honest caregivers would instruct their patients to
throw their weapons away and go home.
Weapon elites are not amused by these instructions, unless their enemies
adopt them unilaterally.
I’m counting on everyone
to adopt them. Then, let’s see to what
extent global health would improve! It
is my understanding that quality healthcare could be delivered to everyone on
Earth for something like the price of a year of Bush the Lesser’s war in
Iraq. Instead, we are exposed to the
paradoxical, hypocritical, ruinous and disease-aggravating medical industry so
familiar to WeaponWorld.
A peace-oriented medical
community would train many more deliverers of basic first aid and cardio-pulmonary
resuscitation (CPR). There should be
another expression for this in English: a surchange
of healthcare and home health providers: personal aids, masseurs,
acupuncturists, physical therapists, emergency medical technicians, hospice
care-givers, pharmacists, nurses, physicians’ assistants, chiropractors,
naturopaths, homeopaths, shamans, healers, herbalists and other
specialists.
Couldn’t we expect a
healthier society, given so many more caregivers of this kind? Many of them are in training today, yet their
education is incoherent and chaotic. It
reveals reductive and fragmentary attempts by decadent WeaponWorld to apply
holistic, PeaceWorld solutions to its problems, even as they worsen. Those fixes will fail inevitably, since they
are too parochial, reductive and fragmentary.
The pragmatic holism that PeaceWorld requires,
is forbidden on WeaponWorld, except for its weapons undertakings.
Learners of healing will
practice in their own neighborhood, up to but not beyond their level of
expertise. Those levels will determine
which of an incremental pharmacopoeia of remedies and treatments these
successors of ‘barefoot doctors’ may administer, and who will practice serious,
in-depth diagnosis involving many more consultations and referrals.
Particular attention will
be paid to powerful placebo effects, reinforced by healing rituals of
heightened psychological impact.
The need "to seek a
second opinion" will become ridiculous, since this medical system will
demand several opinions for every significant diagnosis. Since comfortable incomes will be routine
anyway (in multiples of the minimum income necessary to escape poverty), expert
cooperation and free referrals will replace competition for patients. It will eliminate the insular, “figure it out
for yourself” attitude of present-day medicine, that promotes selective
technical incompetence and a growing incidence of errors. We should make use of deliberate redundancy
to reduce these errors! The perfection
of personal medical mastery (that WeaponWorld insists upon) was never that
important—the dropoff of error rates is.
It might be preferable if each patient were seen by a partnership of
doctors or some more extensive medical team to confirm their diagnoses and
treatments.
Malpractice would draw immediate
demotion to lower levels of healthcare responsibility and accelerated remedial
coursework. Word would go out: “If your
medical competence is suspect, we will seek treatment among better qualified
replacements while you retrain and recertify yourself.”
Learners of Healing will
saturate neighborhoods with basic education in nutrition and hygiene; they will
teach preventive and elementary public health measures in every household,
office and school.
Doctors with advanced
training will be freed for home health visits.
Sophisticated nursing services can also be delivered there. Primary healthcare providers would practice
preventive medicine and long-term nursing care in the home. Rarely visited hospitals would only house the
most demanding tasks of emergency and surgical care, teaching, research and
disaster response.
While they reorganize the
medical community, Learners will introduce conception-to-expiration,
single-source holistic healthcare on a global scale.
This may involve more
ablutions of prayer, washing strangers’ feet (especially those of enemies),
more restful sleep and hydration. I am
convinced that many of today’s chronic ailments stem (at least in part) from
these deficiencies. Obeying Mohammed’s
dictum, everyone will wash their hands at least five times a day, or else feel
ritually unclean. This simple habit
would block the easiest transmission route of most infectious diseases. It seems that bacteria may not mutate their
way past the simple physics of soap and diligent scrubbing flushed by water
(its temperature irrelevant except for your comfort; water hot enough to kill
microorganisms would blister your hands)—unlike complicated antibiotics that
they seem genetically designed to neutralize in the long run. Also, new masks will block airborne pandemics
(using powerful glues or static electricity?
How do nose hairs block germs?)
Public health overwatch,
pollution control, good nutrition, more exercise, health education (and no
cars) would improve general health much more dramatically than any amount of
research grants funding the serial torture of laboratory animals. Accurate, cheap and preemptive diagnoses –
both medical and psychological – will replace the medical guesswork of today.
I have also discovered,
all on my own and without a doctor’s confirmation, that my chronic back pain
and digestive disorders were the result of eating tomatoes and other acidic
foods and drinks (no more Coca Cola for me, ever!), and nothing else. How many millions of people suffer from similar
complaints, undiagnosed and treated at best symptomatically, instead of
receiving an accurate diagnosis and permanent cure of their primary ailment?
The self-care wisdom that
takes us a lifetime of disease and suffering to more or less pick up by trial
and error, Learners will succeed at it effortlessly during childhood.
What follows cannot be
emphasized enough. Universal
psychological testing and lifelong monitoring will become critical for the
survival of human civilization.
Modern weapon technologies
encourage ephemeralization. In plain
English, that means it is becoming easier to make and deploy biological and
nanotech weapons capable of inducing mass casualties and destruction. By “easier,” I mean cheaper, less technically
complicated, more accessible and easier to hide by individuals and groups not
all that powerful otherwise. Read “lone
gunmen” and marginal terrorist groups, along with their sociopathic supporters
in numbers too small to count.
Thanks to ex-President and dementia sufferer
Ronald Reagan (since glorified by his equally demented supporters), the richest nation on Earth has institutionalized
homelessness: a national disgrace. These
days, we let people run loose unsupervised who listen to voices in their
head. Thus we risk the occasional axe
murder and massacre of a restaurant- or classroom-full of innocent
victims. In the future, these
psychopathic crimes may become city and sub-continent sterilizing attacks.
Therefore, all such
homicidal maniacs, (especially the borderline, the latent, late bloomers and
the most brilliant among them), will have to be watched very carefully over the
course of their lifetime. We might as
well survey everyone as a matter of routine, and iron out more neuroses while
they were tender and easier to fix; or even before, by means of prenatal
genetic engineering.
No longer would we
restrict doctor’s visits to crisis situations, once something had gone
seriously wrong. Medical visits will
become easier to schedule and more reliable than today's purchase of self-administered,
over-the-counter palliatives. Four
doctor’s visits per year will become the norm, if only to chat for a while
about routine health matters. Local
Learners of Healing will dispense cheaper remedies (for the most part,
placebo); they will diagnose anything wrong, targeting serious problems for
extensive referrals and consultations from a much larger, better trained and
more accessible medical community.
The therapeutic laying on
of hands will be studied systematically and practiced intensively. Anyone who demonstrates a talent of that kind
will be recruited into the medical community as a child and dedicated to the
highest levels of healing.
Many cost-effective
treatments are not available to us: a dearth that goes a long way to satisfy
weapon requirements for medical rationing, profit and privilege. The media applaud spectacular feats of
life-support, surgical virtuosity and extraordinary intensive care; but they
rarely report the hyper-inflated expense this type of care.
It’s amazing. In John Dos Passos’ trilogy, USA, he describes a few hard-working
families that lost everything for which they had worked so hard, to illness,
medical bills, lost income and jobs. He
wrote this story almost a century ago.
Here we are, a hundred years later, and the worst dread most people
experience is that the bills for chronic illness and the helplessness of old
age will ruin them and their children.
This perfectly reasonable
fear justifies a level social and economic elitism that would be inexcusable
otherwise, so that a few scheming individuals might shield themselves from
it. Everyone else conspires with this
travesty, hoping that they and their loved ones may attain some unreachable
plateau of medical security through selfish, lose-lose efforts. A superior form of social wisdom would result
from the institutional termination of this dread by providing free,
birth-to-death healthcare.
Drug companies base their
research and development plans on “what the market will bear” rather than “what
the population needs today.” Such
wasteful practices will soon price themselves beyond the reach of everyone
except millionaires. Self-serving
medical care corporations will see themselves replaced by more thoughtful,
civic-minded public utilities.
Patients who require
absurd levels of care should be allowed to die with dignity, free of pain and
with a clear awareness of their option to
reincarnate in Jesus and be saved.
The beatific epiphany experienced by many near-death survivors, confirms
my suspicion that a merciful God ministers even unto our death. If this phenomenon is just an imbalance in
brain chemistry induced by the agony of death, so be it; drug companies should synthesize
it and medics should administer it to everyone during their death throws. Less pain and fear, more mercy and no harm in
that, per Hippocrates.
Medical spending
priorities should be revised to reduce overpopulation, neonate mortality,
pandemics, the ill effects of mental illness, obesity, undiagnosed criminality,
family neglect and abuse—we should stop working so hard to retain life signs in
the undead.
The grim project of
extending the lifespan of privileged people beyond the statistical norm should
be shelved. More pressing priorities
need to be addressed, first.
Once every neonate enjoys
a cherished and healthy childhood through adolescence – and only then –
extending the decrepitude of the rich may cease to be obscene vampirism. The miracle of very old age and concurrent good
health may become surprisingly easier to achieve, without so many betrayals of
ordinary morality.
Abortion is a source of
distress for everyone involved. This
ghastly procedure cannot be eliminated, however, until the above measures have
been fulfilled. If you insist on banning
abortion, you should insist on these other items, first. It is not realistic to criminalize the
actions of desperate parents from above; it would be more so to relieve their
sense of despair and let them decide what to do with their child. Every child on conceived Earth should be
afforded a secure and beloved upbringing.
This grim decision should
be delegated to each mother and only to her, once she has been instructed by
her chosen physicians without government prompting. God help her make such a devastating choice.
LEARNERS: On the Move from WeaponWorld to PeaceWorld