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.

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.

The Free Pursuit of Happiness

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.

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.

Abuse

Getting high from time to time may be necessary to our physical and mental health, just as dreaming at night seems to be vital to our well‑being. —Andrew Weil, MD

Regular overuse of an intoxicant constitutes abuse. When an individual persists in overusing an intoxicant despite all the negative feedback (from body, mind, family and society) that he or she is receiving, then the effects of the overuse turn seriously abusive (to body, mind, family and society) and ultimately addictive.

Ironically, the intoxicant abuser experiences few of the positive effects that once came with moderate intoxication. For the abuser, any happiness enhancement is fleeting at best. Likewise, the acute effects of intoxicant overuse gradually turn more chronic. Though there is still a poisoning effect, the abuser experiences it more as a chronic condition than as an acute warning. Tragically, it is extremely difficult to learn from and grow out of chronic conditions.

The crux of intoxicant abuse is the loss of self‑control. The intoxicant abuser is out of control of his or her life. There is no longer any free choice to use or not to use a specific intoxicant; rather, it is as if the power to choose has been transferred to the substance, over the individual. One’s whole life comes to be dominated by the daily necessities of continuing abuse. One is, at this point, addicted — trapped in the chronic abuse of a toxic substance.

Thus, the intoxicant abuser/addict suffers from both a chronic’ poisoning of body and mind and from a loss of the free will and personal autonomy that makes one fully human. This is truly a depraved condition with dire consequences for the individual and society.

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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.

Human beings are drawn to intoxication. For better and for worse, we choose to ingest certain substances that affect our minds and bodies in intoxicating ways.

Some say that any desire for intoxication stems from weakness or immorality and that most, if not all, intoxicating substances should be forsworn by the individual and prohibited by society. Yet history has shown the unintended consequences and ultimate failings of such repressive strategies. Since the use of various intoxicants is common to virtually all societies, past and present, we would do better to accept and learn from the human desire for intoxication, rather than struggle in vain against it.

The dictionary loosely defines an intoxicant as something that makes one happy or excited; that has a poisonous effect on; or that affects one so as to cause a loss of control. Anything that affects us in such ways is an intoxicant. This includes alcohol, tobacco, caffeine, cocaine, marijuana, stimulants, depressants, and a long list of other drugs, as well as some foods, such as chocolate and sugar.

If ingesting the substance makes us happy, and/or poisons us, and/or causes us to lose control, then it can be considered to be an intoxicant. Moreover, this definition indicates that with any such substance there are degrees of intoxication ranging from beneficial use to questionable overuse to destructive abuse.

Use

Throughout history intoxication has functioned like the basic drives of hunger, thirst or sex, sometimes overshadowing all other activities in life. The solution to our drug problems begins when we acknowledge the legitimate place of intoxication in our behavior. —Ronald—Siegel,—PhD

We use intoxicants because — used rightly — they can enhance our happiness. Some intoxicants fill the ‘body with pleasure while others send the mind on fanciful flights. Some intoxicants lower inhibitions while others raise self‑confidence. Some grease the wheels of social intercourse while others expand the vistas of personal solitude. Some invoke our creative muses, others are essential to our meaningful rituals, and still others embellish our favorite celebrations. Some take away physical pain, some relieve emotional stress, some ease mental anxiety, and some do all of these things and more.

Intoxicants can enhance happiness and the free pursuit of happiness is a vital part of being human. For thousands of years, men and women have assiduously pursued happiness while turning barley into beer and grapes into wine, while tasting and testing nature’s leaves, flowers, seeds and mushrooms, while experimenting with countless potions for altering mind and body.

So much art and science, so much honest industry, and all so thoroughly intoxicating — is this weakness and immorality? Or can we accept that there is indeed a right use of intoxicants?

Most of our inveighing against any right use of intoxicants stems from the Judeo‑Christian tradition. Yet there is the constant use of wine throughout Jesus’ New Testament travels, including such key acts as the miracle of turning water into wine and the ritual drinking at the Last Supper. The intoxicating properties of wine were accepted by Jesus and his followers and were embraced as sacramental.

For many Native American cultures, tobacco is likewise sacred, to be smoked in peace pipes and offered as the highest blessing. For shamans around the world, psychedelic plants have been the bringers of essential dreams and visions. For Rastafarians, marijuana is a gift from God. When we look beyond our cultural biases we find that most intoxicants have similar histories. All intoxicants are potentially servants of human happiness.

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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.

Curing Birth
Nowhere is the hammer of hardcare medicine more recklessly applied, and with such dire consequences, than in the practice of modem American obstetrics. Though most obstetricians are well-intentioned and extensively trained, to the extent that they follow hardcare practices (not all obstetricians do) their chosen tools are inappropriate for 90-95% of the births they oversee.

Hardcare obstetricians approach pregnancy/birth as if it were a life-threatening illness demanding invasive, high-tech intervention. Thus, while birth can be the most natural and sacred of life processes, hardcare medicine turns it into a messy female problem to be fixed. While birth can unfold as awe-inspiring theater, co-authored by the mother, infant, midwife, father and other supporters, hardcare turns it into a futuristic thriller, starring the doctor, and featuring the very latest in techno-controls. And though birth can be a joyful initiation into the human family — Welcome, child, to a world of love and absolute nurturance — American obstetrics turns it into a mechanical, impersonal, and too often violent, medical emergency.

Because hardcare medicine diminishes individual responsibility for bodily processes, hardcare-conditioned women typically turn birth over to their doctors. Such women can be sadly uninformed about the nature of pregnancy and about the purpose of and ways to a fulfilling labor. They tend to let the doctors take care of everything, including time of delivery, drugs for the pain, and surgery if labor goes on too long. Unfortunately, the more that women cede responsibility for their bodies and birthings, the more problematic birth becomes, and the more necessary are the “birth-improving” interventions of hardcare medicine.

Well-Intentioned Interventions

Hardcare interventions into birth begin with the mistaken notion that we can expect, and even schedule, birth to happen at a certain time. If it’s late getting started, then the obstetrician may use drugs to induce labor.

If we expected a rose to bloom on a certain day and then tried to pry it open with pliers when it was “late,” it would not surprise us that such a flower would turn out poorly. Nor should it surprise us that chemically-induced labors often progress poorly — the mother/infant was not ready. (The ultimate perversion is unnecessary caesarian deliveries scheduled according to hospital and doctor needs.)

Once labor begins, most American hospitals now require high-tech fetal monitoring. This consists of a wide belt wrapped around the mother’s waist and attached to a bedside machine that makes irritating noise throughout the labor. The belt prevents the mother from easily moving around according to her needs; it also prevents mother, father and midwife from placing their hands directly upon the lower belly or from massaging the lower back. All of this interference comes from a machine that has been proven in several studies to be of little if any benefit in most births. The main reason we continue to use fetal monitors — instead of non-invasive monitoring with a fetoscope — is so that doctors and hospitals have a record to refer to in the event of malpractice suits.

Other common interferences with labor include: the use of the counter-intuitive supine posture (rather than squatting); the lack of a well-informed labor supporter (simply having one such lay person who stays with the mother throughout labor is of great benefit); the use of sterile, medical environments for labor and delivery; and the use of statistical norms to judge and direct the mother’s progress. All such interventions and interferences ultimately lead to a poorly progressing labor and, in reaction, to more invasive interventions.

In such cases the obstetrician might perform an episiotomy — surgically cutting the perineum to widen the mother’s vagina. Or might use forceps to mechanically pull the infant down the birth canal. Or might forgo labor and perform a caesarian delivery. (Roughly 25% of American births are now caesarians. This compares with 9% in Japan and Scandinavian countries.)

However the baby makes it out of the womb, we can expect further interventions. Doctors may cut the umbilical cord prematurely — before the baby has initiated breathing — leading to the classic abuse of hanging the infant upside down and slapping it. The infant will most likely be needle-poked three or four times during the first hour of its life (one or two blood tests, a vitamin K shot, and a hepatitis vaccine). The infant might be separated from its mother and placed alone in a nursery (especially if the mother is less than conscious due to drugs and/or surgery). And the infant might be fed ersatz formula food (hospitals and obstetricians have financial incentives to discourage hreastfeeding.)

Obviously, all such interventions have been developed with the best of intentions — birth is risky, it sometimes goes poorly, and hardcare practitioners work hard to keep the mother and baby alive and relatively healthy. Yet studies of births in other countries, combined with studies of midwife-directed births in America, show that for more than 90% of births, obstetrical interventions do more harm than good.

Harm to the mother can include various side-effects from drugs and surgery, and a further diminishing of her sense of responsibility for body and life. Harm to parents and child includes the medicalizing and mechanical-demeaning of what could have been a profound life experience. Harm to society includes vast amounts of unnecessary anguish and expense.

But it is the babies who suffer most, though hardcare practitioners say otherwise. They claim that babies are unaffected by the events of birth and early childhood. Babies don’t remember, we are assured. The infant born into a cold, brightly-lit room staffed with masked technicians; the infant who is slapped while choking for breath; the infant who is poked, jabbed, weighed, measured and then separated from its mother; the infant boy with the foreskin of his penis sliced off: it doesn’t matter, the experts assure us, babies don’t remember.

It is the grossest of misunderstandings, a terrible foolishness, for which we pay dearly. Humans are conscious, growing, learning and developing from day one. Babies are influenced, positively or poorly, by each and every human interaction. To cause unnecessary physical or emotional pain to an infant is child abuse, plain and simple. To do so under the rubric of “good medicine” is a continuing nightmare from which America must awaken soon.

Power to the Midwives

Fixing birth is so simple: pass a federal law mandating power, status and privilege to the softcare practices of well-trained midwives. Hardcare obstetricians can carry on as they have, for parents who want such deliveries, and for the small percentage of pregnancies that present as high-risk situations. But for those who desire safe, natural, and joyful births, let midwifery become a socially-supported option. Take away the legal and financial barriers that now impede midwives throughout America, and let pregnant women choose.

The return of midwifery will give us healthier children and mothers and will save us a lot of money in the process. Moreover, if the first step in our healthcare system is positively transformed, the rest might naturally follow.

It’s getting to be old news, but a recent study has further clarified the dismal performance of the US healthcare system. In the past twenty years, the US has fallen from 11th to 42nd place in life expectancy. Nations doing better than America include all of Europe, Japan, Singapore, and Jordan.

Researchers cite two main factors: the ridiculous costs of health insurance, and the trend toward obesity in America, especially among the poor.

Neither of these factors will ever improve as long as we continue down the hardcare path. Indeed, both factors would be immediately improved by a shift to a single-payer system that stresses prevention and softcare.

In 1971, President Nixon declared a “war on cancer,” promising a cure with the decade. Like the current president, Nixon totally misunderstood the “enemy” and committed the nation to an endless war of attrition and frustration. Even worse, he committed vast amounts of wealth to the funding of the “medical-congressional-industrial complex” that, like its military counterpart, drains the public treasury while providing a too often unhealthy medical product.

These mammoth conglomerates share a number of traits:

* they redirect huge portions of public tax dollars into the private pockets of the corporate overclass;
* as major sponsors of politicians, they achieve oligarchic influence over key social issues;
* through the shear size of their businesses and bureaucracies and the millions of jobs they represent, they become too important to question, too big to fail, too Byzantine to investigate, and too entrenched to change;
* they attack mere symptoms of problems, while exacerbating root causes;
* and through their determination to solve all problems via war-think they inflict inevitable terrors, great and small, on an already war-torn world.

The medical-congressional-industrial complex avoids softcare questions of individual immunity and natural healing while focusing our intellectual energies and research on defeating specific disease symptoms, battle by battle, with an increasingly complex array of medical weaponry. Rather than a peaceful investigation into the nature of wellness—How do some people manage to stay healthy without resorting to doctors or medicines?—we have chosen to wage war on the real and imagined agents of disease.

Since Nixon declared the War on Cancer, American medicine has fought an all-out crusade against a single disease, spending some $100 billion on research and more than a trillion on treatment. Yet, 1.2 million Americans receive new cancer diagnoses each year and 1500 die from cancer every day. A huge anticancer apparatus has been funded and erected — universities and teaching hospitals, research centers, biomedical laboratories and startup companies, much of the pharmaceutical industry, several major charities-all geared to the continuing search for a cancer cure, year after year, one breakthrough treatment after another, even as new cancer rates remain steady.

After more than thirty years on this painfully expensive quest, we still have little understanding of why cancer arises in one person but not another, or of why some people die from it while others live on. We have, however, waged one hell of a war.

Waging war requires weapons, the more lethal the better, and all weapons inflict collateral damages as a matter of course.

The two primary weapons in the War on Cancer — radiation and chemotherapy — attack cancer cells with military zeal, but produce terrible side effects and unintended consequences, sometimes worse than cancer itself. Both radiation and chemotherapy have especially toxic effects on the human immune system; such “remedies” undermine the very capacities for self-healing that patients most need. While the latest advances in cancer treatment strive for “magic bullets” that target only cancer cells, mostly sparing healthy tissue, even the best of these treatments fail to alter the systemic conditions that trigger cancerous growths in the first place.

Waging war also requires a one-minded obedience to the commanding ideology.

Paradigm-challenging theories get brushed aside and dissenting opinions face active suppression. Throughout the War on Cancer, the medical-congressional-industrial complex has abused the powers of state and federal law enforcement to squelch innumerable alternative therapies. Serious doctors and medical researchers, often supported by a host of grateful patients, have been dismissed as quacks, jailed as charlatans, and driven out of the country as dangerous felons.

Though cancer-war authorities early on saw the wisdom of reducing tobacco use — its single-most life-saving “battle” to date — it was decades slower in accepting that diet might play a role in the genesis of the disease. To this day, the medical-congressional-industrial complex seems reluctant to acknowledge or even investigate the likely link between cancer and the rise of the petrochemical and nuclear industries in America. And even when, as we have seen since the mid-90s, the cancer warriors begrudgingly admit the effectiveness of some low-cost alternative therapies — especially diet and stress-reduction — it does nothing to stem the flow of dollars into the search for, production, and use of more exotic weapons.

Above all, waging war demands the silencing of peaceful voices and a rigid avoidance of viable peace plans.

In the War on Cancer this has meant paying no heed to the countless well-documented cases of people who have recovered from cancer through alternative means. One would think that a single such story, let alone thousands, would propel researchers into fervent study. One could imagine cancer detectives excitedly seeking out a few hundred of these “once cancerous, now healthy” people to test their blood and examine their immune systems and to earnestly dissect their histories of recovery. One might even dream of a worldwide database filled with documented stories of cancer recoveries, and at every new cancer diagnosis the patient could be told, “Here’s several people just like you, who suffered just as you do now, and they fully healed, and here’s how they did it.”

But no, cancer warriors simply ignore these living bodies of potent evidence, while steadfastly denying the possibility of any better way than continuing down their battle-worn path.

The medical-congressional-industrial complex, like its military counterpart, will never bring us healing or peace. It functions as a wage-war machine — the very opposite of a healthcare system.

I can remember as a child watching a movie about that time and being struck by one scene in particular: a big man, all dressed in black, drives a cart from house to house, picking up the dead and carrying them off for burial. I remember thinking, “How is he getting away with this?” Here is an incredibly bad bug, killing one out of every two people, and this guy is going into infected households, and touching infected bodies, and somehow still managing to put in a sixteen hour day!

Since the fourteenth century, we have learned a lot about bubonic plague. We fully understand the bug that causes it: what it looks like, how it lives, how it travels, how it affects the human body, and how to kill it, which we have proven successful at doing. Yet we know almost nothing about the man driving that cart and how and why he lived on. While we have conscientiously studied the half of Europe that died we have blithely ignored the half that survived.

Doctors now say, “The survivors just had greater resistance; they had natural immunity.” But what does that mean? Was it God’s will? Were they born with it? Were they just lucky? Or could it have been something in their diet, or their manner of thinking, or the way they processed their emotions, or how they prayed, or perhaps some combination of any or all of these factors? More importantly, as we come to better understand the survivor’s experience, can we successfully transfer it to others?

In fundamental ways, Western medical science over the past few hundred years has assiduously avoided addressing these questions. We have enthusiastically dissected the dead while showing little interest in the living. We have stayed away from questions of individual immunity and natural healing while focusing our intellectual energies and research on defeating specific disease symptoms, battle by battle, with an increasingly complex array of hardcare weaponry. Rather than a softcare investigation into the nature of wellness—How do some people manage to stay healthy without resorting to doctors or medicines?—we have chosen to wage a hardcare war on the real and imagined agents of disease.

The hardcare medical model claims that every ailment has a specific causative agent (the bad guy) and for every such agent we can and will eventually find a specific remedy (the magic bullet). It is a model that totally ignores the individual involved — is she under stress, is she a happy person, is she motivated to go on living, does she express her emotions, how is her family life, what was it like growing up, is she loved — these questions are dismissed as irrelevant. All that matters is figuring out which bug is causing the problem and then administering the proper remedy.

And yet, we harbor flu viruses for most of our lives without catching colds, and we are exposed to carcinogens on a regular basis without developing cancer. Half of the population of 14th century Europe contacted the plague but did not die. There is more to it than “you catch the bug and it makes you sick,” and much more to it than relying on a “magic bullet” to make things better.

The more to it resides somehow and somewhere within all human beings. Though it can not be captured in a bottle and measured out in clear dosages, nor carefully produced in a laboratory and shot into the body with pointed precision, it is more potent than any such remedies, and can surely heal any and all wounds.

While it is reassuring to know that we now have a cure for the bubonic plague, we must remember that the man driving the cart had one six hundred years ago.

The healthcare debate of the past few years must have Einstein nodding sagely from the grave. For all the volumes that have been written, for all the legislative starts and stops, for all the heated discussions of experts and pundits, little has been said about the medical thinking that underlies our current healthcare crisis. We have fixated on the secondary concerns of administrative bureaucracies and payment systems, when we should be exploring long-overdue changes in societal attitudes, lifestyles, and healing practices.

American medicine grew out of and remains mired in the Industrial Age. The “kind of thinking” that characterizes an industrializing society is reflected throughout our current healthcare system:

• the turning of “healthcare” into a mass-produced consumer item; the imbalanced relationship between so many doctors and their patients;
• the overuse and abuse of invasive drugs and surgeries;
• the shifting of power and prestige from general practitioners to overpaid specialists;
• the discounting of mental, emotional, and nutritional causes of illness;
• the over-medicalizing of the should-be sacred events of birth and death;
• the granting of ultimate authority to distant, profit-driven bureaucrats;
• the fundamental dis-ease of the modern hospital;
• and the continuing failure to see polluted air, water, and soil as vital public health issues

These are all symptoms of a medical-industrial-complex that has become as dangerously outmoded as the smokestack factories of a hundred years ago.Yet, contrary to the prevailing mythology of constant medical progress, America’s healthcare problems will not be remedied with “new and improved” technologies, drugs, or bureaucracies. This is just more of the same kind of thinking. What is needed now is a genuine revolution in the ways that we think about our bodies, about the nature of illness, and about the role of healers within the community.

Allopathic Medicine — Hardcare

Until the middle of the 19th century, most people died of traumatic injury and/or infectious disease. Infant mortality was very high, and the median age of death was in the thirties. Two key developments changed all that, ushering in the modern era of miracle medicine and ever-extending lifespans.

First, and most important, came major improvements in public sanitation. As sewage and water systems were established, especially in urban areas, much of the underlying cause of
Infectious disease was eliminated. To this day, access to decent food, clean water, and good sewage is a far better predictor of a nation’s overall health than its medical system. (For example, the high infant mortality rate in America is not a failure of medicine, but a consequence of the malnutrition and environmental toxicity that afflicts its poorest citizens).

Second, came the scientific discovery and understanding of infectious microbes. This began a medical revolution as countless microbes were identified and medicines were developed to kill or neutralize such microbes. This in turn allowed for the advancement of surgical techniques, as it finally became possible to operate on people without infecting them (though, here again, a key innovation was the attention given to sanitizing the surgical environment).

The approach to healing that has since evolved, called allopathic medicine, or, “hardcare,” is characterized by a reliance on drugs and surgery. Illness is viewed as coming from beyond the individual’s control — an invading microbe or a traumatic injury (or, these days, a faulty gene). The doctor intervenes on the patient’s behalf, working to defeat the invader and/or fix the ill effects of the injury.

For most of the 20th century, hardcare has performed one life-enhancing wonder after another. Diseases that plagued humankind for millennia can now be eliminated with a single injection or a handful of pills. The most horribly injured trauma victims can be saved, mended and returned to the living with nary a trace of their injuries. The blind can be restored to sight, the lame can walk again, failing organs can be replaced. It has all been truly miraculous and any future healthcare system will certainly make use of some elements of allopathic medicine.

Still, such harcare derives from a kind of thinking that is now causing more problems than it heals.

The Limits of Allopathy

As people were saved from the ravages of infectious disease and traumatic injury, individual lifespans increased, and a new set of illnesses began to inflict men and women. Chronic, degenerative diseases — such as heart disease, cancer and arthritis — became the major challenges to medicine. Cancer, for instance, became such a frightening threat that an all-out war was declared against it. Hundreds of billions of dollars were channeled through an enormous medical-industrial apparatus, regularly sustained by the promise that a cure for cancer was just around the corner. It never happened.

Hardcare has proven to be mostly futile, if not recklessly dangerous, against most modern illnesses. While the surgeries have grown ever more heroic (dangerous and expensive), and the drugs ever more powerful (dangerous and expensive), the human suffering caused by chronic, degenerative illnesses has steadily increased (including among children).

At the same time, the suffering caused by medical practices (such as when too much chemotherapy destroys a patient’s immune system, or when a surgical patient dies from secondary complications) has also increased, as hardcare treatments have grown ever more
invasive.

Even some of the greatest miracles of hardcare are reaching their limits. Antibiotics are proving to be less and less effective against each new generation of invading microbes. Moreover, it is becoming apparent that our overuse of antibiotics, vaccinations, and immunizations has undermined the integrity and innate healing powers of the human immune system. Ultimately, we failed to understand that all drugs have side-effects; after a century of relying on ever more powerful medications, we are now experiencing a plague of medicine-induced illness.

Likewise, many common surgical practices — such as caesarian sections, hysterectomies, and heart by-pass surgery — have been carelessly overused. As with antibiotics, an over-reliance on surgery seriously undermines the body’s own healing mechanisms. Surgery delivers a quick-fix of symptoms while ignoring, and often exacerbating, the underlying causes of an illness.

Finally, it must be said that hardcare is inevitably expensive. Both drugs and surgery demand large cash infusions at every stage of their development and use. The vast research facilities, the long and intensive training of practitioners, the high-tech tools and hospitals, the complex administrative systems, the steep malpractice payments and the high profit margins at every step of the way: To the extent that America remains committed to hardcare, we will never get healthcare costs under control, nor can we hope to create a fair and equitable system for all of our citizens.

Reclaiming Responsibility

The most serious failing of harcare is its shifting of primary healthcare responsibilities away from the individual. Just as illness is thought to be caused not by the person, but by a nasty germ, a traumatic injury, or a faulty gene, healing is thought to be caused not by the person, but by the doctor, the drugs, the technology, the insurance company. The net effect of such thinking is a nation of people desperately searching for health in all the wrong places.

This is an unfortunate but logical result of allopathic medicine’s great strengths.

After so many years of miracle drugs and surgical heroics, it’s reasonable that people see themselves as being healed by others (and that those others — the doctors — attain a god-like status). As I’ve said, there will always be a place for such medicine; in the course of a lifetime, we may all occasionally find ourselves acutely ill and unable to heal without the outside help of powerful drugs and/or invasive surgery. For such times, harcare may long be a blessing.

But hardcare becomes a curse when it institutionalizes the notion that sickness and healing come from outside of ourselves. That is precisely the kind of thinking which must change if we are to bring about a genuine healthcare revolution.

Because harcare has shifted responsibility away from the individual, it has also largely ignored (or argued against) the major causes of modern illness and health: our thoughts and beliefs, our emotions, our dietary habits, our bodily practices (ie, posture, movement, breath, sleep, exercise and sex), our use and/or abuse of intoxicants, the relative health of our environment, the nature of our relationships, and our personal experience of spirituality. Any vital and effective healthcare system must address all of these factors first, teaching healthcare as a lifestyle which must be vigorously practiced every day of one’s life.