Mainstream medicine & other man-caused damage to our health

Mainstream western medicine has always been about making money and it has increasingly adapted a model that favors making money over actual healing - as can clearly be seen in this article which traces the history of mainstream germ-theory-and-unnatural-drug medicine.

Modern Medicine: How Healing Illness became Managing Illness

Human bodies are a huge, yet ulitmately finite marketplace.  When your only marketplace is limited to the human body, actually healing disease and preventing disease would result in a decreased demand for the unnatural drugs and mainstream treatments that western medicine and the Big Pharma empire depends on.

A far better model for profit, albeit a horrible one for humanity, would be to !) limit and eliminate competition, 2) produce medicines which cure little and mostly manage symptoms and which also have side effects that lead to more illness and thus more treatments, drugs, 3) create and postulate new conditions which must be treated, and 4) expand and promote the "off-label" use of existing drugs for uses other than what they were developed or intended for.  Given the dark history of mainstream medicine and drugs, it is no surprise that the model I just described is exactly what we have now.

Mainstream medicine realized from the outset that they needed to eliminate competition from homeopaths and other naturopathic healers, and they succeeded in doing just that on a grand scale.  Around the middle of this past century the idea that healing would be a very big limiter for future profits appears to have really hit home - and indeed we have seen almost nothing healed in the past half century.  During the past half century their has been an increasing push to eliminate nature itself as competition.  Look for example at what is being done to our crops and other foods.  For decades now it has been possible, if not likely, for doctors to go through their entire medical education with no more than one or two single lectures, if that, on the role diet and nutrition play in health.  While that seems to be changing somewhat, I wryly note that increased emphasis on foods is coming only after the foods have been pretty much farkled.

The same is true for vitamins and minerals - which, despite continued widespread naysaying,  have been seeing at least some grudging acceptance in recent years.  Is it coincidence that the increased acceptance is coming at the same time that vitamins, minerals and other nutrients and natural supplements are increasingly coming under the control of governments and agencies who are largely controlled by Big Pharma and mainstream medicine?

We currently have over 25,000 approved prescribed and over-the-counter medications - and several thousand drug trials are underway for still more medications to come.  Over 95% of the exisiting medications have side effects, a great many of which can be severe and even life-threatening (listen or look carefully at what the disclaimers say in flood of "Ask your doctor" commercials which few companies outside the US allow).  Given the track record, there is little reason to believe that the horde of new drugs on the horizon will be any safer.  In all likelhood they will be even more dangerous given the fast tracking of drugs and all the overseas drug trials with even less oversight than teh poor oversight and drug safety we have had thus far.

I have always maintained that a big reason for side effects from unnatural drugs is due to the fact that they are items which are not found in nature - either man-created compounds, synthetics modeled after - but not the same as - natural compounds, or unique patentable isolates which do not have the supporting compounds found in nature.  Our bodies, which have adapted over all the millenia alongside nature, recognize things which are placed into them which are not found in nature.

Thus I have long maintained that a good rule of thumb is that if something is not found in nature it is generally not a good idea to ingest it, absorb it inject it or otherwise place it into our bodies.  Quite simply, I am not aware of any Devine or natural license being issued to man to try to imitate and supplant God and nature.

However, the more I look at the medical industry and their drugs, the more I am certain that my belief in man's limited abilities to control and imitate nature does not fully explain the damage being caused by mainstream drugs and medicines - and their accomplices in the food, chemical and other industries.  In many instances we likely could do a lot better, but we don't.  In some of those instances it is simply because we don't care.  In others it is because greed and profits dictate otherwise.  And, in my increasingly strong opinion, in many instances, such as with drugs, side effects are either deliberately ignored or even encouraged.

In all of nature, only man deliberately screws over the entire species for the sake of making a buck.