I do not believe that vaccinations cause autism. I do believe that autism, along with a host of other modern illnesses, including diabetes, asthma, auto-immune dysfunction, and cancer, can result from over-exposure to some mix of the 100,000 synthetic chemicals that have been released into the environment in the past 70 years.

The whole miracle of modern chemistry is that small amounts of specific compounds can have powerful, often positive, effects. Digitalis for heart problems, insulin for diabetics, aspirin for headaches, antibiotics for bacterial infections, anesthetics for surgical procedures, vaccinations for smallpox, polio, and other serious illnesses: the tiniest quantities of these and other chemical formulations have greatly reduced human suffering and added countless benefits to our daily lives.

Yet we’ve also learned the hard way that some chemicals can cause serious harm to living plants and animals. Beginning with Rachel Carson’s warnings about the problems with DDT, on through Love Canal, Bhopal, thalidomide, the first swine flu vaccine, acid rain, smog-filled air, and polluted rivers, to our current concerns about PCPs, dioxin, and cadmium, one would hope that we’ve learned to be extremely careful anytime we introduce new synthetic chemicals into our environment.

In fact, the vast majority of industrial chemicals undergo no environmental testing, much less human trials. And pharmaceuticals, which of course do have to get government approval, cannot possibly be tested for the many different chemical interactions they will encounter from one body to the next.

A recent FDA ruling against Percocet and Vicodin, two of the most popular prescription painkillers in the world, because of their effects on the liver, illustrates the problem:

The panel’s 20-17 vote to recommend a ban on the combination drugs was one of 11 it took at a meeting called to advise the F.D.A. on problems arising from the extraordinary popularity of acetaminophen. In 2005, American consumers bought 28 billion doses of products containing the ingredient.

While the medicine is effective in treating headaches and reducing fevers, even recommended doses can cause liver damage in some people. And more than 400 people die and 42,000 are hospitalized every year in the United States from overdoses. —NY Times

All pharmaceuticals now come with long lists of possible side effects and contraindications. Most all generate unintended consequences, including fatalities. (A 1996 study estimated that aspirin and other non-steroidal anti-inflammatory drugs caused 7600 deaths per year in the U.S.).

Moreover, most chemicals interact with other chemicals, often in unpredictable ways. As we increase our exposure to ever more chemicals — some 1500 new chemicals go into production every year — the possible side effects, contraindications, and negative interactions naturally increases.

Donna Smith has long been a strong voice for single payer coverage. Her passion comes from a series of awful experiences that she and her husband — both with health insurance — have had dealing with our current system.

OK, if this wasn’t personal enough just yet for me, it just got a whole lot more so. And if you think for one instant that in this nation at this point in history and with this popularly elected President and Democratic Congress you will be treated for a heart attack simply because you might die if you are not treated, think again. And if you think having insurance helps, think some more.

On Friday, my husband was denied a blood test because a computer record from some distant time past and some other state showed he had a $7 balance with LabCorp. I am not making this up.

CommonDreams

Even Obama’s doomed “Public Option” would not be the change we need. Nobody should be profiting on human misery the way the insurance and pharmaceutical companies are.

Dr. Mark Harmon has a great piece in the Huffington Post discussing what he calls Functional Medicine or UltraWellness. He explains that, while mainstream medicine helps at “the very end stages of disease” and for acute emergencies, raging infections, broken bones, etc, it does little to address chronic illnesses or to ameliorate the long-term conditions or lifestyles that lead to serious illness.

But when I worked in the emergency room, I felt I was saving people just before (or sometimes after) they were washed DOWNSTREAM and over the waterfall to their death.

I began to wonder what led them to this point — what happened UPSTREAM in the process of disease and illness. What were the real causes of disease? If I could answer that question, then I thought I might be able to help prevent disease in the first place.

I graduated from college in 1973 and left home shortly after. I had been a sickly kid with several hospitalizations during childhood, including a near-fatal condition at 14. So, as I left my family care, my mother worried constantly about my lack of health insurance. Like most people in their “invincible twenties,” I paid no attention to such worries.

By the time I reached my thirties, I had settled into what has become a lifetime of self-employment. I’ve never had employee-based health insurance, and have never made enough money to justify the expense of getting my own. I’m happy to say that, except for periodic adventures in dentistry, I’ve never missed it.

I have always recognized, however, that in the absence of health insurance I must take full responsibility for my own health. If the medical system would not insure necessary care in the future, I must do whatever I can to assure good health without it.

This is a great article from Ezra Klein. First he makes clear that our current insurance system actually works against the commonhealth, not for it. Then he offers five steps to improving the system — none of which have any chance of ever happening — ultimately making the case for non-insurance-based, universal coverage:

It is actually counterproductive for insurers to compete on giving us the best care. It’s not simply that they’re not doing it, but given the structure of the marketplace, they shouldn’tdo it. Imagine insurer X creates the best damn diabetes protocols in the country. And they begin advertising this fact. What happens on Day Two? Well, they’re flooded with individuals suffering from diabetes, or individuals who fear they will one day be suffering from diabetes. These people, in the current system, are a bad deal. Not only is it near impossible to insure them at a profit, but pooling their costs (which is what insurers do, after all) raises premiums for all the insurer’s other customers. When the average customer of an insurer gets sicker, prices go up for all their customers. So the healthy folks contracting with that insurer quit the pool, and go find a cheaper deal, which forces the insurer to raise premiums again, driving out more healthy folks, which forces them to raise premiums again, which drives out more healthy folks, and so on. It’s what we call an insurance death spiral, and it ends with the collapse of the insurer.

Given those incentives, insurers cannot compete to offer better care, because if they offered better care, all that would happen is they would attract worse deals. Which is why, in the current system, insurers make things worse.

I finally got to watch Michael Moore’s Sicko two nights ago, a nice piece of timing as, the very next day Hillary Clinton announced her healthcare reform plan.

What a frikkin disappointment she and the rest of the Democratic hopefuls (with the exception of Kucinich) have turned out to be. She is pushing her version of the same approach that Republican governors have pushed on Massachusetts and California: mandantory bondage to the insurance companies.

As with the Iraq War, it just doesn’t matter that strong majorities of the American people favor a single-payer, government-run system, like they enjoy in Canada, England, France, etc.

In fact, Clinton emphatically stated that her plan was anything but that. She willingly joins in the “socialized medicine=evil” frame that has brought us our current mess of a system. Government can be trusted to fight wars and put out fires and  deliver mail and, uh, provide dandy healthcare to the governing elite, but it can’t be trusted with administering the healthcare for the rest of us.

Baloney Hillary. Just lost my vote.

Lately there have been several articles in the mainstream press discussing the merits of legalizing marijuana and other intoxicants. While most politicians remain obdurate on the subject, the mere possibility of having a frank and spirited public debate, free of “just say no,” knee‑jerk hysteria, is encouraging.

This article is not an advocacy of intoxicant use, nor a denial of the very real problems of abuse and addiction. It is a plea for consistent, humane, and effective substance use and abuse policies. Our current policies inflict unnecessary suffering — on users, abusers and nonusers — while utterly failing to reduce substance abuse and addiction. It is time to try something different; let’s wind down the drug war and get on with the more rewarding work of teaching tolerance and the free pursuit of happiness.

For clarity’s sake this article is limited to a discussion of intoxicating substances. These same arguments can also be applied to the use, overuse and abuse of certain intoxicating activities, such as having sex, watching television, gambling, wielding power, and spending money.

As a species, we will continue to play with half a deck as long as we continue to tolerate cardinals of government and science who presume to dictate where human curiosity can legitimately focus its attention and where it cannot. Such restrictions on the human imagination are demeaning and preposterous. —Terrence McKenna

Overuse

No major American decision was ever made without the influence of alcohol, nicotine or caffeine­‑often all three. —Peter McWilliams

Yet all intoxicants can be overused. This is the ‘tox” in intoxication. Use any intoxicant too much or too often and its positive promise invariably turns poisonous.

The overuse of any intoxicant has a temporarily sickening effect upon one’s body and mind. The stumbling stupidity of too much alcohol, the hacking cough of too much tobacco, the wired agitation of too much coffee, the glazed over eyes of too much marijuana: any intoxicant can be overused and such overuse always results in a short term loss of wellness.

It must be noted, however, that our experiences with specific intoxicants are subjectively determined and therefore personal. One person’s happiness enhancer is another person’s poison. Some people can derive pleasure from scotch, some can’t. Some people can enjoy chocolate every day, some shouldn’t. Even for the individual, moderate use at one time in one’s life might constitute overuse or abuse at another time. All of which argues for social policies that encourage individual responsibility, rather than the promulgation of oppressive dogma and fruitless punishment.

The effects of intoxicant overuse are mostly temporary. They serve as clear feedback to help the individual to moderate any future use of the intoxicant. In some cases, a single instance of overuse (or even just witnessing overuse by another person) may be enough dissuade the individual from ever using a certain intoxicant. Or, some experience with overuse may lead to moderate use, ie, “I never drink more than one beer or “I only get high on weekends.” Or, the individual may miss the lessons of overuse and fall into destructive abuse.

About 80% of all births worldwide are attended by midwives. In America, some 10,000 midwives attend 5% of all births. —”Mothering” Fall 1995In 1979, [California] appropriated $750,000 for the first scientific study ever made of the root causes of violence. Two years later a first paper was issued, listing the ten principle causes of crime and violence in our nation. At the top of the list was the violent way we bring our children into the world. —Joseph Chilton Pearce

For most of human history, the two primary causes of premature death have been traumatic injury and infectious disease. Mainstream American medicine, with its heavy emphasis on hardcare practices, grew out of the challenge to solve these two problems. To a great extent it succeeded, with at times miraculous results. Yet the development of hardcare — a combination of complex diagnostic technologies followed by treatments of drugs and/or surgery — has come with unintended consequences that have brought American society to a profound crisis.

Hardcare medicine creates a specialized class of experts to administer to the sick while diminishing individual responsibility for the health of one’s body and mind. Hardcare drugs and surgeries can cause serious side-effects, often worse than the symptoms they attempt to cure. Hardcare treatments prove inadequate against a host of modern illnesses, yet hardcare tends to screen out, deny, and actively campaign against other healing approaches. Finally, hardcare medicine is extremely expensive and thus exacerbates all of our current economic difficulties.

The failings of hardcare medicine have arisen where it has over-reached its ability and over-stated its role within society. Though hardcare medicine provides excellent tools for dealing with the problems of traumatic injury and infectious disease, it fails terribly for most other health problems.

We could argue that all of the positive effects of moderate intoxicant use would be better achieved through such practices as prayer, meditation, good works and simple clean living. At the same time, all of the obvious negative effects of intoxicant overuse and abuse would best be avoided altogether. So we might all be better off, and better people, if society just eliminated the use of all intoxicants. There are some individuals who have already achieved such purity; it might indeed be a better world if everyone did likewise.

But which is the better path to such a world? Prohibition, moral‑mongering, judgment and punishment? Or freedom, individual responsibility, education and growth.

We are gradually coming to understand that human beings learn better when treated with respect, given the truth, and encouraged to make intelligent choices. Positive reinforcements work better than negative conditioning. People of all ages grow more sound and vigorously while in the free pursuit of happiness than while reacting to threats and punishments.

Simply stated, the free pursuit of happiness works. To the extent that intoxicant use is truly enhancing one’s happiness, it is enough to gratefully enjoy such use and all that it brings. When instead one is overusing or abusing, and thus diminishing happiness, the challenge is to learn, to moderate present and future behavior, and to get one’s life moving on a more positive track.

Society’s challenge, in turn, is to provide an environment in which such positive learning and growth is strongly supported. This means taking all of the immense effort and resources of our failed war against drugs and shifting to a policy of honest education, compassionate treatment, and reasonable regulation. This means, in essence, becoming fully committed as a society to the basic entitlements of life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness.