Health is not about what someone else, like a doctor, can do to or for you, it’s about what you do for yourself. If health fails, the first thought that should come to mind is: What did I do to cause this? Illness, like life, is merely the result of working out our own acts.
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Instead, in our lazy, “expert” dependent society, most run to the doctor. It’s easier to just pay for a fix (particularly if someone else is paying for it) than to have to think about what we may be doing wrong and change our ways. Our entire culture has been brainwashed into health dependency by the trillion and a half dollar medical industry. 

Getting more free medical care occupies a huge portion of current political debate. Since medical care is the number one killer in America (see Stopping The Number One Killer), this is like leading sheep to the slaughter. The modern death process begins with the first trip to the doctor. 

The folly all started in the Salerno School of Medicine that flourished around 1000 A.D. Its basic tenets were borrowed from the Greek concept of Four Elements: fire, air, water, and earth. The scholars of that period analogized that the body contained four corresponding "humors": blood (fire), phlegm (earth), black bile (water) and yellow bile (air). 

That sounds primitive, but we have not really advanced from this reductionistic and materialistic view that the body is just a machine made of parts and pieces. Now we use words like biochemistry, physiology, anatomy, and DNA. The ignorance remains. Nobody, and I mean nobody, even has a clue as to what “life” even is. But that does not stand in the way of invading the body with every imaginable drug and procedure as if we know what we are doing. 

(Side note: As I write this I am struck by two headlines. One is about “evil” parents who are refusing chemotherapy for their infant with cancer. The implication is that chemo cures cancer. But it rarely if ever does and can cause disastrous side effects. Cancer cure today usually amounts to remission while the drug kills you. In another headline, a study is cited with the remarkable findings that people diagnosed with serious disease may be suffering from depression! Really, who would have thought? Doctors are alerted to watch for this so they can treat them with wonderful side effect inventions call anti-depressants. And the sheer nonsense goes on and on.) 

Life, the thing that health is about, is not only more complex than is imagined, it is more complex than can be imagined. Anyone who does not acknowledge that fact displays an incredible degree of ignorance, and should certainly not be trusted with your body. 

At the hands of barber-doctor experts (as was the profession even into early American history), people were bled, leeched, cupped, blistered, mercuried, amputated, ulcerated, sweated, trepanned, scourged, purged, and flayed to the fare-thee-well. Today we pay for more technology, but the net results are even more brutal, cruel, and dismal. 

There are more than four billion prescriptions filled every year. Virtually all of them address symptoms (effects), not causes. It’s like yanking out wires to the low oil gauge to stop the flashing red signal. Sure, the distress light goes out, but terrible damage is being done. 

Drugs are prescribed for the side effects of other drugs that were used to take care of the side effects of other drugs that were… and on and on until many seniors are on twenty or more medications. Is there a doctor in the world who knows what this potpourri of deadly chemicals is actually doing as they interact in the body milieu? No. But let that not stop the insanity--defined as doing the wrong and harmful thing over and over.

From: Wysong. (2008). Living Life as if Thinking Matters. Midland, MI: Inquiry Press.

Wisdom dictates that we must be very, very skeptical about ANY medical intervention. History proves that and so does the scientific literature. At least half a million medication-related adverse events occur each year. Pharmaceutical-related deaths now surpass deaths from auto accidents. 

The seat belt needed to hold us back from the doctor’s office is reason and self reliance. Unfortunately, using our minds and taking charge of our own health destiny is the hardest of work. That’s why most refuse to do it. 

Illness is like the man who found himself a prisoner in a dark and dreary room. Year after year he pined and fretted until one day a brilliant thought occurred to him: he opened the door and walked out.