THE NAKED FEAR OF HEALTH FREEDOM
MAY 10, 2011. I have sent out this article before. In the light of recent events (bin Laden, the nuclear disaster in Japan, US hurricanes, etc.), the issue of health freedom has taken a back seat. In truth, it only surfaces during crisis moments, when big government makes overt moves to limit our health choices.
But that doesn’t mean people have lost track of it. In 1994, I ran for a Congressional seat in the 29th District (Los Angeles), on this issue, and I know some of the people who were with me are still working to keep the flame alive.
First, I do have two updates in health-freedom news—
Right now, because I can’t find reports on the status of a bill in Washington State, which would limit parents’ choices re refusing to vaccinate their children, I have a query into the governor’s office. The bill would require parents to obtain a pediatrician’s signature, before claiming a philosophical, religious, or medical exemption. It is pernicious. It limits freedom by making a doctor the arbiter of another person’s religious or philosophical views. In a perverse way, it’s fitting—because in the last hundred years, doctors have become the modern priests of this era. Their white coats are the prelates’ robes; their instruments and medicines are the sacraments of the faith. They cite certainty as priests do—and they cover up the crimes. (See Starfield, July 26, 2000, JAMA, for evidence the medical system in the US kills 225,000 people a year.)
Second update: a group called EBCALA (Elizabeth Birt Center for Autism Law and Advocacy) is holding a press conference at noon, ET, today, on the steps of the US Court of Federal Appeals, in Washington DC. The link for live viewing is www.ustream.tv/channel/ebcala
The subject? Kids brain damaged by vaccines. EBCALA states they have proof the US government has been paying out settlement claims to parents of kids who developed autism after vaccination.
This would mean the government’s statement that there is no link between vaccines and autism is a lie and a cover-up.
EBCALA has obtained a bombshell email sent by David Bowman (US Health and Human Services spokesman) to a reporter, in which Bowman denies the government has ever paid such a claim. But the interesting language comes near the end of the email, after Bowman indicates the government has paid out claims for vaccine-caused encephalopathy. Encephalopathy is a catch-all term for a number of “brain diseases.”
Bowman writes: “Encephalopathy may be accompanied by a medical progression of an array of symptoms, including autistic behavior, autism, or seizures.”
It’s the old disease-label shell game. “We pay for vaccine-injured kids who develop encephalopathy, not autism. Even though in cases, encephalopathy IS autism…”
Feel free to break down Bowman’s sleazy logic into its finer points.
Here is my 2010 article:
Usually, when politicians discover a large voting bloc that has no champion, they move in like gold prospectors with a fever in their heads. Tap that bloc; mine it; use it.
However, in the case of millions of Americans who passionately want to manage their own health without government interference, who want access to the full range of nutritional supplements and unlimited access to alternative practitioners, there is dead silence in Washington.
Why?
First, few politicians are willing to challenge the agenda of the pharmaceutical companies (drug everybody from cradle to grave). Second, these health-freedom advocates are radical decentralists—which means they know how it feels to be denied the right to take care of their own bodies. They have met the enemy and they know how it operates on a very personal level.
There is no chance politicians will be able to finesse these voters or make empty promises to them or wow them with “task forces” created to “study problems.” Health-freedom folks are too smart for any of that nonsense.
They want unbridled freedom. They want, for example, to be able to say no to vaccines for their children without having to walk the gauntlet of officials who try to dissuade and intimidate and threaten them.
They want to find alternative treatments for cancer in many cases, and cancer happens to be one of those tightly guarded provinces, where big money and big government insist on radiation, chemotherapy, and surgery, come hell or high water.
If politicians aggressively and publicly courted health-freedom people, they’d be exposing themselves to vicious attacks from the medical/government axis and its media dupes.
They’d be opening the door to the notion that people can really choose their own solutions, despite “the best science” and the authoritarian pronouncements of doctors, who are modern priests in white coats wielding hypnotic power.
In other words, FREEDOM would become the top issue and the trumping issue all the way across the board—and very few politicians of either party want to step out into that world.
It’s too raw, too real, too much about naked choice.
That’s why, even as states try to nullify ObamaCare, you don’t hear conversation about how the Dept. of Health and Human Services is poised to compose a list of permitted medical treatments and will eventually outlaw alternative options.
See if you can find, even among the most conservative legislators recently elected to office in the Republican landslide, any who speak up about health freedom.
Good luck.
It remains a taboo in the halls of Congress.
This means individuals will have to carry the burden themselves. They will have to speak out and keep speaking out. They will have to challenge government repression on the most fundamental level. They will have to make this issue electric.
In doing so, they will be accused of everything under the sun. They will be called anti-science Luddites, and religious crazies, and even killers of their own children.
Notice that I’m not advocating the wholesale rejection of modern medicine; I’m saying every individual has the right and the freedom to choose to how to manage his own health. Period. That right takes precedence over anyone’s idea of science or “best evidence.”
On that basis, the fight can be won, in the long run. On any other basis, defeat is certain.
I have lobbied for the formation of a PR agency, funded by nutritional companies, that would widely disseminate information about the health benefits of supplements and the false science behind many conventional medical treatments—and the response has been zero. These companies have no stomach for such a campaign. They, too, fear health freedom, in their own way. They continue to exist in a twilight zone of hope and fantasy. “Maybe the government will ignore us and let us go on doing business.”
In 1994, when I ran for a Congressional seat in the 29th District (Los Angeles), on a platform of health freedom, I gained profound knowledge about who would come out of the woodwork to offer help and who would stay in the shadows. The results, in that regard, were quite sobering. One or two nutritional companies supported me. The rest stayed away.
When the inessentials are stripped away and you are talking about sheer freedom, and when people realize this is your sole concern, they tend to retreat and find other things to do. On the one hand, they will admit their own health is a top concern, but they won’t come out and fight for the right to pursue it according to their own dictates. It’s a strange landscape.
Call me crazy, but I believe a presidential candidate, fully funded, who argued vigorously and widely for health freedom (and other freedoms), could win an election, even in this day and age.
But we are not about to test that hypothesis, because the fear of health freedom is too deep.
And this tells us something.
It tells us we are in the right pew. We are mining a red-hot idea. We’re discovering a lever and a fulcrum that could move the nation.
Back in 1994, I saw passion about politics that far exceeded anything I’d ever run into before. The health-freedom supporters who emerged from their homes were battle-tested veterans in a war that, out of media range, had been going on for decades. They carried a revolutionary spirit of outrage. They weren’t opting for New Age rainbows and pastel prophecies. They had a spirit toward which the Founders would have tipped their hats.
I’ve learned it’s never too late for freedom, because freedom is not part of ordinary time. It’s stands above the passage of events. It is. It’s waiting.
The current trigger is this shuck-and-jive ObamaCare program. This sanctimonious share-and-care sop. Behind it is the plan to force all Americans into a straitjacket of pharmaceutical insanity.
That’s what’s up the road.
But we can take other roads.
If we will.
Neither mainstream political party will ever admit that the government/pharmaceutical axis is a perfect example of a fascist operation. Neither party will ever state, in clear terms, that every citizen has the right to define and follow his own dictates in managing his health. They are afraid to touch that electric core.
But we aren’t.
And that is where hope resides.
JON RAPPOPORT