How to deal with the new medical care system

There comes a point when every traditionalist moves from searching for remnants of a moral and constitutional order to conserve and begins instead to long for the collapse of the current system.

~Farewell, America

Since I was a teenager, I’ve been saying that I hoped that the first President who was not a male WASP would be a good one, as a bad one would likely cause a resurgence of racism. Now we are being given the opportunity to find out if the predictions of the sixteen-year-old Cassandra Goldman were correct, as we have a mulatto president who is both inept and corrupt. Will the ideal of racial equality survive?

I doubt it, because I don’t think much is going to survive. I suppose I can hope that we’ll produce as much good music as the Weimar Republic over the next few years, since we’ll probably have the rest of their predicament. The system was already tottering, and Hussein Obama didn’t have the discernment to see that giving it a good firm push was not a good idea. As I’ve said before, a wise parasite does not kill its host. Liberals are not wise parasites.

However, this gives me an excuse to post about a subject I’ve been wanting to discuss for a while: health. Our medical system is now inevitably doomed to a steady decline. Soon, mothers of my faith will stop urging their sons to go to medical school.

To escape the fate of waiting in line while our bodies suffer irreversible damage or appearing before a death panel to learn if we have been deemed worthy of being allowed to live, we are going to have to take responsibility for our own health. It shouldn’t be too difficult; we’ve already been made responsible for everyone else’s.

Since I had a health crisis some years back, I’ve been studying the subject for myself. It had become too clear that I couldn’t rely on my doctor to look after it all for me, or tell me everything I needed to know. Furthermore, as on so many subjects, the beliefs on health that have been impressed upon us all of our lives could not be more wrong. Bear in mind that this is only what I have learned for myself by reading piles of books. I am not a medical professional of any sort, just someone who wanted to learn. You will have to do your own research and use your own brain.

To begin with, we are going to have to break free of all the lies we have been told about nutrition in recent decades. We all know that most of the health problems that plague us could be corrected with better habits in eating and exercise. I’m just going to list a few of the myths, then a few books that back me up.

LIES:
* Whole grains are good for you.
* Carbohydrates are good for you.
* All that matters is how many calories a food has.
* Cholesterol is basically Satan incarnate, which is why you should never eat eggs.
* Red meat is unhealthy and you should seldom eat it.
* Chicken is healthier than steak, but be sure to throw away the skin!
* Dietary fat causes people to be fat. Thank goodness that nowadays, we have figured out ways of making low-fat milk, low-fat cheese, low-fat cream, lean pork, and low-fat margarine without any of that yucky milk in it. How on earth did our ancestors survive without these things?
* Running long distances is good for you.
* Foods like meat, dairy products, olive oil and so on are full of things that are bad for you. You’re better off drinking a can of chemicals known as a “diet shake”.
* Caffeine is harmless. Even for small children.
* Most Americans get too much protein. After all, Dr. Atkins died of a heart attack.

Now for the books I recommend. For a detailed survey of the “science” behind the lies above, read Good Calories, Bad Calories: Fats, Carbs, and the Controversial Science of Diet and Health by Gary Taubes. By the time you are finished, you will be amazed that anyone ever had the gall to claim there was evidence for the nonsense above, and will already be on board for In Defense of Food: An Eater’s Manifesto by Michael Pollan. And you’ll be ripe to be infuriated by Greg Critser’s Fat Land: How Americans Became the Fattest People in the World, which explains how our government helped to inflict high-fructose corn syrup on us.

EDIT: I had never actually read Fat Land, only the reviews on Amazon. Now the author, in a comment to this post, has revealed that he wishes for people he dislikes, a category which includes this blogger and presumably her readers, to be raped and murdered. What we have done to deserve such a fate he does not mention. The same information can be found in more compact form without giving money to someone who wants us dead here. /EDIT

For advice about what you should eat, read any book with the words “French paradox” in the title or subtitle. The so-called “French paradox” is that French people do none of this, they drink wine and eat fatty foods and drink coffee and smoke and their rates of obesity and cancer are far lower than ours. The various books all say pretty much the same thing: eat food, not chemicals. Nature knows what she’s doing.

The single nutrition book I would recommend above all others is The Diet Cure by Julia Ross. Or maybe her other book, The Mood Cure. The two have substantially the same message, but if you have a mood disorder such as depression, buy the latter. Ross prescribes a slew of vitamins and supplements according to your body’s needs.

If you have a large amount of weight to lose, read a few books on low-carb diets. They are the only ones which work. Pick one which suits you – Atkins, Paleothin, South Beach, etc. Thanks to the prevalent misinformation I’ve listed above, this can be a tough row to hoe, but if you’re reading my blog, you’re probably enough of a contrarian to eat low-carb.

It’s interesting that on the very day I needed to discuss this, I came across a blog post about low-carb diets treating cancer. There is reason for skepticism about blaming cigarettes for cancer. A few decades ago, a lot more people smoked. I remember my mother smoking in a grocery store. People lit up in movie theaters. In old movies you can see people smoking in the corridors of hospitals – check out Wings of Eagles. There is a delightful scene in The Amazing Dr. Clitterhouse (Edward G. Robinson, 1938) in which a patient lying on a table, waiting to be operated on demands a cigarette while he waits for the surgeon to scrub up. I have read speculation that since that time, cigarette companies have begun adding a great many synthetic chemicals to their tobacco and that this is the real danger, but I haven’t been able to find solid verification of this. However, I think that, whatever the effect of the chemicals, it is probably true that more of them are used than was the case a few decades ago, because people old enough to remember that era have said that the strong, unpleasant smell now associated with smoking venues never seemed to arise.

Source.

According to this chart, lung cancer rates peaked just at the time when the anti-smoking hysteria was really taking off, and today is higher than it was when almost all adults smoked and could do so everywhere. Seems you’d be better off giving up sugar than tobacco.

I am not a “natural medicine” fanatic, but with what the government is preparing to do to allopathic medicine, it is only sensible to study natural remedies. If the government decides that a subversive reactionary like you should, as Garrisson Keillor recommended, be denied any medical care beyond aspirin and hand sanitizer, you need to know what vitamins and herbs can help your conditions. If you have a yard, it wouldn’t be a bad idea to grow the herbs yourself. But don’t be surprised if eventually that gets outlawed.

It seems unlikely that alternative practitioners will be under the same stranglehold as allopathic doctors. My own conviction is that we need both, but if allopathic medicine is put beyond your reach by the government, find a good acupuncturist. (If possible, I recommend finding one who is actually from China.) Also, find a chiropractor whose practice has the words “atlas orthogonal” in its name.

Allegedly, scientists have “proven” that acupuncture is a placebo. I don’t think so, for the simple reason that I have used it and it worked. Similarly, I keep hearing that chiropractors can’t help with anything other than lower back pain. I can only conclude that whatever study determined this had flawed methodology, because after months of mostly useless efforts on the part of my gastroenterologist, it was my chiropractor who finally persuaded my severe gastritis to quiet down. The last time I had a flareup, I felt as if my stomach were on fire. I took a bunch of pills, including prescription medications, and they did nothing. Then I got in the car and went to my chiropractor, and twenty minutes after he started messing with my bones, my stomach was normal and painless again. It’s a tough sell to convince someone that the sky is green when they’ve actually seen it.

I still have some unhealthy habits, even though I know better. It’s a scanty silver lining, but the fact is that responsible people are going to improve their eating and exercise habits now that American medicine is going to be destroyed.

I feel somewhat presumptuous, offering this data when I know how far I am from being an expert. Consider this merely a starting point, to save you too many years struggling to abide by the myths listed above before stumbling across the facts on your own.