What concerns me most about medicine today is that there seems to be ever fewer hygienists practicing.  The young holistic practitioner is overwhelmed with confusing data and approaches and is increasingly less able to discern what is really important and what is distraction, and is increasingly intimidated by the AMA, made fearful of accepting people with serious conditions.  Too many young practitioners become ideologues, clinging to the rightness of a single rigid discipline, missing the truths that exist in other approaches and worse, missing the limitations that exist in their own personal healing methods.

The current concern about the cost of medical care and resorting to government-run insurance programs and regulations will do little or nothing to reverse the trend to more and more sickness that costs more and more to treat.  The root causes of our current crisis are two fold.  One, our food, just as it comes off the farm, is getting ever worse.  This is not even recognized as a problem.  After we process it for an industrial food distribution system, much nutrition is lost too.  This is barely recognized as a problem.  Until we are better nourished, we will be ever sicker and each generation will become a degeneration.  Secondly, our society is suffering from all the evils of monopoly medicine.  This is barely recognized.  The AMA has a stranglehold on the sick.  There is no effective competition for its methods.  Alternatives are suppressed.  In my version of a better world, if anyone that wanted to could hang out a shingle and offer to diagnose, treat and cure disease, a few quacks would really hurt a few people.  But many genuine therapies would appear and the public would be exposed to workable alternatives.  If anyone that wanted to market it could put a label on a bottle of pills, power or tincture that said its contents would heal or cure disease, yes, a few people would be poisoned.  And a few would die needlessly by failing to get the right treatment.  But on the positive side, all this liberty would result in countless new therapies being rediscovered and many new uses for existing substances would appear.

Fundamentally, this is the issue of liberty.  I believe it is better to allow choice and options, to permit the dangers that go with liberty to exist.  And to allow unfortunate outcomes to occur without intervention into individual lack of intelligence and irresponsibilities.  The opposite is our current path—­an attempt to regulate and control away all dangers.  But this overcontrol results in institutionalized violence and cruelty, inefficiency that is not checked or exposed by the bright light of a better way.  As Churchill said, ’democracy is the worst form of government there is—­except for all the others.’  What he meant is that we must accept that this is an imperfect world.  The best this planet can be is when it is at its freest, when restrictions are minimized and when people are allowed to make their own choices, be responsible for their own outcomes and experience the consequences of their own stupidities.