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Mark · Site Admin Joined: 13 Nov 2007 Posts: 1052

Preventive Medicine is Terrorism
by Mark E. Smith

Under the Homegrown Terrorist Act, terrorists are defined as people who intend to, or act so as to interfere with corporate profits.

Government studies have shown that preventive medicine saves millions of dollars in health care costs. Those millions are currently part of the profits of the private health care industry, the insurance industry, and the big pharmaceutical corporations.

Obviously then, preventive medicine would interfere with corporate profits.

So far there has been no need for big pharma to sue doctors or clinics for practicing preventive medicine. The health care industry in the U.S. is profit-based, so doctors are fully aware that if they select a less expensive treatment or therapy, or recommend preventive treatment or therapy, it will quickly show up on the corporate books as an indication that their practice is less profitable than that of other doctors, which would not only decrease their income, but could lead to their loss of employment or ability to compete within a given community.

The more risky and expensive, and the less effective a given treatment is, the more profitable it will be. You don't maximize profits by curing people or by preventing disease, and all corporations have a fiduciary duty to their stockholders to maximize profits -- even at the cost of human lives.

One of the many reasons that people are switching to alternative health care is that a ten-dollar handful of herbs may actually be safer and more effective than a $4,000 prescription. Traditional Chinese Medicine, Ayurveda, juicing, and other alternative therapies are less apt to have side effects because they've been tested, in some cases for thousands of years, while new pills may not have even existed for a decade and their long term effects cannot be known.

Recently the government of India won a legal battle to prevent the pharmaceutical companies from patenting tumeric. There are hundreds of other common herbs and spices used in traditional medicine that have been found to be so much more effective than refined and/or synthesized pills, that pharmaceutical companies have been attempting to patent them everywhere that they can. Can you imagine having to get a prescription in order to use basil or ginger in a recipe? Big pharma can, and hopes to bring that about.

As usual, it is the corporations themselves, in their amoral and limitless greed for profits, that are the real terrorists. I don't think that anyone else has yet pointed out that preventive medicine fits neatly into the definition of terrorism in the Homegrown Terrorist Act, but it does and I think that is something we need to be aware of.

(Note: This article is public domain and may be reproduced by anyone, anywhere, with or without attribution. --Mark)