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.
We should have a thousand
times more medics.
The first but least
obvious benefit of this increase in medical personnel may become apparent
during the next global pandemic. Instead
of collapsing once a third or more of health care professionals fall sick, this
service could rapidly ramp up to the required number of hospital beds by
recruiting newly trained health care providers to replace losses among standard
hospital staff. Otherwise, we can expect
to face this Twenty-First Century challenge with Nineteenth Century levels of
health care and corresponding casualties.
Learners of healing should
treat a spectrum of human conditions most of which are ignored these days. These treatments would range from internal
factors (psychic and physical) to those external (social and
environmental). Proper reverence would
be paid to every aspect.
Robust public health
promotes human genius. Failure to
promote the best public health reduces this civilization’s IQ and multiplies
other problems. Excellent public health
would reduce those problems to a fraction of their current bulkiness, in direct
proportion to that excellence.
Learners will advocate a
constitutional guarantee of quality care in order to advance medical
progress. They will organize a universal
health care system to fulfill that mandate.
Privileged corporations, (insurance, pharmaceutical, teaching, nursing
homes, etc.) will be stripped of health care profits. Those profit centers will become public
utilities. Psychic and other forms of
alternate healing will be researched much more thoroughly.
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 rise once
again, based on recent waves of American doctors bound for perpetual
warfare.
I may be too optimistic
about this decline. By hook or by crook,
fat-head right wingers seem to have swept every tasty
morsel off the American smorgasbord.
Reactionary chic has become all the rage, these days: complete with
useless wars, at-home ineptitude and disaster, ambidextrous handouts to the rich,
and fraud on every level of government.
Is there any crime and misdemeanor these gentlemen haven’t gotten away
with? No one could serve as better
examples of ideological worthlessness.
They keep insisting that government must be incompetent; man, have they
verified their own assertion!
The AMA recruited its
first adherents from military surgeons in bloody aprons who got their weapons
catechism during the American Civil War in the 1860s. Allied with embryonic drug companies, the AMA
suppressed its sibling medical discipline, homeopathy.
During the early 1800’s,
Samuel Hannemann reinvented the idea of administering minute doses of drugs
that would induce specific symptoms and thus cure ailments with similar
symptoms.
Despite homeopathy’s early
success, the AMA championed allopathy, which used drugs in massive doses (just
below toxic levels; and let’s not mention the interactive toxicity of drug
combinations!) strictly to suppress symptoms.
Even though homeopathic hospitals and colleges flourished during the
nineteenth century, the AMA and allied drug companies hounded most of them out
of existence by World War II.
Like weapon religion, AMA
conservatism has exhausted any usefulness it could once claim. Today, the primary goal of AMA conservatives
is to boost their profit margins by denying the advantages of single-payer
health care to all but the rich and the military.
Weapon medicine contends
with disease and trauma inflicted deliberately.
Soldiers in the field suffer like abused farm animals; out in the
weather and layered in filth, they devour whatever garbage they can loot, dig
up or drag from the rear. In combat,
hordes of agonized casualties, pandemic infection, exhaustion,
lack of sleep, 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 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 post-insult 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’ towards 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 trauma medicine
evolved just off the battlefield.
Alexander the Gross brought surgeons along with his much-lauded,
pincushion phalanx. Western medics
didn’t investigate Chinese acupuncture until after French military surgeons
followed their Army into
Space-age ambulances
continue to bounce screaming and/or dope-zombied
casualties along too many bullet-swept and crash-crowded highways. Our highways kill more people than our wars;
and far too many wars occur overseas.
Every war on this planet, every insurrection, every duplicate 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 full of a freezing cocktail of lifesaving
fluids. Flash-cooled trauma and drowning
victims appear to have longer survival times, slower bleeding rates, greater
resistance to infection and extended immunity from brain death while they await
delayed but crucial care from doctors out of reach.
Victorian tropical
medicine and insect eradication programs protected white colonial garrisons,
not aboriginal peoples. Yellow fever and
other tropical infections were finally conquered for this reason alone. This racist neglect continues today. It engenders, among other abuses, the mass
genocide of Aids that has engulfed
Sooner or later, such
assumptions will bring the same plagues down on our heads. The best public health is that deployed far
away from the richest nations. If you
can guarantee that someone living at the antipodes from your world gets better
public health care than your own, yours will grow proportionately.
Today, more money is spent
to find 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 source of most
of these diseases, chronic malnutrition, is carefully ignored and even
fostered. This global famine is largely
caused by corporate export monocultures that satisfy luxury consumption
demands.
Almost every civil war
since the Cold War has had this in common.
They involved some country’s restricted commodity export: diamonds,
timber, oil or some unique monoculture.
Simple agricultural self-sufficiency 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 let this happen. Learners will
suggest to them 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 will provide ten times
higher returns than ornate swindles currently worshipped. Who knew?
Weapon medicine took off
during the Great Paroxysm (World War I) when almost every doctor on Earth
rotated through years of combat internship.
If not World War I, then WWII. If
not those, every war 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
health care was dismissed as irrelevant.
This recession to the
militarist mean is not hard to understand.
On a battlefield, honest preventive caregivers would instruct their
patients to throw away their weapons and go home. Weapon elites are not amused by these
instructions, unless their enemies adopt them unilaterally.
I’m counting on everyone
adopting them. Then, let’s see what
global health improvements we could achieve.
I understand that quality health care could be delivered to everyone on
Earth for something like the price of a year of Bush’s war in
A peace-oriented medical
community would train many more deliverers of basic first aid and
cardio-pulmonary resuscitation (CPR).
There should be another word for this in English: a surchange of health care 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 new caregivers of this kind? Many of them are in training, today, yet this
training timetable is incoherent and chaotic.
It demonstrates reductive and fragmentary attempts by maturing
WeaponWorld, to apply holistic PeaceWorld solutions to its problems as they
worsen. Those fixes must inevitably
fail, since they are too parochial, reductive and fragmentary. The pragmatic holism required by PeaceWorld
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. Competence levels will
determine which of an incremental pharmacopoeia of remedies and treatments
these successors of ‘barefoot doctors’ will 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 many healing rituals of
extraordinary psychological impact.
The stipulation of
"having to ask for a second opinion" will become ridiculous, since
this medical system will demand multiple opinions for every significant
diagnosis. Since everyone will earn a
comfortable living anyway (in multiples of the minimum income necessary to
escape poverty), expert cooperation and free referrals will replace competition
for patients. They will eliminate the
insular, “figure it out for yourself” attitude of present-day medicine that
promotes selective technical incompetence and a growing number of errors. We should apply deliberate redundancy to
reduce error rates! The perfection of
personal medical mastery was never that important—enormously reduced error
rates are. It might be preferable if
each patient were seen by a partnership of doctors, or some larger medical
team, in order to confirm their diagnoses and treatments.
Malpractice would draw
immediate demotion to lower levels of public health care responsibility and
accelerated remedial courses. Word would
go out: “If his medical competence is suspect, seek treatment among other
replacements far more qualified, while we retrain this one.”
Learners of Healing will
saturate neighborhoods with basic nutrition and hygiene education; they will
sponsor preventive and elementary public health measures in each household,
office and school. The self-care wisdom
that takes us a lifetime of disease and suffering to pick up by trial and
error, Learners will pick up effortlessly during their childhood.
Doctors with advanced
training will be freed for home health visits.
Sophisticated nursing services can also be delivered there. Primary health care healers would practice
preventive medicine and long-term nursing care in the home. Rarely visited hospitals would only house the
most demanding operative tasks of emergency care, teaching, research and
disaster response. While they reorganize
the medical community, Learners will introduce conception-to-expiration,
single-source holistic health care on a global scale.
This may involve more
ablutions of prayer, washing of strangers’ feet (especially those of enemies),
restful sleep and hydration. I am
convinced that a majority of today’s chronic ailments stem from these
deficiencies. Obeying Mohammed’s dictum,
everyone will wash their hands at least five times a day, or feel ritually
unclean otherwise. This simple habit
would interrupt the easiest transmission route of most infectious
diseases. It seems that bacteria may not
mutate their way past the simple physics of soap and hot water—unlike
complicated antibiotics that they seem designed to foil 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 number of
research grants funding the torture of laboratory animals. Accurate, cheap and preemptive diagnoses –
both medical and psychological – will replace the medical guesswork of
today.
The following matter
cannot be emphasized often 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
complicated, more accessible and easier to hide by individuals who are not
powerful, otherwise. Read “lone gunmen”
and marginal terrorist groups along with their psychopathic 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 institutionalized homelessness: a national disgrace. Today, we let people run loose unsupervised who
hear voices in their heads. Thus, we
risk the occasional axe murder and the massacre of a restaurant- or
classroom-full of innocent victims. In
the near future, these psychopathic crimes may turn into city and sub-continent
sterilizing attacks.
Therefore, all such
homicidal maniacs, (especially the borderline, the latent and the most
brilliant among them), will have to be watched very carefully throughout their
lifetime. We might as well survey
everyone as a matter of routine, and iron out more neuroses while they are
tender and easier to treat.
No longer would we
restrict doctor visits to crisis situations, once something had gone seriously
wrong. Medical visits will become easier
to schedule and more reliable than today's purchases of self-administered,
over-the-counter palliatives. Four
yearly doctor’s visits will become the norm, if only to chat for awhile 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 referral
and consultation 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 talents 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. This
dearth satisfies 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 such care’s hyper-inflated expense.
It’s amazing. In John
Dos Passos’ trilogy, USA, he describes a few
hard-working families that lost everything they had worked so hard for, to
illness, lost business and medical bills.
He wrote this story almost a century ago. Here we are, a hundred years later, and the
worst dread most people face is that the expenses of chronic illness and the
helplessness of old age will ruin them and their children.
This fear remains
perfectly reasonable; it justifies social and economic elitism, otherwise
inexcusable, so that a few scheming individuals may shield themselves. Everyone else is a co-conspirator in this
travesty, hoping that they and their loved ones may attain that unreachable
plateau of medical security through selfish, lose-lose efforts. The institutional termination of this dread,
by providing free, birth-to-death health care, would promote much greater
social wisdom.
Drug companies base their
research and development decisions 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 need to be replaced by more thoughtful,
civic-minded public utilities.
Patients who need 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 many near-death survivors experience, confirms my suspicion
that a merciful God ministers even unto our death. If this phenomenon is merely a chemical
imbalance in the brain 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 should be
reprioritized. We should 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 needs 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 easier to achieve, without so many betrayals of ordinary
morality.
Abortion is a great source
of distress for everyone involved. This
ghastly procedure cannot be eliminated, however, until the above measures have
been fully implemented. If you insist on
banning abortion, you should insist on all these other items, first. It is not realistic to criminalize, the
actions of desperate parents from above.
It would be more realistic to reduce their desperation and then let them
decide what to do with their child.
Every child on Earth should be guaranteed a secure and beloved
upbringing.
This grim decision should
be delegated to each mother, and only to her, once she has been objectively
instructed by her chosen physicians. God
help her make such a devastating choice.
LEARNERS: On the Move from WeaponWorld to PeaceWorld
CONTACT PAGE (under development)