It is probably not a good idea to write while in the grip of anger. But I am struggling to suppress my emotions about a wasted year, during which politicians and many doctors have ignored a growing body of evidence suggesting that Vitamin D can play a critically important role in the prevention and treatment of […]
The recent executive order signed by Donald Trump to protect premature babies and babies born after “botched abortions” was the result of heated debate over the provision of medical services for especially the latter. A bill to make them compulsory was defeated earlier this year. Some of the rhetoric surrounding this controversy makes the very suggestion of allowing babies to die sound inhuman, as did Alberto Giubilini and Francesca Minerva who opined in 2011 that:
Medicine has changed. We used to be a calling that catered to the public welfare, and our prime consideration was the patient. Now we are a business, and some of us practice as impersonal corporations, with the bottom line the profits, not the well-being of the patient.”
— From The Doctor, by Dr. Edward E. Rosenbaum, 1991
One nurse told Clay, “I’ve given him the highest dosage I can. It’s enough to kill a horse. Most hospice patients die from morphine, but I can only OD him within an acceptable margin of error.”
— From Christopher Bollen, A Beautiful Crime, 2020
Some years ago, the then vice-president of Monsanto Robert T Fraley asked, “Why do people doubt science”. He posed the question partly because he had difficulty in believing that some people had valid concerns about the use of genetically modified organisms (GMOs) in agriculture.
Critics were questioning the science behind GM technology and the impacts of GMOs because they could see how science is used, corrupted and manipulated by powerful corporations to serve their own ends. And it was also because they regard these conglomerates as largely unaccountable and unregulated.
In what is being called the worst financial crisis since 1929, the US stock market has lost a third of its value in the space of a month, wiping out all of its gains of the last three years. When the Federal Reserve tried to ride to the rescue, it only succeeded in making matters worse. The government then pulled out all the stops. To our staunchly capitalist leaders, socialism is suddenly looking good.
Men’s evil manners live in brass; their virtues
We write in water.
— Henry VIII (IV.ii.)
My master that was thrall to Love
Is become thrall to Death.
— “A Ballad of Death,” by Algernon Charles Swinburne, Poems and Ballads, First Series, 1866
It is the year 2019, and American health care is in a state of profound crisis. While oligarchic parasites from the pharmaceutical industry and health insurance companies make enormous profits, bankruptcy and the fear of being denied care hang over the American people like a sword of Damocles. This diabolical order, predicated on greed and placing profit-making over human life, has stripped doctors of their autonomy and given birth to an inhuman and deeply unjust multi-tier system.
