Many years ago doctors would bleed sick patients with leeches. Today, the insurance companies do that.
No matter what ailed you, you went to see the barber surgeon who wound up cupping you, bleeding you, purging you. And, oh yes, if you wanted, he would give you a haircut and pull your tooth while he was at it.
I grew up on antibiotics. Every ailment - sore throats, earaches, flus - warranted a trip to the doctor and in most cases some kind of prescription.
Even though I believe we should promote Chinese medicine, I personally do not believe in it. I don't take Chinese medicine.
I remember the first day I was looking at my hands and I thought about my nails. People wouldn't really be paying attention to that, but a Civil War doctor - What would they be doing with their nails? Would they cut them really low? And Dr. Burns said, "No, they would let them grow out so they can scoop stuff out. They would use their nails." So for a while I let my nails grow. They were too long. I kept stabbing myself by accident, so I cut them down, but I was trying to be faithful to the details.
If you look over a list of medicinal recipes in vogue in the last century, how foolish and useless they are seen to be! And yet we use equally absurd ones with faith today.
Medicare is a monopoly: a central-planning bureaucracy grafted onto American health care. It exercises a stranglehold on the health care of all Americans over 65, and on the medical practices of almost all physicians. Medicare decides what is legitimate and what is not: which prices may be charged and which services may be rendered.
A doctor today would never prescribe the treatments my grandfather used in the Confederate Army, but a minister says pretty much the same thing today that a minister would have said back then.
Like fast-food chains, child psychiatric inpatient units and the wholesale psychiatric drugging of children, in and out of hospitals, are recent...and remarkably popular products and practices.
I'm a fan of homeopathy, acupuncture and spiritual healing. In Australia, this is not weird, but when I arrived in the U.K., everyone thought I was a freak.
The doctors, whether based in Brussels or Paris, draw the same conclusions and write the same prescriptions.
The health-care sector certainly employs more people and more machines than it did. But there have been no great strides in service. In Western Europe, most primary-care practices now use electronic health records and offer after-hours care; in the United States, most don't.
England has a long history of supporting alternative medicine - maybe it's because they don't have such a strong pharmaceutical industry in England, and homeopathy has been taught and promoted there for hundreds of years.
Unless physicians stand together to fight threats and injustices, our practices cannot remain viable in the future.
You see, when medicine works, it is blessed science, and when it fails, it is witchcraft. - Polidori
Deep down, I do not believe that there are any really good parents out there - the same way that I do not believe there were any really good doctors in the 10th century.
A true legislative alternative to ObamaCare would support physician ownership of independent medical practices, and preserve local competition between doctors and choice for patients.
Only desperation can account for what the Chinese do in the name of 'medicine.' That's something you might remind your New Age friends who've gone gaga over 'holistic medicine' and 'alternative Chinese cures.
