A Snapshot of Sick Care in America

Op-ed by Cate Schrödinger

If you wanted to make sick people sicker, how would you do it?

Suppose, as a thought exercise, you wanted to make sick people sicker. Maybe you are a psychopath or sadist, or maybe you’re just curious. Well, if a bunch of people sat down and brainstormed some of the most effective ways of worsening an urgent illness or injury, they might come up with something like this:

• Make them wait intolerably long times in uncomfortable seats in a room filled with other sick people.
• Make sure that they pay, or agree to pay in writing, before you treat them. Make them fill out lots of paperwork, most of it irrelevant, and force them to stand at a desk for 15 minutes while entering every piece of data about them from birth onwards into an archaic computer system that assimilates information at the speed of a sloth.
• Make them wait even longer in little tiny airless rooms that have been filled with a variety of sick people, one after the other, all day long for years.
• Make sure the room is brightly lit with fluorescent lights and has no comfortable resting place.

• Ignore them completely while you busily assault them with a variety of tests that are mostly or completely irrelevant to whatever illness or injury they are suffering from. The more invasive the tests, the better. Make sure they are constantly in motion, whether to open a mouth for a thermometer, offer their arm to a blood pressure cuff, or to step on a scale.
• Don’t let them tell you what’s wrong. Ask a bunch of questions about what medications they are taking and maybe a few yes or no questions about specific symptoms. Act as if you are only interested in data points, and not at all in their experience.
• After they answer your questions, leave them again without any indication of whether or not they are going to get any help. Make them wait again, preferably as long as possible.
• When you come back, offer the following:

* A. the conclusion that their suffering is mostly in their heads, as the tests all came back negative. Berate them for wasting your time and send them away. Do not even consider the money they have spent and the hours they have waited and the suffering that is not relieved.
* B. a meaningless diagnosis that simply describes their symptoms. Offer medications that carry risks of serious side effects, which may very well make them sicker even while managing the symptoms. Make sure to be as patronizing as possible while explaining the treatment.

• Make it so that your “help” may bankrupt them.

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If you want to make people sicker, the best kind of people to manage sick people would be people who have been indoctrinated to believe:

• That they are in a class of exalted people who know best all the time.
• That human bodies are machines; they are all alike, and they all work the same way.
• That diseases need to be treated with pharmaceuticals and surgery. There are no other tools available – anything else is quackery.
• That testing counts as a treatment.
• That the long-term effects of dangerous chemicals are worth the short-term benefits of concluding that you have treated your patient successfully.
• That good practice in medicine is completely objective, and doesn’t have anything to do with a patient’s feelings.
• That all patients should have to provide proof of their suffering that fits the standard (outdated) tests in common practice.
• That medical science understands all there is to know about the human body and its functioning, and is the pinnacle of human knowledge.
• That they have ultimate authority over you.

If you want to make people sicker, then by all means DON’T:

• Treat them gently and try to make them as comfortable as possible with a clean, comfortable, homey space that has soft resting places and gentle lighting.
• Work with them to understand what the problem is and then collaboratively decide what tests would help further that understanding.
• Acknowledge that as a unique human being, they know their body better than you no matter how much training you may have, and that they can provide the information that will be key to treating them.
• Empathize with their suffering, and seek to address the root cause of it regardless of whether it fits into a standard model.
• Look at possible treatment options that include nutritional choices, supplements, or even – God forbid – plant medicines.
• Explore treatment choices together, and discuss them as if you were partners.

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A hundred years from now, we will look back at our medical system and recognize how barbaric and primitive it is. Modern medical schools and research have all been funded by pharmaceutical companies, which have engineered a standard medical philosophy and eviscerated any opposing views. Medical science is narrow and limited, with a dim understanding of the complexities of the human body/mind.

They have chosen to ignore the effects of consciousness, or even just psychology, on a person’s health, with the result being that most causes of illness are completely inexplicable to them. Because natural food and medicine cannot be patented, they do not play a role in medicine, regardless of how valuable they might be to healing. The only tools available are dangerous synthetic chemicals which have massive deleterious effects on the body that are poorly understood. Modern medicine is based on treating disease, not on supporting health.

Medical practice reflects the limited view of medical science, ignoring the patients’ actual needs in favor of churning people through standard treatment protocols to address symptoms that match established criteria. Curiously, the patient, who they are ostensibly trying to help, doesn’t really figure into it much, and their comfort doesn’t seem to matter. The entire process of western “healthcare” couldn’t possibly be better designed to make a patient feel worse, as outlined above. From the condescension of healthcare workers to unnecessary tests, getting caught in that system would be horrible on a good day. When you’re feeling awful, it’s pure torture.

Modern medicine is the leading cause of death in the United States. It’s time to open our minds; we don’t just need to refigure how we pay for and provide healthcare, we need to retool what healthcare is.

Image: Dees Illustration

Cate Schrödinger is a writer and independent researcher out of Portland, Oregon, focused on helping to free the world of medical dogma, economic and mental slavery, and chemical poisoning. Visit her at www.theiamyouproject.com.

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