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Tuesday, July 28, 2009

A Nation Of Hypochondriacs?

Are we in the United States, in our health care debates, showing the world that we are fundamentally Shakespearean drama queens who actually suffer from Hypochondriasis?

Whom am I to ask such questions? Check this out:
The main impression growing out of twelve years on the faculty of a medical school is that the No. 1 health problem in the U.S. today, even more than AIDS or cancer, is that we don't know how to think about health and illness. Our reactions are formed on the terror level. We fear the worst, expect the worst, thus invite the worst. The result is that we are becoming a nation of weaklings and hypochondriacs, a self-medicating society incapable of distinguishing between casual, everyday symptoms and those that require professional attention.
(A Nation Of Hypochondriacs, Time Magazine, Norman Cousins, June 1990, emphasis added). Oh, and that "radical nut case doctor", who was on the Medical Faculty of U.C.L.A. up to his death in September, 1990, went on to say:
The most significant single statement about health to appear in the medical journals during the past decade is by Dr. Franz Ingelfinger, the late and former editor of the New England Journal of Medicine. Ingelfinger noted that almost all illnesses are self-limiting. That is, the human body is capable of handling them without outside intervention.
(ibid). Do I need to add, that, in the 19 years since that article was written things have only gotten worse?

The American public is much more fearful, timid, and terrorized by government propaganda now, and we still act out by taking pills.

Now, the President and others even inform us that we are on the brink of destroying our national economy with our "health care" system.

My take on it is clear, the institutionalization of propaganda always brings empires down.

So much for sophistication, on with the games, let us continue with "breaking down the distance between right and wrong", and calling it "progress"?

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