- DOCTORS WITHIN BORDERS: This is the COVID part.

Many more medics must serve us. Weapons impediments to public health. Peace technology as it applies of health care.

https://www.buzzsprout.com/1106222/

LEARNER full text (2024) and chapters

All or nothing, PeaceWorld or death

https://www.buzzsprout.com/1106222/

APPRENTI texte integral (2024) et chapitres

Tout ou rien, Le monde paisible ou la mort

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WORLD WAR COVID
From WeaponWorld to PeaceWorld
Learner, begin

- DOCTORS WITHIN BORDERS -

First draft, over twenty years ago. To every reference to AIDS, please add "and COVID".

“Should medicine ever fulfill its great ends, it must enter into the larger political and social life of our time, it must indicate the barriers which obstruct the normal completion of the life cycle and remove them. Should this ever come to pass, medicine, whatever it may then be, will become the common good of all.” Rudolph Virchow quote in The World Encyclopedia of Peace, Volume III, p. 362.

There should be ten times more medics where there are plenty of them already and a thousand times more where they are few and far between.

The most important but the least appreciated benefit of this medical reinforcement will become apparent for the duration of the next global pandemic. Instead of collapsing once a third or more of healthcare providers fall sick, this service will rapidly ramp up the number of available hospital beds by recruiting newly trained healthcare providers to replace losses among everyday hospital staff. Otherwise, we will face this 21st century challenge with 19th century means of care and corresponding losses. 

Learners of healing should address a broad spectrum of human conditions, most of which are neglected today. These treatments will range from internal factors (psychic and physical) to external ones (social and environmental). Learners will pay equal heed to each of them. 

Robust public health promotes human genius; failure to improve it lowers a civilization’s IQ and multiplies its other troubles. Those will decrease to a fraction of their current bulk in proportion to that improvement.

To fulfill that mandate, Learners will legislate a universal healthcare system constitutionally guaranteed of high quality. Privileged corporations, (insurance, pharmaceutical, teaching, nursing care, etc.) will be stripped of healthcare profits and converted into public utilities. Psychic and other forms of alternate healing will be studied in depth, especially the preventive benefits of good sleep and hydration, thoughtful micronutrition and body micro-ecology. 

These days, only a third of American doctors have signed up with the American Medical Association. Its innate conservatism spells its doom and it is gradually fading away as we speak. 

In truth, its membership may rise once again, based on the recent waves of recruitment of American doctors trained for perpetual war. I am probably being too optimistic about this decline. 

By hook or by crook, right-wingers have swept what’s best off the American buffet table. Reactionary chic is all the rage, these days, complete with pointless wars overseas and disasters at home, leaders handpicked for ineptitude, ambidextrous handouts to the rich and fraud at every level of government. Is there any crime or misdemeanor these people have not perfected? They keep insisting that government must be incompetent. Man, how thoroughly they’ve confirmed their own claim to ineptitude! No other group could serve as a better example of dogmatic incompetence. 

The AMA recruited its first adherents from bloody-aproned military surgeons who received their weapons catechism in the 1860s during the American Civil War. In unholy alliance with startup drug companies, the AMA suppressed its sister discipline, homeopathy. Early in the 1800’s, Samuel Hannemann had brought back to life the idea that certain drugs, administered in infinitesimal doses, could induce specific sets of signs and symptoms and cure ailments with similar ones. 

Despite homeopathy’s early success, the AMA championed allopathic therapy that prescribed drugs in massive doses strictly to suppress symptoms (at or just below toxic levels, don’t mention toxic interactions!). Even though homeopathic hospitals and colleges flourished up until then, the AMA and allied drug companies hounded most of them out of existence by World War II (sic). 

As in the case of weapon religions, AMA conservatism exhausted whatever usefulness it could once claim. These days, the main goal of AMA conservatives is to boost their profits by denying the automatic delivery of high-quality healthcare to everyone except the rich and the military. 

Weapon medicine attacks disease and trauma deliberately inflicted. Soldiers in the field suffer like mistreated farm animals. Out in the weather and layered in filth, they devour whatever garbage they can loot, dig from the ground or drag up from the rear. In combat, the daily routine involves agonizing casualties, pandemic infection, exhaustion, sleep deprivation, exposure, malnutrition, grief, frustration, fear, rage, separation anxiety and psychiatric emergencies. In addition, seniority and combat survival determine who gets promoted among military leaders. Therefore, military surgeons do their best with the tools they have at their disposal: crude drugs and sharps, to suppress their patients’ signs and symptoms of illness, trauma and old age, as well as emotional reactions. 

From weapon medicine’s point of view, reducing stress to promote health is absurd. Instead, warrior societies practice social triage, isolation of patients and post-insult, high-stress invasive treatments. No such medical system can maintain the health of a population undergoing greater and greater stress. As overall health deteriorates, medical expenses skyrocket. After all, there is no “rear area” toward which to evacuate casualties for better treatment, and no stream of replacements in good health to suffer their abuse in turn. Hospitals turn into incubators of every infection strange and ordinary, and wind up killing nearly as many patients as they save. 

Western medicine evolved just off the battlefield. Alexander the Gross brought surgeons along with his much lauded, pincushion Macedonian phalanx. Occidental medics didn’t seriously investigate oriental acupuncture until after French military surgeons followed their Army into Indochina. The American Army didn’t establish a semi-adequate “Golden Hour” of helicopter emergency response until the Korean and Vietnam Wars. As a gesture of mercy, Napoleon’s senior surgeons equipped horse-drawn ambulances with sprung axles. Prior to that, such accommodations only cushioned the delicate behind of healthy nobles. 

Space-age ambulances bounce screaming or shock- and dope-zombified casualties down our bullet-swept, crash-strewn streets. More people die on our highways than in our wars, and far more in those overseas. Every war on this planet, every insurrection, every redundant massacre of innocents, every suicide explosion and car wreck is one more “too many” and largely avoidable despite everything we've been told.

Even today, the medical community hasn't decided whether to keep shock victims warm under blankets or pump their chest with a freezing cocktail of lifesaving fluids. Flash-cooled victims of trauma and drowning seem to retain a longer survival rate, delayed bleed-out, greater resistance to infection (look out for gangrene after frostbite!) and extended immunity from brain death while they await delayed but crucial care from doctors out of reach. British combat surgeons documented this capacity among wounded patients during the Falklands War; as did army doctors during the invasion of Murmansk, Russia, by Allied forces in 1918, among others.

Victorian era tropical medicine and insect eradication programs protected white colonial garrisons, only aboriginal peoples as an afterthought (and many of those not even today.) Yellow fever and other tropical infections were finally conquered for that reason alone. This racist neglect continues today. It engenders, among other abuses, the mass genocide of AIDS that is engulfing Africa and the poorest corners of Asia. AIDS has spread, predictably enough, into every poor neighborhood on Earth — just like terrorism has. Once all those Third World babies, child parents and twenty-something grandparents succumb to AIDS, mass terror or mere malnutrition, they won’t require so much pesky international aid, now will they? 

Sooner or later, this bias will summon similar plagues down on our First World heads. The best global public health results from that achieved at great distance from the richest nations. If you can ensure that someone living at the antipodes of your world benefits from public healthcare comparable to your own at the time, your own will improve correspondingly. 

Today, much more research money goes to cure the trivial complaints of rich societies (baldness, geriatric impotence, foot fungus and pet neuroses) than lethal tropical diseases. 

The underlying causes of most of these diseases – chronic malnutrition and bad water – have been ignored or even fostered. 

Almost every war in Africa since the Cold War has shared this feature in common. It involved corporate monopoly of a poor country’s profitable export: diamonds, timber, oil or some other monoculture or rare mineral resource. The revenue from these kinds of enterprises ebbs and flows unpredictably and cannot be used to buy out these problems once and for all. Their exploiters refuse their obligation to overcome these problems and cease to profit (poorly) from them.

Simple autarky in those countries (self-sufficiency, which means good food and water produced locally) will blunt most of those wars. I can hear officials of the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund scream bloody murder rather than allow this to happen. Learners will suggest that they change their mind — swiftly and with gusto. They will discover, a little late but beyond dispute, that this new policy pays much better. Practical charity pays much better than their WeaponWorld today. Who knew?

Weapon medicine took off during the Great Paroxysm (World War I, sic) when most doctors did a medical rotation through years of combat internship. If not World War I (sic), then WWII (sick); and if not those, other wars since. As a result, general practitioners vanished, most physicians became specialists, home visits were cut short, health services became hospital routines and preventive healthcare was dismissed as irrelevant. 

This recession to the militarist mean is not hard to understand. On a battlefield, honest caregivers would instruct their patients to drop their weapons and go home. Weapon elites are not amused by these instructions unless their foes adopt them unilaterally.

I’m counting on everyone to adopt them. Once that happens, we will see how much global health improves! I’ve heard that high quality healthcare could be delivered to everyone on Earth for something like the price of a year of the war in Iraq under Bush the Lesser — easily affordable if every country on Earth contributes. 

Instead, we submit to the paradoxical, hypocritical, ruinous and disease-aggravating medical mismanagement of WeaponWorld.

A peace-oriented medical community will train many more deliverers of basic first aid and cardio-pulmonary resuscitation (CPR). There will be a tremendous increase of home health care providers, including personal aides, masseurs, acupuncturists, physical therapists, emergency medical technicians, hospice care-givers, pharmacists, nurses, physician assistants, chiropractors, naturopaths, homeopaths, shamans, healers, herbalists and other specialists. 

Could we foresee a healthier society with so many more caregivers? A lot of them are in preparation today, yet their training is incoherent and chaotic. This confusion betrays reductive and fragmentary attempts by decrepit WeaponWorld to apply holistic, PeaceWorld solutions to its problems, even as they worsen. Those fixes are doomed to fail because their application is too localized and fragmentary. Except for its weapons projects, WeaponWorld forbids the pragmatic holism that PeaceWorld demands.

Learners of healing will practice their skills on-site, up to but not exceeding their level of expertise. Their qualifications will establish which of an incremental pharmacopoeia of remedies and treatments these successors of “barefoot doctors” may administer and who among them will deliver in-depth diagnoses involving many more consultations and referrals. Particular attention will be paid to powerful placebo effects reinforced by new, shamanistic healing rituals of forceful psychological impact. 

The need to seek a second opinion will become unnecessary since this medical system will provide several professional opinions for every important diagnosis. Since a comfortable income will become commonplace in any case (in multiples of the minimum necessary to escape from poverty), expert cooperation and free referrals will replace competition for patients. This will eliminate the insular, “figure it out for yourself” attitude of present-day medicine, which promotes a growing incidence of errors. Apply deliberate redundancy to lessen diagnostic errors! WeaponWorld insists on personal medical mastery that was never that important — what is important is a drop-off in error rates. It would be better if each patient were seen by a partnership of doctors or a more extensive medical team to confirm their diagnoses and treatments. In recent studies, their diagnoses have proven less error prone and more accurate than those of lone practitioners.

Malpractice would draw immediate demotion to less healthcare responsibility and more remedial coursework. Word would go out: “If your medical competence is suspect, we will seek treatment among better qualified replacements while you retrain and recertify to a more appropriate level of care.” 

Learners of Healing will saturate neighborhoods with basic education in nutrition and hygiene. They will teach preventive and elementary public health measures in every household, office and school. Every instance of junk food and drug poisoning for corporate profit will be neutralized.

Doctors with advanced training will be freed for visits at home or in much more numerous and widespread clinics. Primary healthcare providers will practice preventive medicine and long-term nursing care in the home. Rarely visited hospitals will only house the most demanding tasks of emergency and surgical care, teaching, research and disaster response. 

Along with reorganizing the medical community, Learners will introduce conception-to-expiration, single-source and holistic healthcare on a global basis. 

This may involve more ablutions of prayer, washing of strangers’ feet (especially those of enemies), more restful sleep, proper micro-nutrition and adequate hydration. I am convinced that many chronic ailments stem at least in part from these deficiencies. Not to mention the longstanding blockage of rational social policy by six generations of leaders who have suffered from the concussions of warfare explosives and contact sports.

The stupidity of war abounds in the peace that follows it. 

In obedience to Mohammed’s dictum, everyone will wash their hands at least five times a day or else will feel ritually unclean. This simple habit will block the easiest transmission route of most infectious diseases. It seems that bacteria cannot mutate around the simple physics of soap and diligent scrubbing flushed with warm water, unlike complicated antibiotics, they evolved to neutralize in the long run. The water temperature irrelevant (?) except for comfort; water hot enough to sterilize the skin would blister it. Also, new masks will block airborne pandemics, using powerful glues or static electricity? How do nose hairs block germs? 

Public health overwatch, pollution control, good nutrition, more exercise, health education (and no private cars) will improve general health much more dramatically than research grants funding the serial torture of laboratory animals. Timely, accurate, cheap and preemptive diagnoses – both medical and psychological – will replace the medical guesswork of today.

I discovered that my digestive disorders were the result of eating tomatoes and other nightshade vegetables, as well as acidic foods and drinks. No more Coca Cola, soda, coffee or vinaigrette salad dressing for me!  

I found this out by trial and error, without a doctor’s input beyond a physical therapist’s conclusion that there was no mechanical reason for my chronic lower back pain. My illness had been officially diagnosed as inflammatory colitis and treated in vain with big handfuls of pills as bitter as they were ineffective. 

I discovered that a teaspoon, more or less, of simple baking soda mixed in a small glass of warm water could stop back pains I’d suffered intermittently for years. My wife found the same solution for her digestive problems, if only by avoiding onions and taking a shot of cider vinegar in the morning. I just partook of a tasty slice of lasagna for the first time in years, chased with a small glass of baking soda mix, and it didn’t cost me a week’s follow-up pain as it would have in the past. 

It’s funny. When I eat acid foods (very carefully), then swallow a small glass of bicarbonate of soda and water, the liquid goes down the digestive tract quicker than the food, catching up soon with pockets of its acid. When they pass through each other, the chemicals flash into carbon dioxide and salt water. So I burp. At each burp, I’ve neutralized a globus of acid food that would otherwise have eaten into my guts.

Check out those treatments for yourself!

How many millions of people suffer from similar complaints, undiagnosed or treated at best symptomatically, rather than receiving a definitive diagnosis of their ailment and a permanent cure for it?

The self-care wisdom we pick up by trial and error after a lifetime of disease and suffering, Learners will be taught trouble-free as children.

That which follows cannot be stressed enough. The survival of human civilization may depend on psychological testing and monitoring both universal and lifelong. 

Weapon technology encourages ephemerization. In plain English, that means it has become easier to induce mass casualties and destruction with the latest biological and nanotech weapons. By “easier,” I mean cheaper, less technically complicated, more accessible and easier to hide by individuals and groups not at all powerful otherwise. Read “lone gunmen” and marginal terrorist cells along with their psychopathic patrons and sociopathic supporters.

 Thanks to ex-President and dementia sufferer Ronald Reagan (glorified by his equally crazy supporters), the richest nation on Earth institutionalized homelessness: a national disgrace. These days, we let people run loose unsupervised who hear voices in their head ― or imprison them, worse yet. Thus we risk the occasional axe murder and NRA-induced massacre of innocent victims in a restaurant or a school. In the future, these marginal crimes could become attacks that depopulate entire cities and continents. 

Those homicidal maniacs, (especially the borderline, the latent, late bloomers and the most brilliant among them), will have to be watched very closely over the course of their lives. We may as well survey everyone as a matter of course and iron out many neuroses while their bearers are young and their ills easier to treat; or even before birth, using prenatal genetic surgery.

No longer will doctor’s visits be restricted to crisis situations once something has gone seriously wrong. Medical visits will become easier to schedule and more reliable than the purchase these days of self-administered, over-the-counter palliatives. Four doctor’s visits per year will become the norm, if only to chat for a while about routine matters of health both mental and physical. Local Learners of Healing will dispense cheaper remedies (for the most part, placebos). They will deliver preliminary diagnoses of anything amiss, targeting serious problems for extensive referrals and consultations from a broader, better trained and much more accessible medical community than ours today.

The therapeutic laying on of hands will be studied and practiced intensively. Anyone with a talent for that kind of thing will be recruited into the medical community as a child and dedicated to the highest levels of healing as long as their talent lasts.. 

Many cost-effective therapies have been withdrawn from us to satisfy weapon requirements of medical rationing, profit and privilege. The media applaud spectacular feats of life-support, surgical virtuosity and extraordinary intensive care; but rarely the hyper-inflated expenses and shortcomings of this type of care. The latest example? Surgical transplantation and replacement of a complete pair of lungs ruined by COVID.

That’s shocking! In John Dos Passos’ trilogy, USA, hard-working families lost everything they had worked so hard to achieve, to illness and its medical bills, lost employment and income. He wrote his novel a century ago. Here we are, a century later, and the worst nightmare most families face is that bills for chronic illness and the vulnerability of old age will ruin them (the cause of 60% of American bankruptcies). 

This perfectly reasonable fear justifies economic disparities that would be inexcusable otherwise, so that a few schemers can shield themselves and their family. Almost everyone conspires with this travesty, hoping to attain some Shangri-La of medical security by means of self-seeking, zero-sum competition for quality health care. Slightly wiser heads (much better informed) will provide free lifelong health care and put an end to this mass anxiety and the inequity it causes.

Drug companies base their research and development budgets on “what the market will bear” rather than “what the population needs today.” This kind of waste will soon price itself beyond the reach of everyone except millionaires. 

Instead, self-serving medical care corporations will be replaced by more civic-minded public utilities. Patients who require absurd levels of care should be allowed to die with dignity, free of pain and fully aware of their option to reincarnate and be saved. 

I suspect that a merciful God ministers even unto our death.  The epiphany that many near-death survivors report has confirmed that conclusion for me. If this is merely the result of imbalanced brain chemistry during the agony of death, so be it. Drug companies should synthesize its components and medics, administer them during the death throw of their patients. Less pain and less fear, more mercy and no harm in that, per Hippocrates.

Our medical spending priorities should be revised on a global scale to reduce overpopulation, infant mortality, epidemics, the ill effects of mental illness, obesity, undiagnosed criminality, family neglect and abuse. We should stop working so hard to retain signs of life in those near death. 

Rich survivors of old age, awaiting replacement organs from concentration camps of random victims (if not those arrested on purpose): this is what WeaponWorld offers us, at least in China nowadays if not elsewhere. This disastrous project, extending the lifespan of certain privileged individuals beyond the statistical norm, must be shelved. More pressing priorities should be addressed first. They will purify and re-inforce this project in an acceptable manner.

Once every newborn and mother enjoys a cherished and healthy relationship – and only then – extending the decrepitude of the rich may cease to be obscene vampirism. The miracle of very old age in good health will be surprisingly easy to achieve, for rich and poor alike, without so many betrayals of everyday morality. 

Abortion is a source of grief for everyone. But this ghastly procedure cannot be brought down until the above measures have been fulfilled. If you insist on banning abortion, you should insist on these other items, first. It is not realistic to criminalize the actions of desperate parents; it would be better to relieve their despair and let them decide what to do with their child, every one of which deserves a secure, tender and dearly beloved upbringing. 

This grim decision must be delegated to each mother and only to her, once advised by her chosen physicians and without government intervention. God help her make such a devastating choice.

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