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 expansion of medical personnel will become apparent
when the next infectious pandemic strikes the population of Earth. Instead of collapsing, once a third or more
of health care professionals fall sick, this service could rapidly ramp up to
the surge numbers of hospital beds we would require, recruiting newly trained
health care providers to replace losses among ordinary hospital staff. Otherwise, we may 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 should
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 bulk, in direct
proportion to that excellence.
Learners will demand the
constitutional guarantee of quality medical 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 America’s 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 shrinkage. By hook or by crook,
fat-head right wingers seem to be sweeping every tasty morsel off the American
smorgasbord. Reactionary chic is all the
rage these days: complete with useless wars, at-home ineptitude and disaster,
ambidextrous handouts to the well-connected 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 poster boys for
their ideological worthlessness. They
keep insisting government must be incompetent; man, have they confirmed 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 even talk about 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 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 on purpose.
Soldiers in the field suffer like mistreated 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
dictate 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, no ‘rear area’
remains towards which casualties may be evacuated for more civilized
treatment. Hospitals become repositories
of every infection known and unknown to mankind, and kill off 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 Indochina. The
American Army didn’t establish a semi-adequate ‘Golden Hour’ helicopter
emergency response until the Vietnam War.
As a crude gesture of mercy, Napoleon’s chief surgeons equipped
horse-drawn ambulances with sprung axles.
Previously, those special vehicles were reserved for delicate noble
behinds.
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.
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 longer survival timelines, slower bleeding rates,
greater resistance to infection and extended immunity from brain death while
they await delayed but vitally needed 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 Africa and all the poorest corners of the
Third World. Predictably, Aids has
spread to every poor nation—just like terrorism will. Presumably, once all those Third World
babies, child parents and teenage grandparents die from AIDS, mass terror or
mere malnutrition, they won’t require so much pesky international aid.
Sooner or later, such
conclusions 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 of your world gets a better public health care system than your own,
yours will grow proportionately.
Today, more money is spent
to research cures for 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 had this in common. Almost
all of them 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 politely that they change their mind—with speed and
enthusiasm. They will discover, tardily
but indisputably, 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
to adopt them. Then let’s see what
global health improvements we could achieve.
I understand quality health care could be delivered to everyone on Earth
for something like the price of a year of Bush’s war in Iraq.
Instead, we expose
ourselves to the paradoxical, hypocritical, ruinous and disease-inducing
medical industry so familiar to our WeaponWorld of today.
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 care givers 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
endeavor.
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’ can 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 a multitude of healing
rituals of extraordinary psychological precision.
The stipulation of
"having to ask for a second opinion" will become ridiculous since the
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 two 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 better 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 to deliver 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 around the simple physics of soap and hot water—unlike
complicated antibiotics that 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 dramatically; much faster 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 that may induce mass casualties and destruction. By “easier,” I mean cheaper, less
complicated, more accessible and easier to hide by individuals otherwise
trivially powerful. 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 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 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 such talents 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. They rarely report such care’s
hyper-inflated expense.
It’s amazing. In John
Dos Passos’ trilogy, USA, he describes several
hard-working families who lost everything they worked so hard for, to illness,
lost business and medical bills. He
wrote this story almost a century ago.
Here we are, a century later, and the worst dread most people face is
that the expenses of chronic illness and old age helplessness will ruin them
and their children.
This perfectly reasonable
fear justifies habits of social and economic elitism, otherwise inexcusable, so
that a few manipulative individuals may shield themselves from it. 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 their selfish, lose-lose efforts. The institutional termination of this dread
by providing free birth-to-death health care, would promote 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 would be replaced by more thoughtful and 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 agonies 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 life span
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. 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)