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If Given a Fair choice, most consumers would choose alternative medicine over conventional health care By Mike Adams

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This article is taken from NaturalNews.com
 

(NaturalNews) As a strong proponent of free market economics, I have long wondered why free markets don’t seem to be operating in the health care industry. Today, it finally hit me with great clarity, and I’ll share that with you here. But first, a primer on free market economics:

As the free market theory says, “greed is good” because innovators can only get rich by figuring out how to deliver more goods, services and life improvements to consumers who purchase those items. The genius who figures out how to build a better car— or a less expensive car of the same quality — earns the business of consumers and is financially rewarded as a result. Greed drives innovation, the theory goes, and innovation benefits consumers even as it fills the pockets of corporate CEOs, too.

This model works under one critical assumption, and it turns out that assumption is not true in health care today (for reasons you’ll see below). Which assumption is it? That consumers will rationally purchase only those things that are in their own self interest (things that benefit them) and, equally importantly, that consumers have access to the information they need to make an informed decision.

So, for example, if a solar panel manufacturer figures out a way to make a new line of solar panels with twice the current efficiency at the same cost as current solar panels, consumers will rationally choose to purchase those solar panels and will experience a benefit as a result (but only if they have access to accurate information about the improved performance of those solar panels). The CEO who runs the company that figured out how to make the new, improved solar panels will also reap the financial rewards at the same time.

This is called free market theory in a nutshell.

How it all fell apart in health care

But all this falls apart when corporations are selling products that harm consumers under an irrational system protected by government intervention. Many pharmaceuticals, vaccines and treatment services (such as chemotherapy) actually harm consumers far more than they help them. Knowing this, no rational consumer would choose to purchase such products. So the health care system must engage in some rather devious marketing distortions to cajole people into buying their faulty products:

#1) People are TRICKED into thinking they need these products that harm them. This is accomplished through disease mongering (pushing fabricated diseases such as ADHD), emotional advertising and bribing physicians in order to influence their drug prescribing behavior.

#2) People are LIED TO about the risks of using such products. Drug companies, in particular, routinely lie to consumers by burying negative clinical trials, bribing researchers to produce positive study results, exaggerating claimed benefits in television advertisements and other similar methods.

#3) People are ISOLATED from information they need to know in order to make a rational decision about conventional medicine’s products. They are not allowed to know the truth about the dangers of drugs as revealed in clinical trials, for example. The FDA even conspires with drug companies to hide this relevant data.

#4) People are FORCED into a monopolistic choice by the government outlawing alternative choices such as natural cancer remedies or certain nutritional supplements. Once again, the FDA plays a key role in discrediting natural alternatives. The health insurance industry also enforces this monopolistic approach by covering conventional sick-care therapies (such as heart bypass surgery) while not covering natural therapies that help prevent degenerative disease.

#5) People are KEPT IGNORANT of the actual costs of health care through Medicare, Medicaid and health insurance coverage. Consumers have no idea what they’re being billed for most medical procedures because they’re not footing the bill! So hospitals, clinics and cancer centers bill whatever amount they can get away with.

Why this recipe works for the sick care industry

Remarkably, this recipe of deception has achieved tremendous success, creating a trillion-dollar global market in bad medicine largely based on quack science combined with manipulative marketing.

Of course, it’s not really a free market to begin with. This market is a protected, monopolistic market that’s propped up through government regulatory action designed to eliminate competition. It only exists under the illusion of a free market, where consumers think they’re making a “free choice” about what drugs to take, not knowing they have another option to avoid taking those drugs altogether and do something completely different to protect their health.

Government intervention harms consumers

One conclusion from all this is that when the government gets involved in protecting one particular industry while allowing “greed” to run its course inside that protected industry, the result quickly becomes harmful to consumers even while corporate CEOs (in Big Pharma) accumulate wealth. We see this in Wall Street as much as we do in health care… notice how the trillion-dollar bailouts all went to the wealthiest money criminals even while debasing the currency held by the working masses?

On the Big Pharma side of things, rather than creating better and more innovative products, these companies are in the business of marketing disease first, followed by introducing a chemical pill designed to treat that disease. This is precisely the story behind restless legs syndrome, for example, or the recent push to use drugs to control your uric acid levels.

When governments interfere with free market economics, they inevitably create an unfair playing field that favors one group of companies over another, and that favoritism will always result in financial exploitation that inevitably harms consumers.

The best way out of this would be to deregulate all health care and end the monopoly on medicine currently granted to Big Pharma (and even doctors at the state level). By allowing all providers of health services and health products to compete on a level playing field, without government favoritism, selection orcensorship, consumers would quickly learn which products or services work best to protect their health, and they would rapidly shift their purchasing behavior in that direction.

This would cause a windfall of profits in the realm of natural health and alternative medicine, by the way, even while sharply reducing the profits of Big Pharma and the sick-care industry (because it produces virtually no positive results). In fact, this is precisely why the government is not pursuing a free-market approach to health care right now: Because to allow consumers a truly free choice about how to treat their own health would spell the end of some of the wealthiest corporations in the world — the drug companies whose very existence depends on ignorance, deception and scientific fraud.

Conventional medicine must force consumers to use it!

This is why the FDA continues to censor the truth about nutritional supplements, by the way. It’s the reason why Medicare won’t cover Traditional Chinese Medicine or homeopathy treatments. This is why the AMA has waged a 100-year war on the chiropractic industry. Conventional medicine works so poorly and is such a total failure in terms of its results that it has to force consumers to use it. Sometimes at gunpoint! (With the forced chemotherapy treatment of teens, for example.)

No other system of medicine in the world is such a total failure that a government has to force its own citizens to use it through a campaign of disinformation, monopolistic controls and active censorship of alternatives.

Today, Americans think they live in a free country. But most do not realize their entire health care system is structured in direct opposition to free markets and free choice. The sick-care industry can’t afford for you to have a free choice, because to do so would destroy their entire business model.

Opting out of sickness and into health

You can, of course, opt out of the entire system as I have done. I spend exactly $0 on health insurance, doctor visits and health care. With all the money I save by not writing checks to a system of failed quack medicine, I instead buy superfoods, nutritional supplements, gym memberships and organic fresh produce that I juice and drink every day. This level of personal health commitment combined with true freedom of choice terrifies both the government and the sick care industry which is precisely why Obamacare mandated that all Americans must buy sick-care insurance or be fined by the IRS.

Think about it: If conventional health care really worked, would they have to send IRS agents after people to force them to buy into it? This is “gunpoint health care” where you get to choose any system of medicine you want as long as it’s the one the IRS says you have to choose. Sounds a bit like Communist China, doesn’t it?

What we really need is a truly free market for health care products and services. …a level playing field where natural remedies can be honestly marketed with accurate health claims and where healers of all kinds can engage in healing services without being arrested or threatened with imprisonment. State medical licensing boards, in particular, should be completely dissolved. They are the monopolistic power hubs that enforce conventional medicine monopolies at the state level while criminalize alternative cancer doctors.

A truly free market in health care would revolutionize health in America while ending the dark age of Big Pharma dominance over the entire industry. One day soon, let us hope we may have an opportunity to invoke truly free market economics that will unleash a new era of freedom and healthy living while giving the natural side of medicine its well-deserved opportunity to compete against the failed system of conventional sick care.

In a fair competition, 4 out of 5 consumers would choose natural medicine over conventional medicine. That is precisely why they cannot allow such a freedom of choice to exist.

Learn more:http://www.naturalnews.com/030923_alternative_medicine_consumer_choice.html#ixzz1AM0jQ3ow

Core Energetics by John Pierrakos, and Paranormal Perception
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Core Energetics by John Pierrakos, and Paranormal Perception

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I know a woman who lives in the bell-jar of analysis. She’s a fine person, brilliant, successful, and lovingly committed to her children, though she seems not to like other women all that much. I have a few foibles of my own and I like her, snarkiness and all. It’s just that having dinner with her is a marathon of hearing about her feelings, her feelings about her feelings, her thoughts about her feelings about her feelings, her analyst, her feelings about her analyst, her thoughts about her feelings about her analyst… It’s a closed and airless world, fundamentally solipsistic. Masturbatory.
 
I have serious qualms about contemporary psychotherapy as it is generally practiced. There’s a lot of horse manure that’s taken as gospel by therapists and by people influenced by therapists. In fact, psychotherapy is one of the current sacrosanct priesthoods, along with “hard science.” Some months ago, I told a few psychotherapists that I didn’t believe in group therapy. Boy oh boy, did they get unpleasant. They wouldn’t admit it, of course. The most self-unaware people in the world are psychotherapists. But it was a lot like admitting to an Inquisitor that the Holy Trinity is bunk. Be careful when you poke someone’s sacred cow!!
 
Ultimately, I don’t think talk psychotherapy works. It’s brought general silliness and brainlessness into the culture. It’s an exercise in narcissism, self-indulgence, and inanity. People are afraid to think for themselves, and they are afraid to use their discernment–because “everyone is ok” and all that drivel. Values have been discarded in favor of bland lack of judgement that masquerades as tolerance. Personal accountability has been sloughed off.
 
So what does work? Because people need help: we are all suffering, to some degree. Orgone boxes work. Everyone should build one and install it in their living room. Sit in it for an hour a day and open the flow in the body-mind-spirit-psyche unit that we call our human self.
 
Orgone boxes work because of, as John Pierrakos writes, “Three main theses… the first is that the human person is a psychosomatic unity. The second is that the source of healing lies within the self, not with an outside agency, whether a physician, God, or the powers of the cosmos. The third is that all of existence forms a unity that moves toward creative evolutions, both of the whole and of the countless components. … The basic substance of the person is energy. The movement of that energy is life. The freer the energy movement…the more intense the life..”
 
Sitting in an orgone box is like charging a battery, the battery being the human being. As the person is filled with energy, blocks to free energy movement start to shift and dissolve. Those blocks are multidimensional: they affect the body, the mind, the emotions, and the spirit. They have to affect all those dimensions because those dimensions are yoked together, inseparably. There is no possible way to change the mind without also affecting the body, spirit, and psyche. And so forth. On the psychological level, a block is a neurosis or phobia, etc. With the free flow of energy movement restored, those can melt away like ice in hot water.
 
Orgone, as Wilhelm Reich defined it, is primordial cosmic energy. The Chinese call it Chi. The Hindus call it Prana. The Japanese call it Ki. George Lucas called it ‘The Force.’ Physicist William Tiller calls it the Quantum Domain. Everything is energy, and orgone is the fundamental, root energy substrata.
 
There are a lot of implications to this axiom. If you posit that everything is energy and start to pursue that into the realms of human consciousness, a multitude of seeming paradoxes, puzzles, oddities, and anomalies arise. One of those strange consequences of energy and consciousness is paranormal perception. Patanjali called them siddhis and warned against getting distracted by them. But everyone who meditates regularly eventually, whether after 20 years or 20 minutes, stumbles onto clairvoyance, clairaudience, precognition, telepathy–past life recall.
 
I read with some amusement an article in The New York Times (Jan 6, 2011) that described the angry furor over a paper that gives strong evidence for extrasensory perception. These kinds of papers are published all the time, attracting little notice. This time, however, it’s the prestigious Journal of Personality and Social Psychology which is publishing the study. Some traditionalist psychologists are just outraged that a study that passed a stringent peer review would be published–when the study shows evidence for ESP. Remember what I said about poking people’s sacred cows?
 
So what to do if you’re not up for parking an orgone box in your den, in front of the treadmill that holds your dirty clothes? We are relational creatures, after all. It is human to want to move your energy in concert with another person. Then find a core energetic therapist. Go to a Barbara Brennan School of Healing trained healer, someone who is in supervision.
 
I was lucky enough to have a session with John Pierrakos before he died. He was a sparkly, gray-haired elf of a man, radiating both kindness and genius. I worked in my underwear and never before or since have I felt so safe, and so understood. But he teased me a little, too. “Traci has to know,” he told me, in a voice that was both amused and compassionate. I think of that often, especially in regards to foibles and personal bell jars.

APOLLO by Sabin Howard, in pieces
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APOLLO by Sabin Howard, in pieces

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APOLLO by Sabin Howard
It’s not easy to be married to a great artist. The steely internal fortitude necessary for creating a masterful work of art isn’t always conducive to the reciprocity and mutuality of a working marriage. It’s probably no easier to be married to an author. We’re in our heads a lot. Sabin claims I spend half the time time I’m with him having a conversation with myself. A rich inner life, like anything else, has two sharp edges.
But then I get to see Sabin’s work: and it is beautiful. Beautiful like the David, like anything Praxiteles or Canova or Carpeaux or Bernini created. Beauty is its own reward. Above is the APOLLO, in pieces. I’ve seen him whole, too. He’s a feast for the mind, the eye and the heart.
The Benefits of Radical Anarchy: Enjoying Family Dinners
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The Benefits of Radical Anarchy: Enjoying Family Dinners

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The Benefits of Radical Anarchy: Enjoying Family Dinners

My blogs of late have emphasized my dissatisfaction with some thoroughly corrupt institutions in our lives: government and big business. Radical anarchy may be the only solution. And radical anarchy has so many applications. Once you get in the hang of it, it’s a useful approach to so very many situations. All this time I’ve considered myself a one woman stand against entropy. Maybe it’s time to rethink that.

Like family dinners. Getting all 4 of my daughters to sit down to a meal with my husband and me is like herding feral cats. Two are in college and are often in their distant cities. Even when they’re around, this one is working, that one has dinner with the other parent, the other one has two parties and, like, six best friends who demand to see her!
There are always the emotional undercurrents of getting a bunch of women together, who’s mad at whom and why. There’s the emphasis on relationships, makeup, hot guys, relationships, clothes, and hot guys. Did I mention there’s a lot of discussion about relationships and hot guys?
It’s not like we don’t talk about other things as well. Books, movies, TV shows, politics, and the current topics in their majors, neurobiology and sociology. But sooner or later…
“Do you think I should cut my hair real short and wear a lot of eye make-up?” one daughter asks.
“Do you think I should get an apartment with my boyfriend this summer?” asks another daughter.
“Do you think it’s okay to date a guy if I’ve already dated his best friend slash roommate?” asks the third. “Does it matter if the guy I dumped is stalking me now?”
“Can I paint my fingernails and get a dress like Mary had on at the Christmas party?” asks the little one.
“Oh my god, it’s an estrogen-fest,” my husband Sabin moans.
Then the dog barfs on the floor after eating someone’s purse, and the 5 year old breaks a glass and turns off all the lights in the house. The Christmas tree falls over, disgorging its lights, and all the iPhones in the house beep with simultaneous texts. The middle daughter chooses that moment to explain exactly why her boyfriend should be so much more grateful and appreciative to be dating her than he is–all while she in-boxes three guys she’s keeping on the hook for later, maybe. Sabin stabs himself in the knuckles with a fork just to distract himself.
And if you are in the mental state to enjoy radical anarchy: it is a rich feast for whimsy.
Big Brother is Watching
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Big Brother is Watching

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A courageous news team in Houston reported on the Houston Police Department’s testing of an unmanned drone with a high-def, long-range camera that can see inside people’s homes. Check out the video report here.

Mostly I regard the Fourth Estate with skepticism. News media have long since sold out to the government to garner exclusives and to curry favor, to Big Business because Big Business owns the media outlets, and to the lowest common denominator of populist taste because they need to sell copies or gain ratings to stay in business. Objectivity is a myth. Wikileaks is doing what the media should do, but media outlets long ago lost the balls to execute their own mandate: inform the public. Of everything.
However, in this case, local K2 news in Houston did what the media should do: it kept an eye on the police. The Houston Police Department tried to keep media out, and lied to the pilot of the news copter about FAA restrictions. When the Houston Police Department realized that they’d been seen despite their attempts at security, they scrambled to give a press report.
Yes, unmanned drones can have helpful, protective, practical applications, like putting out brush fires and following bank robbers. But make no mistake: this drone will certainly be used by Big Brother, by which I mean the police, FBI, Homeland Security, etc. to deprive civilians of their privacy. To collect information “just in case.”
We all know that information can be massaged to prove any point whatsoever.
It is unfortunate but true that 9/11 has been used to destroy civil liberties. “American freedom” is a myth, a nostalgic idea from a past that has vanished. Totalitarianism approaches. Much of it is financially oriented. We live in a time when Big Business has won, and continues to win, so many legislative victories depriving individuals of choice and forcing individuals to pay outrageous prices that Big Business has become an arm of the government, controlling us. I’ve said it before and will say it again: There is a pattern at work in the world. The pattern is the slow but steady erosion of civil liberties and individual rights. These are handed over to Big Business so that the few can make money at the expense of the many. BEWARE.
Then there are the security forces, who inexorably increase their power so as to enslave the public, eradicate free speech, eliminate the free dissemination of ideas, and deprive us of our privacy.
Beware.
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I support Wikileaks

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Noam Chomsky, re the suppression of information in the US regarding polls of Arab opinion: “What that reveals is the profound hatred for democracy on the part of our political leadership.” (Nov 30, 2010, on DEMOCRACY NOW, interviewed by Amy Goodman).

I wish Assange had withheld certain names. I wish he’d vetted the cables to protect operatives who work for us within lethal, poisonous organizations such as Al Qaeda.
I really wish he’d slipped a condom on before having sex with that woman in Sweden, and I wish he hadn’t taken the snores of the other woman to mean consent. Because these sex charges will detract from the crucial, even urgent work Assange is doing.
But we have a big problem in the United States, and many people aren’t noticing it because we have an African American president. They wrongly assume that the “regular people,” the grassroots who, according to the lies, I mean mythology, elected Obama, are being looked out for. Surely an African American president would remember his roots among the most regular of people, African Americans, and he would care about the individual. But that is not the case.
The problem: Big Corporations are screwing individuals. ‘Big Corporations’ includes: the insurance companies, Big Pharma, Big Agribusiness, Wall Street, the medical establishment as run by Big Pharma and the insurance companies, Biotech and chemical companies, and the United States Government, which is an example of a large, unwieldy, and thoroughly corrupt corporation.
So the US government conceals things from American citizens. Things like diplomatic spying and the results of polls in the Arab world.
How about this one: how many people in the US know that Obama showed up at the G20 summit in London in 2009 with a huge entourage? Specifically, Obama had 500 staff in tow, including the White House kitchen staff, 200 secret service agents, 6 doctors, 35 vehicles, 4 speechwriters, and 12 teleprompters. (See www.scrippsnews.com/node/42183) I guess they don’t have teleprompters in London? Or maybe the British are so penurious they wouldn’t lend a few to Obama?
This wasn’t widely reported in the US–but the Brits poked fun at Obama. It’s a little shocking to read about this kind of lavish spending, but it isn’t the only time. The Obamas have taken some vacations that are, well, Republican-worthy. Marie Antoinette is alive and well and reborn!!
Big Pharma deceives people by, for example, not telling them that CoQ10 will greatly reduce the side effects of statin drugs. Big food conglomerates lie to the American public by pretending that high fructose corn syrup and msg are non-toxic. The FDA has sold us all down the river to be poisoned, sickened, and fattened up by toxic chemical additives, pesticides, and preservatives. Let’s not even start with Genetically Modified food, which has NOT been tested. Just wait until the first Terminator plant genes start crossing the species barrier–it’s called genetic drift–and make human beings sterile.
Big Insurance gouges the American consumer. Our lousy health insurance went up 20% for 2011–WHY? Nothing else has gone up 20%–I’m not paying 20% more for milk, eggs, or clothing. So WHY HAS OBAMA PASSED A ROTTEN HEALTH INSURANCE ACT WHILE STILL ALLOWING BIG INSURANCE TO RAPE AMERICA?
 
WHY DOESN’T OBAMA ATTACK THIS PROBLEM AT ITS ROOT: THE GREED OF HEALTH INSURANCE COMPANIES?
 
Is it because Obama has taken too much money from those companies to even attempt to rein them in?
Are people aware of how Big Insurance won’t allow doctors to run tests or offer medical treatments that individuals need, because those tests or treatments are expensive? How it compensates doctors for NOT running necessary tests? All so HEALTH INSURANCE COMPANIES CAN EARN OBSCENE AMOUNTS OF MONEY?
All this goes to show, we need MORE Wikileaks–not less. The world is increasingly run by big corporations who show nothing more, and nothing less, than contempt for individual human beings. Our only hope of addressing this kind of self-serving corruption is through transparency.
Mr. Assange: I am rooting for you. I hope you get out of your legal troubles, and I hope you learn to be real careful about sex. Most of all, I am praying that you will turn your attention to the real villains, the true governors of our world: the big corporations. Let’s see some of their internal documents. Start with Oxford, AON Corporation, Aetna, Assurant, AMS, and Unicare. Move on to Monsanto, Merck, Pfizer, Bristol-Myers Squibb, Astrazenica. Then Kraft, Cargill, Pepsico, Bunge.
But I somehow think you will not get the chance to do this important muck-raking work. Because the billions of billions of dollars earned by these companies means that they are worrying that you will do exactly as I’ve asked. And you and Wikileaks are, for them, better off dead.