Health care in America is a vital topic, a controversial topic, a political football, and more.
There are many sites on the net which purport to cover this topic, but many are slanted
toward one particular medical viewpoint, political viewpoint, or have particular agendas.

While this page certainly may develop a certain viewpoint as time goes on, it's mission,
if it has one, is to present a multidimensional, multidisciplinary , holistic approach to the subject.

I hope, that as the page develops, that we are able to offer some valuable insight into the
topics we dare to cover, and that we can serve as a sounding board for anyone who wishes
to become a guest writer or present their viewpoint on a given topic. If you have expertise
in any health related field, (and, by expertise, work experience in the field is considered
expertise), and are interested in submitting an article for consideration, please send an
e-mail to : codewarrior_wins(at)hotmail.com or codewarrior_wins(at)yahoo.com.
(replace (at) with @ ).

The state of health care in the United States has been decried by many professional
and lay groups.

From http://www.centrecountyfordean.org/000807Myth.htm we read :
"A commentary published in the July 26, 2000 issue of the
Journal of the American Medical Association notes that in a
comparison of 13 countries based on 16 health indicators, the U.S. ranked on average 12th."
and...
"     On June 21, 2000, the World Health Organization released the World Health Report –
Health Systems: Improving Performance, which is accessible at http://www.who.int/whr/
(World Health Report). The World Health Report ranked the U.S. 37th out of 191 countries.
According to the World Health Report, the objective of a health care system is to be
both good and fair. Thus, a health care system should strive to achieve the highest possible
average level of health with the fewest disparities among individuals and groups.
Americans must face the fact the U.S. health system is not good and fair as so defined.
(See The Health Care Fairness Act of 1999 at
http://www.law.uh.edu/healthlawperspectives/HealthPolicy/991118HCFAct.html
for a discussion of the lower health status of minority populations in the U.S.) "

The notion that the United States health care system would be judged to be number
12 in a 13 country list, might shock people. It is said the US spends more on health
care per capita, than just about any country in the world, so why would our health
care be ranked so poor by both an article in JAMA, and by the World Health Organization ?

WHAT'S HAPPENED TO OUR HEALTHCARE SYSTEM ?
     One reason that the health care system might be considered so poor, is that in the
United States, sickness is big business. If health became a common possession,
it would be extremely detrimental to the "health care system." Patients with a chronic,
debilitating illness, are a cash cow. You can make far more money from a really sick
person, or a very injured person, than you can make if you were able to get them back to
health quickly. Thus, what has developed is a "disease management system". And, when
you talk about use of the term "management", you tend to "manage" those systems and
businesses which you want to do well and continue. Thus, there is not really an emphasis
on dealing with the patient as a whole human being, but more, as a constellation of signs
and symptoms, or even more aptly, as diseases with legs to carry them about.

     Dr. Marcus Welby died a long time ago. The kindly Dr. Kildaire also passed away.
As newer doctors enter the profession, the ability to deal with patients on a personal
level, as patients who are real , living, moving people with feelings, thoughts, desires,
souls, is becoming more and more a thing of the past. Allopathic medicine for a long
time has sought to treat patients in a very objective fashion, at arm's length. Physicians
were and are, taught not to get personally involved in their patient's lives, or get too
wrapped up in their problems. While it is usually couched in these terms, also using
such sterile phrases such as dispassionate professional distancing, the fact is, that
this is putting makeup on a pig. Cold, uncaring, and robotic are better words.

     A doctor SHOULD care about their patients. After all, the profession is called
"health CARE", not, "Your Health I Don't Give a Damn About". If you go back and actually
read the original Hippocratic oath, you read an oath that basically describes a profession
that SHOULD care about patients, and that doctors according to this document, should
not only care greatly about the patients and show them great respect, but physicians
in his day, were expected to feel they had a lifelong debt to those who taught them
the healing art.

     The fact is, that Hippocrates, was known as Hippocrates of Cos, and his approach
to health care was more holistic in nature. Although allopathic medicine hold him up
as their titular head of medicine, the father figure, the progenitor of the profession,
allopathic school ACTUALLY should trace their philosophical lineage to the Cnidians,
who share the same approach to caring for patients, that they would be the heroic
saviors of the patient, and that disease came from the outside in. Hippocrates and
his followers believed more in the notion that a departure from health, resulted more
from the failure of the internal environment to successfully defend the body, to create
a healthy substrate.

A DISEASE MANAGEMENT SYSTEM
     Disease management, means lots of pharmaceutical intervention(s). Pharmaceutical interventions
means big bucks for pharmaceutical houses, as well as outrageous pricing and billing by hospitals
for rather humble and relatively cheap medications. For example, a friend recently was hospitalized,
and was charged eighteen dollars for one acetaminophen tablet ! It has been reported on television
that in a printout of items for which a patient was charged during a hospital stay, there was a
charge for a Kleenex, under the term "mucus recovery system". From the website :
http://www.barnstablepatriot.com/05-03-01-news/comment.html
" Modern Maturity magazine May/June issue on how hospitals apply "shock treatment"
to patients via the hospital bill. Examples: "Mucus Recovery System" (Kleenex), $10;
razor blade, $18; throat lozenges, $2.25 EACH; plus, double billing and
countless hidden charges in a summary bill. The article suggests patients
request an itemized bill."

     Hospitals are saying that these outrageous charges are necessary to pass along
charges to those who can pay, of those who do not pay, and are indigent. But, is this
fair ? Many would say no.

     Thus, one problem with healthcare, is that many big business concerns have turned
the system into a cash cow. Imaging centers have  MRI, CT scanners, Digital X-rays,
PET scans, and these are very expensive devices to purchase and maintain. Like giant sharks
they require lots of scans to pay for themselves. As a result, the use of these scanners
for "diagnostic rule-outs" have steadily increased. The use of a battery of diagnostic tests
and machines, have increased both as a means of reducing medical malpractice claims,
and also, as a crutch to the diagnosing of lesions and soft tissue problems, as physicians
allow their skills of differential diagnosis to decline.

     There is also what I call the "whiz bang golly factor". Basically, the physician who practices
modern allopathic medicine has indeed become the Wizard of Oz. He has the ability to send
you down the yellow brick road to shiny chrome and glass palaces where all manner of miraculous
machines await that can peer deeply inside your body. The setting and machines with their
complex technology, have replaced the rattling gourds, feathers, and bizarre face paint and
incantations, but, in many ways, they serve the same function, to amaze and impress the patient.

THE HISTORY OF THE SYSTEM
     To understand why things are the way they are, you have to look back in time to get the development of the present system. As previously noted, Hippocrates of Cos, although he has been taken as the titular head of modern allopathic medicine, the fact is that Hippocrates, if he were alive, would be practicing alternative or "complementary" medicine. Hippocrates was holistic in his approach, and believed, as many holistic practitioners to come believed,
that disease was a manifestation of the failure of the internal environment to properly maintain health. This notion held that health was the normal state of living creatures, and it was the job of the doctor, to assist the body fight disease by proper nutrition, sufficient sunlight, clean conditions, etc.. The real philosophical ancestor of the allopathic system, was the Cnidian system. The Cnidian system focused on the disease, where the Cos system focused on the importance of the patient. Just that one distinction demonstrates which system is more philosophically aligned
with modern ALLOPATHIC (means "different from the disease") health care.

     The Cnidian, and now the allopathic school of medicine, basically says that disease comes from outside in,
and the Cos system, or holistic system, stresses that disease develops from the inside out, as a manifestation
of the weakened state of the internal milieu. But, the Cnidians figured out a long time ago, that there is a lot of money to be made if you portray that health is kind of a faint, unattainable state, and that you have to have an outside party fight your disease for you, as if ones immune system and internal homeostatic controls are useless.

     In fact, the Cnidians had adopted in part, an earlier concept from Egyptian medicine, that of "whdw", which was like a corruptive residue  in the body which resulted from bodily wastes. The accumulation of this substance was thought to cause disease, and an example of the material was the pus that formed in wounds. The Cnidians liked this idea, because they felt that this meant that the body could not rid itself of this material, and thus, enter the notion of the doctor as white knight, saving the body from itself. For this reasons, enemas became a treatment used to "drain off" the "whdw" before it accumulated.

     This setup the ongoing battle between the "disease is inside out" and the "disease is outside in" dichotomy which continues to this day. On the one hand, the doctors who believe in the inside out, tend to stress natural healing methods , and the modus of assisting the natural healing ability, the "physis" of the body. The "outside in" doctors tend to stress the use of a "heroic" medicine model, where the doctor is seen as the champion of the body, and who uses artificial methods to "battle" illness or disease, or dysfunction.

     If the body did not have innate healing abilities,  the human species would not have survived past the first generation. If the allopathic method was the correct path, then cancer would be cured, AIDS would be cured,
and there would be no problem with autoimmune diseases, since the "deus ex machina" (God from the machine)
method of allopathic intervention would eliminate the need for an immune system, and all problems would be only a pill or capsule or machine away, from solution. This is just not the case. Since the allopathic system stresses a mechanistic approach to looking at the body and its functions (reminiscent of the Cartesian mind-body dualism),
then they tend to use approaches which stress that the sciences such as chemistry and physics hold the answer to problems in the body. And, while we are at it, the Unani health care system is probably the modern heir to the
philosophy of Hippocrates. An interesting comparison is found at : http://www.unani.com/comparison.htm .This page compares the Indian Ayurvedic system, Unani, traditional Chinese medicine, and Western systems. One thing that is notable about the American system, is the fact that it has turned its back on the notion of vitalism, the concept that there is a unique life energy associated with living things. In fact, so-called "conventional" modern Western medicine is almost unique worldwide and time wise, in its denial of the concept of vital energy. In both Eastern and early Western cultures, the existence of a vital force, elan, was a given. Each culture, and even, within cultures, in different methods of health care, the vital force was recognized as essential to life. The vital force is said to be intimately associated with the breath. In Israel, it was called "ruach", in Greece, "pneuma", in China ,"ch'i "(qi), in Japan and Korea, "ki", the Norsemen called it "odic force", in India, it was "prana", in ancient Hawaii, it was "mana"
( www.drjohnbaker.com/internalarts.htm  ). and others have given it different names.

     In fact, if there is a distinct element of modern Western allopathic medicine that distinguishes it from other healing arts, it is this refusal to accept that there is a vital and unique energy associated with the breath. Even in Western healing arts like Chiropractic, Osteopathic, Homeopathic, and Naturopathic, there is an underlying belief in an innate healing life energy.

     I heard a saying one time from a Native American, in talking about how different the Western/ Caucasian view of the world to that of the Native American. He said "the white man believes everything is dead". Somehow, that meant a lot to me, for it is a fundamental flaw to so-called "conventional" Western medicine, that life is not wonderful and special and miraculous, but instead, just the sum total of biochemical and physical interactions of molecules and known energetic interactions. And, as long as the view of medicine in the West is that the patient is merely the battlefield upon which "heroic" battles with disease entities is fought, the Western approach will miss the boat, for along with this, is the objectification of the patient, to the point they are only one or both of two things; one being a mass of symptoms with legs, and two, a source of income. But, if Western medicine is so flawed, how did it gain such a stranglehold, such a monopoly of Western health care?

LAWS MAKE THE MEDICINE AND MEDICINE MAKES THE LAWS
     Fact is,  that in the few years that allopathic medicine was having to compete for patients, it failed miserably against Homeopathy. This rare window of opportunity existed during the Popular Health Reform Movement in 1846. There was a coalition of female suffrage folks, and holistic healers, that were able to throw out the draconian, allopathic slanted licensure laws from state to state. The rallying cry of the period was "Every man his own doctor."

      The doctors who began to get people well the quickest, the cheapest, and with the least ill side effects, were the Homeopaths, a movement / healing art, founded by Dr. Samuel Hahnemann.

      Two hundred years ago Dr. Samuel Hahnemann discovered that a substance, which causes the symptoms of an illness, when given in a small dose to a sick person, acts as a trigger to intensify the healing processes that the body's immune system has already begun. This is called the Law of Similars.

    Every town of any size started having Homeopathic colleges springing up. Clinically, the patients were leaving
medical doctors (allopaths) in droves, and filling up the waiting rooms of Homeopathic doctors. For the medical doctors, this was a crisis. They were watching the stranglehold they had established on health care in America,
slip away. They found their medical practices and remedies were unable to keep up with the homeopaths, and the chemicals they were using in that age, were often more dangerous to the patient than the diseases they professed
to treat. The danger of chemical drugs has been known for centuries. Indeed, the Swiss father of the modern pharmaceutical profession, Dr. Paracelsus (his real name was Philippus Aureolus Theophrastus Bombastus
von Hohenheim,1493--1541, Swiss physician and alchemist, who pioneered the use of specific treatment, based on observation and experience, to remedy particular diseases  ) said about the use of drugs "All drugs are poisons, they differ only in their dosages."

     For the well monied physicians, it was clear what they had to do. The only way they could win was to
make it illegal for the Homeopaths to practice.  The American Medical Association, founded around 150 years ago, made it their main purpose to use money and political influence to establish the reinstatement of all the state's re-licensure laws. Now, with alternative medicines made illegal, they (the allopaths) could use the constabulary to impose their will on the homeopaths and other practitioners.

     But, around 1895, a magnetic healer from Iowa name D.D. Palmer was destined to create a new challenge to the medical establishment. Dr. Palmer met a janitor named Harvey Lillard, who had been deaf for many years. Mr. Lillard was the owner/operator of the janitorial company that maintained the Ryan Building where Daniel David "D.D." Palmer (1844-1913) practiced magnetic healing, a hands on therapy which was also practiced by many medical practitioners of the era. Palmer asked him how he had lost his hearing. He told Palmer that some seventeen years prior while working, he had bent over into a stooped position, and heard something "pop" in his back and almost immediately suffered a loss of hearing. Lillard added that since then, he has not been able to hear sounds like (what we today call," white noises") the clip-clopping of the horses just out side the window, people talking softly or the ticking of his watch. Dr. Palmer asked if he could examine the man's back, and was given permission. Dr. Palmer found a tender lump in the area of the fourth thoracic vertebrae. Since the hearing problem happened after the pop in the back, Dr. Palmer, who knew that bonesetters had been putting bones back into proper place for a long time, devised a plan, and explained to Mr. Lillard what he proposed to do, and asked Mr. Lillard (in a good example of early methods of informed consent) if he would agree to have it tried on him. Mr. Lillard agreed, and miraculously, hearing was restored. The miraculous outcome prompted Dr. Palmer to look closer at what happened, and he started thinking about developing a treatment system using this "adjusting" of vertebral joints. Rev. Samuel Weed, a close friend of Dr. Palmer was consulted as to what he thought may be a good name, and he used "cheiro" from the Greek for hand, and "praktikus" . Both together came to mean, "done by hand".

     Prior to Chiropractic's birth, there was another health care system in the United States which promoted the use of manual manipulation of osseous joints. This was founded in 1874 , by Andrew Taylor Still, M.D. . Dr. Still was a product of the medical training of his age. He was the son of a Methodist minister and attended the College of Physicians and Surgeons in Kansas City, Kansas. Still also served as a state legislator and enlisted in the Ninth Kansas Cavalry during the Civil War. After the war, Still provided health care to settlers and American Indians. While facing the epidemics of the period (cholera, pneumonia, smallpox, meningitis, diphtheria, and tuberculosis) which had claimed much of his family, he became increasingly dissatisfied with the prevailing medical practices. Dr. Still saw that the use of mercury, bloodletting, and the like, often did far more harm than good. For example, our first president, George Washington , was literally bled to death by the virtual vampires masquerading as medical doctors.
Thus, Still was about making the medical profession more scientific and rational. He was NOT trying to start a new health care system. At some point, the AMA had discussions with the Osteopathic doctors, and basically , in simple terms, told them if they would change their practice methods to include prescription drugs, surgery, and to train their doctors using the same precepts as the medical schools, they would "allow" them to practice and not use their place in the various state boards to outlaw / criminalize them. In other words, "play ball and we won't persecute you."

      The DOs (doctors of osteopathy) agreed, and now, they serve as portal of entry doctors, are on the board of hospitals, and practice in just about every way, like allopathic doctors.

     The Homeopaths and Chiropractic doctors did not "play ball". As a result, many , many Chiropractic doctors, went to jail in small towns and large, all across this country. for "practicing medicine without a license". But, jailing
them did not stop their practice. They would get out of jail, and start practicing again. As a result of over a century of legal battles, including but not limited to the Wilk et al, v. the AMA trial, http://biotech.law.lsu.edu/cases/antitrust/wilk_v_AMA.htm  the Chiropractic doctors showed that the AMA had acted in an intentional fashion to interfere with the Chiropractic profession, and acted to prevent its members from referring
patients to doctors of Chiropractic, and from receiving referrals from them. But, even though there was this win by DCs, there are various doctors who are still rabidly attacking Chiropractic. Dr. Stephen Barrett and his websites
chirowatch.com , chirobase.org , quackwatch.org, and a host of similarly configured nonsensical sites, spews a non-stop volume of ill conceived venom onto the public debate of health care. Dr. Barrett is a formerly licensed psychiatrist (nothing wrong in that subspecialty he could expose now is there...lol ) who is said to work out of a
basement in Pennsylvania. He is associated with a similarly obsessed group called the National Counsel Against Healthcare Fraud (NCAHF). These groups have instigated lawsuits against people in the alternative or complementary health care field, such as supplement companies, but their track records on lawsuits has gotten worse and worse in my opinion. I believe they have lost the last bunch they started, and had to withdraw one or more of the ones they filed. Nonetheless, these folks have tried to cause as much trouble for Chiropractic doctors and other alternative health care professionals, but they seem noticeably silent in exposing why so many orthopedic surgeons continue to do arthroscopic knee surgery, despite its exposure as a "sham operation".
(See http://www.mychiro.com/health/index.php?p= ,  http://www.cbsnews.com/stories/2002/07/11/health/main514828.shtml "

"Arthritis Knee Surgery Doesn't Work

July 11, 2002

In fact, I asked the head of the NCAHF why he wasn't exposing his fraud, and he had
no good answer for it, and it was not subsequently discussed on their website.

RACKETEERING IN MEDICINE
http://www.healingwithnutrition.com/education/whysupplement/racketeer.html
     A book was written some time back by James Carter, M.D. under this title. I had a brief
conversation on a national talk show with Dr. Carter on the involvement of the state medical
boards, acting as enforcers for the traditional , conservative line, and acting against
those doctors who want to practice more progressive holistic medicine. Dr. Carter said
that just about every medical board has what he calls a "hit man" who often works in concert
with this national counsel against health care fraud, and targets those doctors who are not
towing the party line in how to practice medicine, for investigation and persecution. This
was what author, Dr. Carter said.

PARALLELS BETWEEN BIG MUSIC AND BIG MEDICINE
     As many of you may know, I have been active in the opposition to the draconian acts
of the RIAA versus their customers. I have also been knowledgeable and involved with the
health care field for some time, and, apropos of this, there are some striking similarities
between the situation with the major music labels represented by the RIAA, and the
allopathic medical establishment.

     Both have established de facto strangleholds and monopolies on their respective industries.
They have done this through the use of liberal amounts of lobbying money, and through legislation.
For the medical industry, things like medical licensing boards, scope of practice guidelines,
and influence on the health insurance industry, have enabled them in the past century and a half,
to virtually control the lions share of the health care profession. For the music industry, the same
holds true. Passage of things like the DMCA (Digital Millennium Copyright Act), liberal massage of
congressmen and women, with the old "green persuasion", has empowered them to control their
own situations under color of law.

     Alternative health care and independent musicians have a lot in common. They are marginalized
by the mainstream, and in general, have to eek out an existence, secondary to the organized effort(s)
of the groups monopolizing their respective industries.