Drugs and commercialised medicine......

Hello Bloglet my old friend, I've come to talk to you again....

I have a real issue with the unnecessary prescription of drugs. Whether that is the use of synthetic oestrogen to delay a natural ageing process or alter a genetically determined ratio of female to male sex hormones, the administration of powerful drugs to slow bone thinning, the prophylactic use of antibiotics or non-steroidal anti-inflammatories, the over-prescription of opioids for chronic pain, the use of full-month contraceptives to stop menstruation – it's all too often an appalling waste of resources and it can do immense harm.

Every drug we take has to be metabolised – the biggest burden in that is carried by our liver and kidneys which are part of an integrated system so what adversely affects them, affects every other organ and system. 

Every drug will react in sometimes impossible to predict ways with the individual's metabolism at a particular point, and may interact with other chemicals, including those to which the individual is exposed in the wider environment.

We live in a world that is saturated with a vast array of chemicals – it is estimated that Americans are exposed to around 80,000 in their immediate environment. 

In isolation, any one of those chemical's effects on any given individual at any given point in their life are hard to predict; in combination, it is a convoluted nightmare. 

We should all be doing everything we can to rid ourselves and the planet of these pollutants – and medical professionals should be doing everything they can not to add to the burden we all carry. 

Instead, they are increasing not just the prescription of drugs – too often palliatively and prophylactically – but the use of unnecessary surgeries which always involve the administration of highly toxic drugs at a point when the body, due to the surgery, is at a low ebb.

Modern medicine has a side to it that is ugly and indefensible – the vast growth of commercialised appearance medicine with its cynical, profit-centred preparedness to cater to every whim, to feed off people's unhappiness and insecurity.

When the use of drugs and surgeries is essential to save life or to reduce or remove extreme suffering, there should be no moral dilemmas. Such situations should sit at the very top of the medical triaging process but all too often they don't. People suffer and die even when their situation objectively warrants them being the highest priority; and they suffer and die because they are poor, do not have insurance, and because so much of the available human, drug and technological resources are now diverted into the lucrative branches of what has become a medical-industrial complex.

The beating heart of that complex is not humanitarianism and medical ethics but the pursuit of profit and professional prestige.

Care to argue with that?

A Counter Analogy

I keep seeing analogies like this: "Am I the only one who thinks "what happened in (sic) Oct 7 is the inevitable result of the deprivation of being colonized" sounds an awful lot like "what did she think would happen going out dressed like that?"

They are so wrong, it’s hard to know where to start debunking them. So, to save my poor brain, here’s a counter-analogy.

 

A man, who claims to be homeless, is billeted in a house owned by a widow woman. 

 

She is not happy about the arrangement but her objections are ignored by the authorities.

 

After some time of co-habitation, and with the support of some very influential people, the man claims he has a legal and a moral right to ownership of half the house. 

 

The courts agree. 

 

The woman is angry and upset but none of her legal appeals are heard.

 

Emboldened by this, the man uses his greater strength and aggressiveness to take over even more of the house. Eventually he confines the woman and her children to a much smaller, colder part of the house, which he reserves the right to enter, and take stuff from. 

 

He also begins to physically discipline the children who both resent his presence and his treatment of their mother.

 

When the woman protests further, he threatens her with violence.

 

A neighbour tries to intervene on her behalf but he is badly beaten, and as the man claims self-defence in the context of a home-invasion, no action is taken against him. 

 

The woman tries again to argue in court that the house is hers, and the man should leave. 

 

He counters by saying she is barely competent to manage her own affairs, and that he has well-established legal and moral rights. 

 

The court orders her to continue to share the house with him.

 

The man now feels he can do what he wants, and he not only prevents the woman and her children from entering his parts of the house without permission, he requires them to get his permission to leave the house to go to work or to school. 

 

Eventually the woman loses her job and becomes reliant on welfare. Her children begin to truant and misbehave, and she is declared to be an unfit parent.

 

The man tells everyone who will listen that he has to take charge of the house and her as she is incapable of managing her own affairs. He claims both the legal right and the moral duty to take any and all steps necessary to control her and her unruly brood, in order to protect himself, his wider community, and what is now legally his.

 

As he has a very loud voice and a confident manner, and he persistently references his prior victimhood as a displaced person, he persuades many people that he is completely in the right.

 

In their increasing anger and desperation, the woman and her children begin to act as he has painted them, and one day, one of the children throws a stone at the man. 

 

When the man beats her child, the mother hits him. 

 

It is not a hard blow, except to his pride. In retaliation, he takes full control of their lives. He takes the woman’s welfare cheques; he restricts even further where she and her children can go in the house, and he tracks their every move outside of it. 

 

He intensifies his public depiction of them as feral or insane, as violent and aggressive – a danger, not just to him, but to the wider community. Any acts of resistance from them are depicted as a threat to him and to others.

 

Then, he invites relatives of his to move into the house, and they demand the use of the woman’s remaining rooms. 

 

They go into the rooms, steal what they want and throw the rest out of the window. They change the locks and force the woman and her children to sleep in a garden shed. 

 

Not content with eviction, they mock the women and her children daily, even encouraging their own children to do the same – saying the shed is a fit place for such crazy, lazy, incompetent people.

 

One day, the woman snaps. She sneaks into the house through an open window and stabs the man in the crotch while he is asleep. 

 

Her aim is symbolic; she is not trying to kill, but to emasculate. 

 

The man is not badly injured, and his retaliation is swift and terrible. First, he beats the woman viciously, then he destroys the garden shed and all her remaining belongings and flings her and her children out onto the street with nothing but the clothes on their back. 

 

When some people protest his actions and try to help the evicted family, the man declares them to be abetting criminals.

 

Anyone who defends the woman is deemed to be siding with a crazy, violent, man-hating bitch who, by biting the hand that fed and housed her and her spawn, deserves all she gets, and more. 

So angry do some of the people become, they chase the woman and her children out of the neighbourhood.

 

As the family flees, the anger at the incomprehensible injustice of it all grows in their hearts and minds until they can neither see nor hear anything except calls for vengeance.