Archive for February, 2009

The Imporance of Diversity in Existence

The need for diversity is often overlooked in our culture. We’ve become quite accustomed to standardization of all things. Most people want to be comfortable, knowing that they will get precisely what they expect, no matter where they are. If they go to a Barnes & Noble and get a coffee at the Starbucks, they know that it will taste the same as the coffee at any other Starbucks and so forth.

Surely it seemed like a good idea to do this, at first; but this trend towards standardization steadily eliminates possibilities, due to its viral nature. Just look at all of the Wal-Marts, McDonalds, etc… What innovations have these stores done, that has benefited mankind? Sweat shops? Rain forest beef? Hydrogenated oils?

At this point in the progression of events, our culture is so deeply absorbed by this hyper-standardization paradigm, that many of us don’t know of alternative ways of conducting our affairs, nor are we likely to ever be exposed to such alternatives during the normal course of our lives. It has gotten to be so extreme, that many of our people are not even willing to the thought of acting in a novel way, that has not been laid down by the authorities.

Standardization, when done to the extent that it is in our society, tends to take the personal touch out of things. Consequently, most of the food is bland and tasteless, and everything is catered towards the least common denominator in a one-size-fits-all fashion; but its really, one-size-fits-some, since we all have our own unique physical and spiritual needs, though we often ignore this.

Cultural and spiritual diversity opens and expands our lives into a myriad of possibilities, so that we may grow into more aware beings.

Western Medicine: Making a Living off of Sickness and Disease

You could see me reaching
So why couldn’t you have
Met me halfway
You could see me bleeding
But you could not put
Pressure on the wound

You only think about yourself
You only think about yourself
You’d better bend before I go
On the first train to Mexico

You could see me breathing
But you still kept
Your hand over my mouth
You could feel me seething
But you just turned
Your nose up in the air

You only think about yourself
You only think about yourself
You’d better bend before I go
On the first train to Mexico

You only think about yourself
You only think about yourself
You’d better bend before I go
On the first train to Mexico

— Incubus – Mexico

Recent experiences with the Western (Allopathic) medical system have made me keenly aware of how Allopathy built primarily as a business model, and has very little of its workings geared towards genuine healing; or a connection between the doctor and patient.

I’ve long known this to be the case, ever since my first experience with “alternative” medicine, in fact. I can say, from my own experiences, that having a connection with the healer is a large part of becoming truly healthy and rejuvenated. All of the healers with whom I have had such a connection were involved in “alternative” healing practices.

My wife recently gave birth to a daughter, and events transpired in a way that we actually needed the hospital at some point. From the very beginning of the experience, the doctors pretended that the prenatal care we received from our mid-wife was non-existent. They even wrote on their forms that we had “no prenatal care.” Lumping us into the category of girls who have their babies in the bathroom stall at their high school.

I don’t really care to get into the whole “story” of everything, but it will suffice to say that I’ve seen quite a lot of disturbing practices in this field of medicine we call neo-natology.

Just today, I was thinking about why it is that I find myself so infuriated at the Allopathic medical system, and it seems to boil down to a few main points:

  • The vast majority of the “treatments” they utilize are pharmaceuticals, forsaking many generations of wisdom amassed by homeopathy.
  • Many of their pharmaceuticals are dangerous and even deadly, and many of the doctors make their living solely off of their ability to prescribe pharmaceuticals; so you won’t see any movement to change this from them.  They often do not know any more than what the sales rep taught them.
  • If I do, in fact, need a pharmaceutical for some reason.  I must pay a $50+ dollar office visit fee to an MD and convince them that I need it, then go to a pharmacy and pay another $40+ dollars to acquire the drug.  This makes it very difficult for people on a shoestring budget to get treatments in the conventional sense.
  • The AMA lobbyists have gamed the system in such a way that one cannot get insurance coverage for visits to alternative medicine practitioners.  The closest thing you can get to “alternative medicine” is Chiropractic; and even those guys get treated like dirt by the rest of the medical community.  This leaves Allopathy at an unfair advantage and doesn’t allow individuals to make their own choices of what kind of medicine they wish to use.
  • Allopathic doctors are often cocky and arrogant; they rarely wish to hear the concerns of their patients.  They generally are not willing to stray from the pack on their treatment recommendations, even if there is a perfectly valid argument to do so.  This is probably because they are most interested in covering their asses, and not with making a patient well.

The only reason Allopathy is so strong in this part of the world, is because people do not want to do their own research; but would rather simply allow the doctors to do whatever they please, pay the co-pay, pick up the drugs and be done with it.  They may alleviate their symptoms in this way, but the underlying problem is not resolved.

Problems in your body are caused by a lack or an excess, not by the lack of a drug.  Drugs fool the body into thinking that the problem is solved; they do not actually solve the problem.

I am thoroughly disgusted with these doctors, the way they use people: having them come in for “office visits” and telling them things they already knew then sending them on their way.  “That will be $50 dollars please.”

Then you have the hospitals, who literally get away with highway robbery.  My insurance company was billed over $14,000 for the doctors help in delivery and the two nights my wife spent at the hospital.

All of the doctors we saw were cold, passive and didn’t strike me as healers at all.  They seemed to me more like cleaver students who know how to play all of the games, without getting too many of their own ideas about medicine.  Even obvious things like giving pro-biotics to a baby who has trouble with food digestion are completely unknown to the hospital.

We actually had doctors refuse to give our daughter pro-biotics, saying that they were “too controversial.”  Imagine that, the bacteria that naturally resides in your intestines is considered “controversial.”

I still have difficulty waking up every morning into a society, where the healers are instead parasites.  If we are to ever grow into a better society, we are going to need real healers, not these charlatans who go around masquerading as medical practitioners.

We are just going to have to recognize them for what they are and route their controlling influence out of our lives however we can.