I’m talking about medical freedom and all that that entails. I am neither endorsing Homeopathy and Vaccines nor condemning them. I am only showing that I should be free to choose my care and not forced into accepting treatment I don’t want.
That is all.
I don’t understand why these basic points are so difficult to understand?
Common Flu does indeed mostly kill the infirm. Generally these are the only people to be given vaccine. Every so often a pandemic Flu arises that is much more dangerous to healthy people. The 1918 pandemic can be first traced on US army bases among completely fit and healthy young men.
There are no diseases that ‘are not a big deal’ that you get vaccinated for. Please provide an example if you disagree.
‘If there is a vaccine against a minor illness that I am unlikely to contract’. This one drives me fucking mental. THE ONLY REASON YOU ARE UNLIKELY TO CONTRACT THE DISEASE IS BECAUSE OF MASS VACCINATION.
THE ONLY REASON YOU ARE UNLIKELY TO CONTRACT THE DISEASE IS BECAUSE OF MASS VACCINATION.
THE ONLY REASON YOU ARE UNLIKELY TO CONTRACT THE DISEASE IS BECAUSE OF MASS VACCINATION.
Understand now?
No, but they relied on the people to nominate judges that would interpret the Constitution the right way. They gave us plenty of information that would leave us with no doubt on the proper interpretation.
They also supported Nullification as a way for the states to OVERRULE the Supreme Court, so they thought of that as well.
What is your opinion of nullification? The founder did advocate it to protect the people from unconstitutional laws, after all.
Less manufacturers only means more profits. Whether or not what you say is true, don’t you see the valid concern one could have about this? Its not like government hasn’t worked on behalf of corporations concerned with profits before.
I have talked to my doctor who performs the procedure and he had nothing but negative things to say about insurance companies and medical schools who fail to teach the technique and he explained the conflict of interest in Insurance companies, Medicare, many medical schools and government programs.
The point is it is certainly not voodoo medicine. It works and there are scores of scientific studies to prove its effectiveness. Yet it too is considered “alternative” medicine and it is still claimed by “official” sources that there is no proven benefit.
As to whether or not it is a miracle treatment, just go read some testimonials. If properly adopted and administered it would eliminate the need for nearly all knee surgeries, back surgery, elbow surgery, and numerous other surgeries to correct injuries. There is obviously a lot of money at stake here.
The point is there is quite a lot of amazing stuff in the “alternative” world of medicine that you are missing out on by staying within a narrow box.
It is both unethical and bad for society in general to stand by and allow people to be exploited and killed for profit. Personally, I think that homeopaths and faith healers deserve prison for medical fraud and in many cases attempted murder, instead of being cosseted by the government the way they are. I see no moral difference between giving someone medicine that doesn’t work for profit and poisoning them for profit.
There is mandatory mental health testing in many schools now. And many kids are placed on psychotropic drugs. I don’t know if there are laws that they have to accept these drugs, but why should this go on at school, period? How many kids can you label as having ADHD who are really just being kids? I was jumping off the walls when I was young driving my mother crazy. I didn’t have ADHD nor was I given Ritalin. If I was in public school today, I may have been drugged.
This trend is scary.
If people are such bastards as you say, why do you trust people in government? Your critical thinking and lack of blind trust seems to end when you favor government intervention into the marketplace. Like government is always wise acting out of altruistic benevolence. That is bullshit.
You say what about exploitive child labor, exploitive 70 hour work weeks, unsafe work enviroments, rampant pollution, or grossly unfair wages.
First of all, I will make the point that unlike some libertarians I am not automatically opposed to very basic regulations to prevent child labor and protect the environment.
But as you say, exploitation occurs now. By the way if government rules were eliminated tomorrow, who would get away with forcing people to work 70 hour work weeks? It would never happen. There are natural incentives for companies to not mistreat their employees.
Any time anyone gets hurt, the responsible party is forced to pay. This goes for the environment and workplace conditions. But what about people who voluntarily want to work more than forty hours a week? Or those who are unemployed who would be willing to do a job for less than the minimum wage?
Many of these regulations destroy opportunities for people as well.
Also, the harm that will come in a free market will be contained. If government makes a mistake, everyone suffers for it. That is the critical distinction.
Not with homeopathy. As much as you think it is bullshit, the people who practice it believe in it 100%. They are not trying to scam anyone. This makes homeopathy not a fraud. Everyone knows what they are getting.
Yeah but its still not fraud. A lot of people believe in it. You shouldn’t deny them the right to be treated through homeopathy. That is all.
I sense an overly-miserly definition of the word “fraud”.
Considering you are a doctor, I respect your opinion. I appreciate the civil tone as well. But don’t you think that there are a lot of disease that people can possibly get in this world that some can die from? Should we vaccinate against ALL possible illness? The world is a dangerous place. Some of us would like to take our chances and not put into our bodies more foreign substances than is absolutely necessary.
I have said before I am not against vaccination as a principle. I simply don’t think all people need dozens of vaccinations in the first couple years of life.
In you experience do you think there is ANY possible negative effect of many, many vaccinations given? Isn’t there a risk to any medical procedure?
Getting sick and dying of a horrible illness is bad, but some of us don’t get many vaccinations and live a long and healthy life. Maybe we are more healthy than those who got all their shots. We haven’t been giving tons of vaccines for very long. The numbers of required immunizations have gone up drastically. Like cell phones causing cancer, we won’t know for sure until we wait and see what the effects of long term exposure are.
I prefer to err on the side of caution and get less immunizations and reduce my risk of disease smartly through lifestyle and dietary considerations. That is my choice and so far it is working out for me.
Prolotherapy is phenomenal. The results I got are staggering. Read the testimonials. They are full of people who lived for years with chronic pain, some confined to a wheel chair who were completely cured with prolotherapy. People have thrown away crutches and returned to athletics after a course of treatment.
There have been quite a few exhaustive studies on prolotherapy that should be sufficient. As to the resistance of insurance companies, that is unfounded. They pay for surgeries and long term drugs that cost many thousands more than a course of prolotherapy. Once a course of treatment is completed the patient is permanently cured.
It makes financial sense for insurance companies to cover prolotherapy as opposed to drugs and surgery.
You know that most people define libertarianism as a person who believes in personal liberty? And the founders did not mean for the General Welfare clause to be interpreted as it has been to this day.
I don’t want to spend the time to beat this issue to death with you, as its so overwhelmingly obvious. Just google: the founder fathers were libertarian and see what comes up.
Hmm. Who to believe?
That’s your argument? Google it?
I thikn you’d get more hits for ‘obama is a marxist’. Does that make it true?
Because government does not necessarily profit from people being exploited, nor does it exist for the sole purpose of making a profit. The companies and individuals doing the exploiting however do. And political figures who refuse to do anything about exploitation can be voted out of office, while the people who run corporations are effectively immune to retaliation from the public - except by that evil government you hate so much. And no, the magic free market won’t do a thing to them; the worst that happens is that the company they run is ruined and they move onto another, profiting in the process.
No, that’s just your own projection of your own attitudes onto others. You are assuming that your opposition supports government blindly the way you oppose it blindly. Some people however simply recognize that government is the best tool for some jobs, while you are ideologically incapable of admitting that, or of admitting the weaknesses of your holy free market.
Your claim is just silly. That kind of exploitation and worse is exactly what would happen, because that’s what happened before the rules were put into place. The only thing preventing such behavior and worse - including simply reducing employees to outright chained slaves - is the government.
By what, magic?
Actually, most people appear to define it as someone who says “screw you, I’ve got mine”, and who thinks the wealthy deserve all the power and the common people deserve none. Concern for or respect for personal liberty is the last thing I expect from a libertarian. Unless it’s theirs, that is.
No it does not. If it did then sooner or later someone else would try to get a piece of that pie. Take a look at erectile dysfunction drugs and how many popped onto the market after Viagra. You are contradicting the realities of markets in your zealotry.
Massive government regulation is part of what made so many companies drop them. I find your attitude funny for a libertarian.
jrodefeld, you somehow seem not to realize that the ridiculous things you wrote in the past are still available for me to read. I don’t need to “foolishly insist” that you were advocating for a system of voluntary exchange using gold or silver. All I have to do is quote your own words. Here’s a trip down memory lane:
Emphasis added. You were advocating for a legal system allowing gold and silver to be traded for goods and services. A system like e-gold or GoldMoney or one of the others. How do I know this?
Because I have you on record advocating for a legal system allowing gold and silver to be traded for goods and services. In other words, you were advocating for something that is already legal.
Those are your words. That’s what you said. You, the expert, were bitching about not being allowed to do something that you are, in fact, allowed to do. Is that the only thing you were advocating for? No, it’s not. But I don’t need to document every error from a three post OP to show the gaps in your knowledge. I just need to choose a few particularly egregious fuck-ups, point them out, and then watch as you dig yourself deeper into nonsense instead of admitting how much you fucked-up. Here’s another error, more recent, this jewel of a post from our present thread:
Assuming that you’re not suffering some tragic mental disease, you should remember writing these words.
I certainly remember reading those words. I was laughing at the time.
Your argument, to remind you in the likely case that you’ve already conveniently forgotten it again, is that these competing currencies are “very small scale and infrequent because otherwise the participants get arrested”. Er, no. That’s still embarrassingly wrong. GoldMoney has more than a hundred million dollars worth of bullion in its vaults. That’s hardly small-scale. It’s not alternative currencies themselves that are illegal. I mean, money laundering? Sure, that’s illegal. But not alternative currencies.
Did you mention Ron Paul with respect to competing currencies? Sure. Is that related to Hayek’s proposal of bank deregulation? Again, yes. But the thing is: You didn’t know that. It’s crystal clear that you didn’t understand the distinctions that Hayek was making, because you fucked up your explanation and started writing ALL CAPS about how ALL alternative currencies are illegal. Do you remember writing this? “The government DOES NOT allow competing currencies PERIOD.” Do you remember writing this? “But yeah, the point is competing currencies ARE illegal. These small town experiments are very small scale and infrequent because otherwise the participants get arrested.” These are your words. You are on the record not knowing the difference between Hayek’s proposal of competing currencies and the currencies that are currently allowed. You are on the record claiming that the only reason that alternative currencies are allowed is that they’re so small that they haven’t got caught yet. If you truly understood Hayek’s proposal, you wouldn’t have made these stupid, silly mistakes. If you truly understood what you were talking about, you wouldn’t have chosen examples of legal transactions when you wanted examples of illegal transactions. You got it reversed, and now you can’t admit it.
Your words are recorded. The whole world and sunny Jesus can still read them.
And then, my absolute favorite part, is your response when your errors are pointed out. It’s not that you just ignore your fuck-up. That wouldn’t be art. Instead, you try to remind the audience, again, of what a super-duper-special expert you are. You’re just killing me with that. If you patted yourself on the back any harder, you’d dislocate a shoulder. I can’t get enough of it. Even if I were allowed to edit your post with malicious filler, I genuinely doubt I could make your arguments any worse than they already are.
It’s a real hoot.
I don’t care about homeopathy and I don’t want to defend it. As far as the larger scope of alternative medicine, I think you are not being quite fair in your blanket criticism. Acupuncture has proven success with a lot of people, improving circulation and relaxing tight muscles and improving range of motion. Chiropractic helps many people maintain proper alignment and health throughout life. And various detox programs and “cleanses” have proven results in cleaning out toxins and improving well being.
My mom is a massage practitioner and Ayurvedic (traditional Indian health care system) doctor and I have witnessed the success of the herbs and food that she has given me on my health and the health of my whole family.
If a person is sick and seeking treatment, they generally don’t give a shit about double blind studies. They care if they feel better from the treatment. There are many things that science cannot YET explain. Certain things have certain effects that we don’t fully understand yet.
The discussion of the science and various studies may be of interest to you and me but it is less important if you, like me, witness the active practice of a competent doctor who sees dozens of clients who improve in their health from the application of natural remedies and complementary modalities.
There is probably a scientific study to determine the exact reason for the improvement seek in the patients but I couldn’t tell you what it would be. And I know that the clients my mom sees in her practice don’t ask for a double blind study after their health is made tremendously better through nutritional counseling, herbal remedies and massage techniques.
The TRUTH is that Ayurvedic medicine and massage can transform a persons health. That is the fact. The science is tasked with proving what I already know.
Sometimes the subjective experience is more valuable than some arbitrary test that satisfies the statistics nerds, but does nothing to help the patients. And sometimes science is not up to the task of explaining all phenomena.
We all hope some day our scientific knowledge will be so vast as to answer all problems satisfactorily.
Yes, but Austrian economists have made many correct predictions and are some of the only people who yet have credibility in this whole crisis. They are also the only ones to my mind who are sufficiently concerned about the deficit and inflation.
I do not agree with Keynes. I consider him a phony and his theories discredited.
Yes, but when it is explained that the CAUSE of the crisis was the creation of a boom and that preventing the correction and propping up unsound businesses and buying toxic debt will only make the correction worse, people are more willing to accept the reality.
And yeah, Krugman is a moron of the highest order. He has a history of being wrong on matters of economics. No thinking person should pay him any mind.
The reason I consider Austrian economics to have the credibility is that both the Keynesians and the Monetarists have contributed greatly to the problems we face.
Meanwhile none can blame Austrian theory for our predicament, therefore hopefully the pendulum will swing back the way of the Austrians. They have sat back quietly, predicting the harm that will come (and has), being proven prescient.
The case must be made and the option presented to the American people that there is a compelling alternative to the madness of current policies.
You can say that again. That is why Obama’s economic policies are failing and the “stimulus” is not effecting things in a substantial way. We need to let this phony bubble that we have been living on since the eighties burst, and build up a true economy based on a solid foundation of savings and production. We need to focus on the fundamentals. The sooner we reject Keynesian solutions, the better.
You are very accurate in your understanding of the causes of the crises. I agree with most of what you said. Artificially low interest rates and Malivestment are the key. When you add ill conceived government programs like Fannae Mae and Freddy Mac you have a recipe for disaster.
Bravo. Very well said. I agree with most of what you said here. LISTEN UP everyone. I hope more on this forum read and heed the economic advice of Sam Stone, he knows a thing or two about economics, which is more than can be said of most of you.
What is your view on the Federal Reserve? Do you support a full audit? How about ending the Federal Reserve?
What are your views on the Gold Standard and the principles of Sound Money?
Do you support cutting spending significantly? Just how small should our government be in your estimation?
I appreciate the thought that went into this post (not just because you agree with me). I hope more follow your example and speak articulately and deal with the issues.