Saturday, July 1, 2017

Medical Licensing, Yankee Doodle, Inc., and the Way Things Work


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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See this article and over 600 others on Anna's website here:www.annavonreitz.com

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