by Liz Pavek
 

THEY are numerous. THEY are wealthy and powerful beyond belief. THEY have the ability to make people do anything they want them to do, when and how they want them to do it.

THEY are the medical industry, the pharmaceutical industry, the food giants, and the press. This is not a conspiracy theory, since the only "conspiracy" involved is the desire for the greatest possible profit and the largest market possible. I am also not going to list numbers, statistics, or specific events. I am merely going to narrate for you a scenario, and expect you to extrapolate from that what you will. Facts, statistics, and physical proof are out there, especially on the internet. Feel free to research to your heart's content.

The medical industry has the responsibility for keeping America healthy (presumably). But today's medical practitioners don't do much to get people healthy. They do do a lot to keep their patients coming back repeatedly, however, soothing and tut-tutting over the patients' frustrations at never getting "well." 

Nowadays, being healthy is becoming more and more a condition that is entirely up to the individual, but most people don't know that. They haven't learned to take responsibility for their health, so they blindly hand that responsibility off to a professional prescription-writer and test-result-interpreter, and wonder why they can never seem to get well and feel really good.

Most of what ails America's health today can be traced back to a faulty, synthetic diet. Our parents were raised on good basic nutrition, before the earliest stages of this transformed regimen, and suffered the least, eating a nutritionally sound diet which included raw whole milk, lots of meat, poultry, butter, cream, and fresh vegetables and fruits grown by the family itself. By the time our generation came along, the number of manipulated and synthesized items in the American diet had increased exponentially. And the generation we are now raising is the most unfortunate of all, for their diet will consist almost completely of manufactured, synthesized, and processed foods.

Today's generation, unless they live on a family farm or have members who are educated in real nutrition, must subsist on a very nutrient-poor diet. Years of constantly eating empty foods and devouring chemicals, polyunsaturated fatty acids, sugars in numerous forms, and artificial vitamin supplements have produced a population that not only is sick all the time, but is probably obese, and generally has hypertension, diabetes, and heart problems. Years of constantly being harrangued by nutritional charlatans in the medical industry to eat these foods has led to a nation of nutritionally deprived sheep, blindly obeying their slightest suggestion because the "authority" is a god who wears a white coat and a stethoscope around his neck.

If America is the "healthiest" nation in the world, then the world is at death's door, because no other country on earth eats the nasty, chemical-riddled, synthetic diet that Americans do. No other nation even comes close to consuming the amount of vile poisons that Americans do. And no other nation on earth has so many doctors, hospitals, clinics, and medications (more than 24,000 prescription drugs alone) to treat all the diseases and disorders that result from this onslaught.

Nobody profits from this pitiful situation like the medical industry (unless it's the food giants and pharmaceutical conglomerates). Profit is good. Profit is a great motivator. Profit in its proper context is one of the things that made the United States the freest country on earth. But the profiteering that goes on in these related fields at the expense of the health of the population of this country is obscene. 

Years ago, a trip to the doctor's office cost five dollars. If your doctor practiced in a rural area, he might even take produce in payment for his services. If his patient was, say, a mechanic, he might accept work on his car as his fee. But he knew how to heal, and medical costs to the patient were minimal. He counted his practice a success if he could point to people who no longer needed his services.  He did a lot of "First Aid" type work, but also treated--sometimes actually CURED--numerous other diseases.  But doctors in those days weren't confronted with the array of recent conditions that plague Americans today. There was one form of diabetes in those days. Hypertension was virtually unknown, obesity was much less prevalent, and myocardial infarction was so rare that when the EKG machine was invented, it was ignored, since it was only for finding the rarest of heart disorders.

I don't believe all doctors are bad. I don't even believe most of them are. But I do believe that virtually all of them who are employed by HMO's and other conglomerates are suborned by the system. For them, to defer from the party line (to actually cure someone, for instance, or refuse to push the drug of the day) could result in their being fired and blackballed. So most of them, ethics aside, have to go along to get along, or they have to get out of the business. 

Medicine stopped being an altruistic service to help mankind, to care for one's neighbors, and to heal the hurts of the population a long time ago. It stopped when it became a business. Then, it became an even bigger business, until it was consuming a very large part of America's income.

Now, as you know, the bottom line is always the bottom line, and the medical industry, intent on more and more profit, actually keeps its victims ill in order to keep them coming back repeatedly, never healing, always "treating."

The days of the enviable American diet are so far in the past that only a few older people really have any personal experience of it. The days of America's robust good health are also lost somewhere in the dust of progress. But the days of the medical industry's headlock on the population have arrived with a vengeance.