This weekend, we celebrate our nation’s declaration of independence from England—which asserted our God-given rights to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. This year, the holiday should hold particular meaning, as the coronavirus health crisis caused the most significant restrictions to our rights we’ve ever witnessed outside of war time.
Indeed, over the past several months, we’ve all experienced restrictions to our freedom to assemble. And I personally faced restrictions to my freedom of speech, regarding what I could and could not write about the coronavirus! (I was already used to not being able to tell the truth about the direct medical benefits of natural remedies—despite decades of evidence from standard, peer-reviewed, published research. Yet the Food and Drug Administration [FDA] has made telling the truth illegal for decades. So, we dance around like their little marionettes. And now, the same holds true when it comes to the coronavirus.)
Not to mention the ongoing, outlandish, unscientific, and unconstitutional overreaches by local jurisdictions. In fact, some individual “nanny” states imposed far more stringent limitations on our daily life and work than did the federal government, which mainly issued guidelines.
Fortunately, President Trump did entirely and appropriately close American borders early on during the outbreak. But this unusual, temporary step was taken to protect Americans from further contagion and infection coming out of Europe and China. Plus, the Public Health Services Act of 1944 clearly granted U.S. Presidents this power long ago.
Limitations were also placed on the kind of healthcare we could receive during the shutdown—which may cause a spike in cancer death rates. The shutdown also denied access to safe, effective, and affordable non-drug approaches for tens of millions of people in chronic pain—in the midst of a real and deadly opioid epidemic.
But the freedom to choose healthcare that suits you as an individual has also been under serious attack for years…
Coerced into overtreatment by insurance companies
Two years ago, I first warned you about how insurance companies use strict HbA1C targets—the long-term measure of blood sugar control—as a “performance standard” in patients with Type II diabetes. And they won’t reimburse doctors unless their patients achieve those very strict blood sugar targets.
This practice forces doctors to blindly follow the numbers, regardless of whether or not they truly make sense for an individual patient. And, as I explained last month, aggressively lowering HbA1C with prescription drugs very often does NOT make sense for the patient. In fact, in older adults with Type II diabetes, overly aggressive drug treatment can cause hypoglycemia (low blood sugar), fainting, falls, and fractures—which can all lead to death.
Americans used to take their liberties seriously
In my view, today’s federal, state, and local governments limit us much, much more than anything King George III had ever done or imagined by 1775. And, worse yet, many Americans today seem all too willing to give away their liberties to those pandering and stumping about an imaginary, socialist, utopian agenda!
For example, as we saw with the coronavirus crisis, publicly elected politicians often ceded control of the crisis to the unelected elites of the academic-industrial-medical complex, whom I long labeled “Medical Mandarins.” These unelected, unaccountable elites wanted to keep us all—and the American economy—in lockdown indefinitely, with all kinds of shifty, shifting preconditions that constantly change to suit their faulty science as a means of more money, power, and control for them.
By comparison, when our country was founded, unelected elites didn’t hold as much sway. And they weren’t even present on the ever-expanding American frontier!
Instead, the frontier drew ordinary, working-class Americans—who strongly believed in protecting and preserving individual liberties and taking individual responsibility. Especially when it came to healthcare.
Those early American men and women typically used effective, safe herbal remedies and other natural approaches because the mainstream medicine of the era was so ineffective and toxic. Fortunately for them, in most cases, mainstream medicine simply wasn’t available on the frontier! (And in my opinion, not too much has changed.)
In particular, they learned about folk remedies—such as white willow bark—from indigenous Native Americans. And they picked up other useful folk remedies from European and Chinese immigrants, who were also drawn to freedom, the open land, and work opportunities.
Energy healers from Europe (originally called “mesmeric” or “magnetic” healers) also came to the American frontier. And eventually, this practice evolved into safe, effective, and “drug-free” manual therapy approaches out of the American Midwest by the late 1800s.
During the Civil War (1861-65), the Confederate army even issued medical kits that included traditional herbal remedies because the northern blockade had made it impossible to obtain manufactured drugs—especially after the Battle of Gettysburg and the Siege of Vicksburg, both of which were settled on this July 4th weekend, 157 years ago, in 1863.
Sadly, that focus on natural healing in the U.S. all but disappeared following World War II. At that point, big government, big pharma, insurance companies, industrial medicine, biotech companies, and the self-appointed “Medical Mandarins” began to place a total stranglehold on American medicine…pushing out natural approaches almost completely in favor of costly and dangerous drugs and expensive and invasive “high-tech” medicine.
As a result, American health has taken a nosedive. In fact, it’s gotten so bad, that for the first time in history, America’s middle class is literally dying in droves.
Not to mention, this paradigm shift toward “modern, high-tech medicine” certainly didn’t help the U.S. respond more swiftly or effectively to the coronavirus outbreak. And we never even heard public health experts talk about the science on the use of natural approaches—such as taking vitamin D—to support immune health. A little more common sense and natural healing would have gone a long way.
On the bright side, new information technologies have given us the power to learn and share the truth about alternatives to accepted doctrines. So, not all liberty is lost…yet.
In my view, it’s not too late to recover the freedoms we have lost when it comes to our health and wellness. In fact, I urge you to keep learning about the alternatives to accepted medical myths and doctrines by becoming a subscriber to my Insiders’ Cures monthly newsletter, if you aren’t one already. And this Independence Day, take some time to think about what liberty means to you.