Most Americans view of health care is that it’s given by physicians prescribing pharmaceutical drugs designed to cure the symptoms of their disorders, not treat disease itself.
When the average American thinks of healthcare, their first most obvious thought is of their health insurance and what it covers, if they have any. If they don’t, then they believe they have no health care at all unless they have catastrophic symptoms that send them to an emergency room where they have to be treated whether they can pay for it or not.
According to Bobby Fontaine, American water supplies are polluted with MTBE
Here are some facts about health care in the U.S. Half of the health care we receive we don’t need while we pay twice as much to run our system to get half the quality of care as Europeans. Most of what we’re prescribed medication for we do not need while the truth is that most of the time, our bodies would heal on their own in the same amount of time if not sooner without the drugs we take. Antibiotics have been being over-prescribed for ailments that they contribute absolutely no aid in alleviating while new untreatable viruses have been mutating from being exposed to antibiotics becoming stronger than the medications we have to treat them. This has been the primary state of medicine over the last 40 years where the race for new cures is mostly being waged in an arena of viruses created by the same scientists trying to kill them who are desperately trying to keep up with finding the next antibiotic to kill new infectious diseases that their last cure gave birth to.
And everywhere we go we’re exposed to bacteria that could lead to deadly diseases even striking the most health conscience among us down in a moments notice. They grow inside buildings closed off from outdoor air using environmental control systems that re-circulate the same air for many years while the antiseptic products used to clean the buildings daily aren’t much different that the antibiotics that inspired these deadly virus to become super strength killers in the first place. And of course we can’t open the windows of these buildings to let in fresh air to allow Mother Nature to help us sterilize our business environments, health care facilities, or homes, the way she always has before we replaced her as our own creators because of the pollution we pump up the atmosphere with will come side and make us sick if we do. Pollution is the dirty secret in the health care industry that makes us weak and susceptible to viruses that our bodies could otherwise deal with easily.
When I was growing up, everyone knew what causes cancer. It was something called carcinogens, which it still is. As I got older, we started to find out that it causes a lot of other less deadly problems as well. Then it seems we stopped short of figuring out that it causes all our health problems, which happened about the time we started to forget what makes us sick. That’s when we were told that our air quality had been cleaned up, in the mid 1990’s. But recent studies show that not only is our air quality worse than ever, it’s been this bad the whole time, which accounts for why there is so much illness in this country. What has changed recently is that now we’re being told the truth, sort of. I mean new studies come out all the time while we’re being told our government is doing a bang up jobs protecting us from poor quality air.
But let’s not focus on air quality right now. Let’s look at our water and average diet. Lets look at bisphenol and phthalates used in plastic for food and beverage containers. They are classic examples of how our exposure to pollutants is dealt with by the people who produce what we consume and the government agencies that regulate them. Phthalates have been an ongoing problem for many years that could be easily solved while studies that support how dangerous they are to our health have been around since it started being used. But as long as you, the average American is not aware of the whole story, nothing will be done. Perhaps even the awkward way it’s spelled is what prevents anything from being done about it. Let me clarify what I mean.
If phthalates, which I don’t even know how to say much less remember how to spell it, were called Britany Spears, that would be it, we would all be talking about it until everyone knew every detail about its lifecycle from the refinery to the factory on its way to the shelves of stores where we buy the products we consume polluted with it. If phthalates had a most memorable name, we would no doubt find it in the same kind of circumstances we find Miss, I think it’s Miss now. Let’s say Ms to be sure, Spears in. They would then be beaten down and pounded on until it proved its worth to us, or we would no longer be exposed to it because it endangers our future, much the way Britany has proved herself to be with not being allowed to visit with her own children.
Don’t get me wrong. I like Britany. I don’t judge those I’ve never walked in the shoes of. She’s just such an easy metaphor to use because everyone knows exactly what I’m talking about. That’s part of the problem with society, we give people with private lives such easy names to remember while chemicals we need to know every detail about, soulless pollutants that can easily be judged based on what we know about them because they has no shoes to follow in the footsteps of, nor a conscience or soul while most of us have never heard of them but consume them in our diet every day.
Or look at bisphenol in plastic, specifically baby bottles. Bisphenol was recently exposed as being highly dangerous for anyone, much less babies, to consume. Granted the studies were considered preliminary as they were done on rats. But Canada reacted to the study by banning it almost as soon as it got the facts. We however have decided to wait and see before we make a decision on whether we want our infants to consume it or not. We’re being told retailers will consider phasing it out while keeping selling it over the coming years while more research is conducted.
The story sticks out in my mind because I happened to catch a newscast of a lobbyist who supports bisphenol claiming that an alarmist overreaction to bisphenol will only hurt the market for a safe product that there’s no conclusive evidence that consuming it at FDA recommended safe levels will cause any problems for anyone including babies. And of course he’s right. Let me illustrate my point while telling you about another toxic product you’re exposed to regularly which you don’t know about that there’s no evidence will harm your health either.
MTBE is a gasoline additive, or was before it was banned for polluting much of the groundwater in the US. There are property lawsuits from what it’s done to land all over this country while some of them are even being won by the complainants, precious few but they are out there. As far as health problems it causes are concerned, it was never tested as required by federal law so although it may hurt you, there is no way for you to prove it in a federal court. And since the tests were never done, there’s no established therapy for how to deal with the health problems it causes. OK, let me back up a couple sentences and re-explain my point.
There have been studies done on the health effects of MTBE. It doesn’t take a rocket scientists to figure out MTBE is toxic. Everything it’s made from is carcinogenic, meaning cancer causing. And the symptoms people who’ve been exposed to it at high levels are the same as the symptoms the chemicals it’s made from cause. So obviously if it’s made from poison, it’s poisonous. There’ve been many studies on MTBE all over the country and world that prove we’ve done irreparable damage to our groundwater that will threaten ours and our children’s health for many decades to come. But there haven’t been any done by the federal government which means any lawsuits that are successful in state courts will loose when oil companies appeal them to the federal courts because the fed will not allow studies introduced as evidence that are not done by,,,, yep, you guessed it, the federal government.
So when you hear lobbyists for bisphenol claming it’s safe the same way supporters of MTBE in groundwater claim there’s absolutely no evidence that their products is dangerous, what they mean is that there is no evidence that can be admitted into a federal court record proving that their products causes any problems whatsoever, which to them means there’s nothing you can do about it even if it is bad for you so why do you care. Of course if we all knew more about how the system works so we know better what the information we receive really means, the question we would be asking is for polluters to prove that their poison products are good for us or we don’t want them on the market. But for now, they seem to think they’re in the drivers seat, and I guess in a way they are if we aren’t educated enough to hold them accountable in the market place and at voting booths.
But let’s try flipping this equation on its head to get insight into another way of looking at how our health care outlook has evolved. I use herbal and nutritional supplements to treat any ailment I come down with. I don’t use anything pharmaceutical but only because I don’t have to because what I do keeps me from getting sick anymore. But if I had to use prescribed drugs, I would. When I first started learning about alternative medicine, I was skeptical. I had no idea how good they truly are. But from the first time I sought relief using what many physicians called quack cures, I found not only is the a cure for practically everything I’ve ever had safe to use, easily accessible, and cheap, but work almost as fast as I can consume them. And rather than having dangerous side effects, they not only cure what’s ailing me, they make my over all health better also. Of course there are the ones that should be stayed away from. So like with everything in life, anyone not knowing what they’re doing should educate themselves on what they’re putting in their bodies the same way you should read the warning labels on prescribed medicine and not take them when you see they’ll cause you all kinds of problems. .
So one day, at the height of when my new healthy lifestyle learning process was unfolding, I called the FDA to ask why they’re not testing herbs and nutritional supplements to find out what’s safe and what’s unsafe so they could recommend to us what works so we don’t have to resort to dangerous drugs so often. The answer was time and money. But upon arguing it would take less time and money than studying pharmaceuticals whose effects on relieving ailments is often negligible where the truth is that all of them are bad for our health where if they do work to help us with one problem, they will almost inevitably cause another, I got chewed out and educated in how the system works.
I was told in no uncertain terms that the reason so much time and money goes into drugs testing while natural solution to our health problems are not given a priority of focus is because you can buy alternative medicines anywhere without a prescription because they aren’t bad for you, they’re safe and need no testing while pharmaceutical drugs are dangerous so they have to spend their time testing them. She seemed to even become belligerently frustrated when I suggested Americans might be better served if we had a reliable authority we can go to who can tell us what will cure us that’s good for us rather than using the government to approve what’s bad for us.
She explained that this to be how the system works - What they do is test drugs to see what the side effects and negative consequences of using it are so it can be printed on warning labels and brochures that come with them. That way you can’t sue the drug company if anything happens to you because you were warned about its potential harmful effects. So if they put their time and budget towards alternative medicines, there would be less focus spent on testing pharmaceutical drugs where if they don’t test them thoroughly, they might miss something that could make someone sick. When I asked how that made sense when all of the drugs they approve make people sick, she clarified what she meant was they might miss a disorder a drug causes that doesn’t get put on the warning label where it later could turn into a lawsuit against the pharmaceutical company that sold it and a political scandal for the FDA.
It’s like warning labels put on cigarettes packs. They’re not put there to stop us from buying the product but to protect the seller from being sued when smokers get lung cancer. And if you’re thinking of sighting my logic as flawed because tobacco companies have recently been sued loosing billions of dollars, what made those lawsuits successful was tobacco companies saw the warning labels as green lights for their adding excessive nicotine and other dangerous poisons to their products thinking that since smokers were told they’re products were bad for their health on the label, they could make them as sick as they wanted without consequences.
Realistically, cigarette warning labels should read that “tobacco alone CAN cause cancer but the with the extra added nicotine, and then the chemicals that allow the nicotine to enter the nervous system and the brain instead of just the bloodstream, cigarettes WILL kill the smoker and whoever breathes in their second hand smoke.” And I know this to be true. I had to quit smoking when I was poisoned by well water polluted with MTBE because cigarettes made me so sick that even just being exposed to second hand smoke sent my health into a tailspin. But every now and then, I still liked to drink a few beers which always seemed to make want to smoke. When I did, I would get me the worst hangovers I ever had. So I tried smoking pure tobacco cigarettes that have no chemical additives in the tobacco when I occasionally drank and found no side effects whatsoever. In fact I stopped drinking and smoking when I learned I no longer had to go without alcohol and tobacco. I didn’t exactly quit really. I just haven’t got around to doing it since knowing it’s there if I want it without consequences, which seems to take away the itch to use either one anymore.
This is how your health care system breaks down. You’re responsible for your health. When you do a poor job of taking care of yourself, you go to a doctor who’s licensed to prescribe dangerous treatments. All the other ways to treat your health are safe and can be done on your own. If you tend to your health responsibly, you should never have any major health problems. So when your doctor gives you a prescription for something dangerous, even if he or she knows a better safe and easy way to treat the ailment, they’re not going to explain it to you because that is not their job. They are licensed to sell you what are dangerous treatments for relieving your ills so it’s assumed when you come to them, you’re not interested in what’s easy and safe or you would simply get it yourself and use it.
From their perspective, it’s not their fault you don’t know how to take care of yourself. They make their livings treating you with methods they went to school to get their license to practice on you with, which the word “practice” for how they describe their trade is a fair one because what you’re doing when you go to a licensed physician is becoming part of an experiment that might or might not work.
But let’s go back to pollutants for a minute. There have been more people around me having cancer and even dying from it than even before over the past few years. Each time I hear about someone getting cancer, when I ask what caused the cancer, all I get is a cloudy eyed stare seeming to beg the question of what that has to do with anything when all that matters anymore is that someone might die. By the time I try to relate my logic on why I asked the question, it’s already too late, everyone involved in the process is in shock hoping whatever radical treatment is used to kill the cancer works.
Cancer is caused by carcinogens, pollutants we’re exposed to at unsafe levels. So anywhere you find cancer, the carriers lifestyle would be suspect to what caused it. Even though heading in a direction of alliterative therapy for most people would be out of the question after they find they have cancer, why still isn’t the toxic source of the cancer the first item of concern for treatment. In fact since cancer is the most extreme symptom of what pollutants cause to our health, why isn’t the first line of defense for any and all health problems to first go to a toxicologist to try to find out what chemicals the patient is being exposed at too high levels so they can rectify the situation which might inevitably lead to causing them cancer.
One day I tried to find a local toxicologist to ask what he thought of this logic when a friend came down with fatal cancer. But I couldn’t get a hold of one because in order to talk to them, I had to go through lawyers. And the lawyers I talked to were amazed I wanted to have any business with a toxicologist if I wasn’t planning on suing someone, which I think therein lies the problem. If health treatment focused on the cause of ailments, then there would be a lawsuit every time someone got sick. But then if we knew what makes us sick, we would demand relief from all pollutants, which brings me to my main point.
Like what I was saying about the lobbyist supporting bisphenol as being safe. I don’t want, nor do I want infants, to have to consume even safe chemicals. I don’t want the FDA to tell industries what are safe levels of pollutants I can be exposed to. How do I know what happens when those chemicals interact with my own body chemistry or the pollutants already there? How can there be a safe level of one poison when I have 200 pollutants in my body at the same time that are all said to be at safe levels, which is what most of us have flowing through our blood, hundreds of different foreign chemicals provided to us by industry many of which are at levels the FDA says is unsafe? I mean who do I sue when I can’t show how one company’s product made me sick when my illness was caused by more than one pollutant combining inside my body where the fault is blamed on how my immune system dealt with the problem?
Our bodies are like a chemistry labs being polluted with a lot of foreign agents our immune system lab technicians are not familiar with processing or experimenting with. The FDA doesn’t have any studies to refer to as evidence for what the combined safe levels of pollutants in our bodies are nor what ailments are caused by exceeding those perimeters. And I don’t think it’s possible for them to come up with this kind of information, ever. Its too complicated if not impossible to forecast. So the answer to what to do about it is to look at our health like there is no safe level for putting chemicals in our bodies that don’t belong there.
This is what I personally want in products I consume, the air I breathe, and the water I drink. I want them to be clear of chemicals that are bad for me. I don’t want to be exposed to any pollutants that are safe or unsafe. That’s what we all want.
Is that an unrealistic need? I know a lot of people might think so but from the research I’ve done, I’ve found there are ways to provide safe air and water, even healthy diets that we like and love as much as the toxic ones we consume now. Contrary to the argument that the cost of doing business from this perspective would be prohibitive – it would not be more expensive to build an economy that considers health and the environment above all else, not unless you make a living providing toxic products and health care now because you would be out of a job unless you could find a way to clean up your act.
The truth is that the only reason we’re not getting safer non-toxic products is because new safe products competing against the old toxic ones have to start out at the bottom our competitive free market where it’s costly to produce new products in small qualities in order to try to get the public interested and educated about them so they will buy them regularly in high enough amounts to bring down the cost of producing them. The truth is that the toxic products we consume now started out with the same business hurdles to conquer before there was enough demand to produce them in such high quantities that their costs came down so everyone can afford them.
As far as environmental pollution caused by industries are concerned, it’s always the same story. Mitigating those kinds of problems is always beneficial for everyone even being more profitable for companies who take a proactive approach to upgrading their industries. But going in this more responsible direction is not the norm requiring investment in expensive technologies that take time to pay off where Wall Street investors don’t see big returns on that money as fast as they’re used to.
It comes down to this. In running a responsible economy, rich people aren’t afforded the chance to make more money fast enough unless they cut corners putting our health and the future of our land at risk to do it. But then from what I’ve witnessed from the few rich people I’ve known, they largely live in a separate culture from ours where they enjoy access to more expensive safe products and environments that the rest of us can’t afford while many of them made their money selling us supposed toxic cures for what the rest of them sold us that made us sick. I fact I hear they can do it, buy whatever they want, without touching their big money using something called disposable income. Can you imagine such a thing – disposable income?
So what do I propose doing about it?
It’s quite simple really – educate you. When I was younger, I smoked marijuana. When I first tried it, I was impressed by how fast it effected me. I also found it relieved me of worries about unrealistic social values installed in me as a child, like about heaven and hell, wearing a suit and tie, strange things that made no sense, short hair, looking down on people because of the color of their skin or gender. It helped me see myself as an intelligent animal floating around the universe on a big spinning rock where I knew that I, nor the adults who were desperately trying to tell me how it all worked, had a clue what it was all about. But when I sobered up, that feeling was gone while I had become initiated as a new member of a new criminal genre of freaks because I had smoked a weed that was illegal because it altered my mind so I saw things differently.
Later in life as I started to have problems with my health because of pollutants, when trying out body cleansing herbs skeptical about whether they would work better than what a physician would have prescribed, I found the same thing happening in my body as with the marijuana - I would take the herb or nutritional supplement and get immediate relief. It wasn’t like I thought it would be at all, just like with smoking pot where I thought its benefit would be mostly physiological where instead I was immediately overwhelmed by a drug effect as soon as the smoke entered my lungs. A year and a half after not being able to take a clear breath of air because what pollution had done to me, I felt like I had the lungs of a teenager in minutes after just a pinch of astragalus root powder.
So I got thinking perhaps the reason marijuana was illegal was because it taught this very important lesson, that herbs can effect your body immediately, that their benefit to our health is like magic. In fact as I got more involved in using alternative therapies combining herbs and teas, oils, diet, distilling rainwater, all kinds of methods searching for perfect health, the perfect feeling, that perfect buzz, the whole process reminded me how so much my generation grew up for the most part self administering highly additive drugs, alcohol, and nicotine treating ourselves for whatever bad feelings were ailing us. In the end, it seems I’ve found the perfect high at the opposite end of a spectrum from the street drug culture I grew up in where fortunately I already had the basic skills leftover for how to approach an alternative and far superior way to dealing with my health.
So once I had a sense the right direction to go for my mind, body, and soul, I found my background in growing up through the sixties and seventies in a culture of streets drugs had instilled in me the foundation of values and techniques I needed to understand how to become adept at caring for my own perfect health. And here’s the magic about this way of thinking. It’s legal to use herbs and nutrition to get that perfect buzz. I’m even allowed prescribe treatments for other people based on what I’ve suffered and treated myself for. I can’t legally tell someone what you did to relieve your ailments using herbs and nutritional supplements but I can give someone your phone number, which is another parallel between the underworld drug culture and what could be a new social trend to discover perfect health which also incorporates many nuances of mind altering experiences along with matters regarding sexuality that many seek out dangerously with street drugs.
In fact I think both pharmaceutical and street drugs have their place in a society that wants to provide for itself the best quality of life that it can. Take magic psilocybin mushrooms for instance where a newly released study shows how people who took it one time went through profound a spiritual change where they still look back to their experience with the mushrooms as a most positive turning point in their life. Of course I wonder if their experience would have been so positive if what they experienced wasn’t part of a legal clinical trial but rather happened as an act of rebellion by a child doing something that’s illegal where once they’d taken the drug having to hide their thoughts about what it did to them where they still found part of their soul had been rightfully uncovered by the experience.
I just don’t see how making it illegal for someone to uncover their soul can be good where it would be obvious to the perpetrator of the crime that they have found what’s needed for their survival although it makes them a criminal to have done so. It’s no wonder trying illegal street drugs leads to addiction while clinical trials with the same drug seem to have a positive effect. In fact even in the case of Sigmund Freud who was a cocaine addict while he conducted his experiments in uncovering the hidden depths of the human mind, when the question is asked about how the mental health industry can be founded around the teachings and techniques of a crack head, the excuse given by those who govern such decisions is that back then, cocaine was legal.
So even in the case of those who are supposed to be experts in the workings of the mind, the only problem with street drugs is that they are illegal. But then what happens when you go to a psychiatrist because you don’t feel like yourself anymore? Pretty much universally these days, the first thing they will do is give you some kind of dope to stone your mind and then commence with some form of personally interactive therapy. But they don’t first send you to a toxicologist to see if any of the numerous neurotoxins in your body are at too high levels and then try to detoxify your body if there is, no way. The first thing they do is give you some drugs to make you feel better, or really I think it’s to turn you into Sigmund Freud so they can better understand how to dig through your drugged up mind to uncover the dark and hidden meaning behind what ails you because that’s the way Freud did it while they don’t know any other way to enter the mind since he lead the first expeditions in how to get there while stoned out of his gourd on cocaine.
From everything I’ve researched about Freud and his empirical influence on modern day psychiatry, it isn’t thought that he took cocaine as an agent to help him better open up the secret corridors of his mind but rather it’s looked at like he was addicted to a drug that was legal at the time making it a moot point to discuss because he was in no way a criminal. But then I personally have watched my whole generation change from reasonable people into dope crazed lost soul most of it being caused by using cocaine. So was all that caused by cocaine being illegal or was it the fault of the drug itself regardless of whether it’s legal or not?
Then the question comes to mind whether clinical controlled experiences with drugs are different from illegal ones, or then are legal ones that are not properly conducted damaging to the subject or patient. The research I’ve conducted into the use of psychotropic drugs and the therapy that accompanies it, just like with the trillions of dollars that goes into drug addiction treatment, there are no studies that support that any of it does any good whatsoever except for employing a lot of people and selling a lot of highly profitable legal drugs while drugs being illegal feeds the justice systems that prosecutes users while making inconsequential seeming weeds and powder that make your ears ring into highly profitable black market products whose drug effects might be minimal if the ambiance of being illegal is removed from them. .
I wouldn’t doubt if there’s a way to use even crack cocaine to some kind of positive benefit. I have no doubt seen it ruin many lives and wouldn’t defend an argument that it has destroyed every life it has ever touched. But I also wouldn’t discount the likelihood that such a successful a product that has been used by millions, even billions of people, that there isn’t someone out there that can relate a positive aspect of their experience with it that would give it value if used under the right conditions. But since it’s illegal, its possible positive effects can’t be gauged easily since those who understand it best have to remain hidden in the shadows of our human evolutionary experience, which I expect is true for all illegal street drugs while it’s oppositely true that prescribed drugs are safe and healthy.
So while we’re not allowed to experiment and share our experiences with street drugs openly and have every bit of confidence in prescribed drugs because we don’t understand how the health care system that prescribes them to us works, for most people, what gets lost in the middle of it all is that there are simple to use, safe, easy to understand remedies for our daily health concerns that even in a toxic environment like ours, we can expect to survive it comfortably needing very little from either of the other cloudy drug markets that most of us could never fully comprehend the meaning of if there was ever a way to clearly understand it.
And for those who want to know the limits of the mind and soul, knowing first what the body can provide from a perfectly healthy perspective would give them a launch pad to return to once they’ve finished exploring the alternatives street drugs offer them on their journey through life. And further if we know how to take care of our bodies perfectly with easy and affordable access to simple tools that can allow us to do so, then when we have no other option but to resort to pharmaceutical drugs because nothing else is working, we can best be able to get in and out of that mindset without getting physically or emotional lost in it.
But for a world like that to evolve, the justice system would have to give up the hold it has on the million of people it stalks to make it’s living by making street drugs public enemy number one while drugs dealers would also have to be willing to give up the poor souls they have choke holds on through the way they market their products playing host to sever and dangerous addictions ruining the lives their consumers rather than aiding in their prosperity.
At the other end of the spectrum, pharmaceutical companies and the licensed dope pushers they support would also have to except teaching their patients how to properly take care of themselves giving up the secrets to perfect health therefore negating the need for their positions of authority in their fields being so profitable because there wouldn’t be many seriously ill people left to try to take care of. OK, there would be but not in the ridiculously high numbers there are now
In that kind of world, pollutants in our diet and environment would quickly become unacceptable, which all the way around, the world would be a better place for us all. But a lot of people who make a lot of money from our suffering would have to find new jobs. And it just so happens that since they’ve done such an exemplary job of making mess of the world we live in now, there’s going to be a lot of openings for new employment cleaning it up.
Go to http://pr.cannazine.co.uk/content/view/438/27/ to read the companion article to this one that was published at same time this one was which is about what I’ve learned about how to manage my chemical sensitivity disorder in a toxic world, alternative health applications that you can use to help keep you from ever getting sick
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