By Anna Von Reitz
Licensing means that you are being given permission to do something that is
otherwise unlawful for you to do. Licensing also implies the existence of a
king who stands over you and who decides whether or not to grant you the
privilege of doing whatever that illegal business or activity is.
For example, acting as a pirate is against the law. However, in
England,
if the King gave you Letters of Marque to act as a privateer (a pirate)
then it
was perfectly legal for you to engage in smuggling and robbery on the
High Seas, or wherever else the King said you could do it. The King
as Law-giver could
also suspend the Law at will and grant you the privilege -- a license
-- to
kill as per James Bond, or to pillage or any other thing.
So, since when has it ever been against the law to be a doctor or
to practice medicine in this country?
Answer: after the Civil War laws restricting medical practices and setting
standards of education for doctors began proliferating. This was promoted by
the burgeoning pharmaceutical industry that wished to get rid of homemade
medicine that competed with their products. They also sponsored medical schools
with their newly acquired wealth from producing such products as Bayer's aspirin
and Carter's Liver Pills and then used these schools as a means of
indoctrinating generations of doctors into dependence on their products.
Then, with the rise of trade unionism we got the American Medical
Association, which in effect unionized medical practitioners, and which has ---
like the American Bar Association --- run a closed union shop in violation of
the public law for over a hundred years. This was also a good development in
the eyes of the early pharmaceutical giants, because it placed the doctors under
the thumb of the AMA and of course, the AMA leadership was already on the take
from Big Pharma.
The end result for American medicine has been mixed. On one hand, you can
be sure that your doctor has been fed exactly all the same information as any
other doctor in the country and has passed exams proving that he or she took it
all in and knows the standard material. On the other hand, you can also be sure
that your doctor has been indoctrinated and literally trained not to think for
him or herself too deeply, and has been taught to rely on and use a panoply of
Big Pharma products, and yes, is literally bribed to do so. The influence
peddling of the pharmaceutical companies has gone so far as to pay outright
kickbacks to doctors for prescribing certain drugs.
We have also suffered from "patentability losses"---- the politically
correct way of saying that better and less destructive traditional medication
based on herbs and essential oils and other traditional medicines are not being
researched and made available because they can't be patented. Big Pharma
avoids putting any research or development money into drugs that they can't
own. Literally. As a result, many of the most promising known cures for
disease are not being investigated and billions of dollars are being spent
instead on manmade molecules that often are nothing but selective poisons that
alleviate some symptoms and cause others at the same time.
This country survived at least 300 years of its history with no licensing
of medical practitioners at all. It's a good guess we could survive another
300. The better part of practical intelligence would argue that there is a need
to oversee medical practices and procedures and drugs being administered--- and
the larger question is who or what should do the oversight?
Medicine at its heart is as much of an art as a science, and while it may
be possible to establish our "best guess" standards for the science end of it,
there is no way to uniformly package or mandate the style of the art.
My own solution is more medical schools, an end to the AMA stranglehold, an
end of the Big Pharma racketeering and kickback system, and public investment
in institutions that teach and conduct research based on traditional
medicine---- hopefully in tandem with our conventional medical schools.
Integrated medicine and its practitioners take the enlightened approach of
trying to discern and make use of the best of both worlds--traditional and
modern--- for the benefit of their patients. After all, if your goal is to cure
or to at least effectively help someone deal with symptoms of disease, doesn't
it make sense that you use all the knowledge in the whole arsenal that thousands
of years of medical practice has garnered?
I think the answer is a big fat "YES!"
As for regulation of medical practice, I think it is best done by those who
practice medicine --- the doctors themselves, but I also think that closed union
shops and coercion by unions is basically immoral and unlawful. So how do we do
away with the bad aspects of the AMA and still retain the good? Perhaps the
better answer is a "Medical Better Business Bureau" under the auspices of the
Office of the Ombudsman or other Consumer Protection agency, that collects and
responsibly publishes verified complaints against doctors and medical
institutions. When you pick a doctor or a hospital you would check their
ratings, just like you check the Consumer Reports on a lawn mower, and their
success or failure would then depend on delivering the best prices and most
effective services at the least risk to their patients.
That sort of open and public competition lets people and institutions rise
and fall according to their performance and the genuine desire to provide the
best health and medical care possible.
Which brings up a final point---- health in all its aspects is the true
goal of all medical practice, and true health requires much more than a bottle
of pills. It requires commitment from patients and knowledgeable patients as
well as committed and knowledgeable doctors. Many of the worst and most
pervasive health problems we face in this country are self-inflicted as a result
of poor nutrition, poor hygiene, and addictions.
My point is that educating the doctors and holding them to high and more or
less uniform standards doesn't create better public health overall, which is the
ultimate goal. To promote that goal requires better health education in our
schools and in the public venues that are open to us, and a more goal-driven
public-policy perspective. We need better health and hygiene curriculums in our
schools, more education made available through public health organizations, and
more support for preventive measures to preserve natural health instead of vast
programs to regain what has been lost through ignorance.
The governmental services corporations we have been dealing with "as"
governments have been profit-driven instead of being directed by any sincere and
practical interest in the Public Good. If it makes them a buck, directly, they
go for it. If it saves them (and us) a buck, they could care less. Public
Health Education is one of those things that the Public Good demands, but is
more attuned to saving us money than costing us money. Just like the
Ombudsman's Office, health education represents an outflow for the governmental
services corporations and, though the public benefits greatly, the benefit to
the governmental services corporations in terms of savings does not motivate
them.
After all, when the governmental services corporations provide services to
you, they get to charge for those services. When they invest in keeping you and
your children healthy, they see savings in that fewer people are on the public
dole or requiring medical care--- but that is all the same to them, because they
just pass those costs, along with their own costs administering welfare
programs, on to you. They actually make money on sick people and criminals
and drug addicts, so from their perspective, there is no motivation to decrease
illness, or crime, or drug use. Quite the opposite.
Until we replace the profit-driven governmental services corporations with
actual people-based government, or otherwise devise means by which these
organizations change their motivations, we will continue to see increasing
ignorance, illness, drug use, and criminality burgeoning as "government
industries" now depend on these negative conditions.
As long as we fail in our job to demand good services and to place other
motivations in front of these profit-driven governmental services corporations
we will continue to get the same results. One possible way to nip this whole
situation in the bud is to provide Negative Rewards to the politicians and the
corporations they work for-- that is, reward them for decreases in criminality,
drug use, medical costs, etc., and punish them monetarily for failure to produce
results.
Since they are just corporations we have the ability to fire them and hire
new people and new organization to provide us with the services we want and
need. At the end of the day, the Consumer rules this planet. If the "USA,
INC." isn't producing the results we need at a price we can afford, then it is
time to boot up "Yankee Doodle, Inc." and see what they can do.
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