Healing Healthcare’s War On People

by Peter Pezonus  CPW News Services

    

     America’s healthcare system is at war and people are its battlefield.  With the advance of scientific discovery and the explosion of the Industrial Revolution gears began grinding, drills began drilling, pumps began pumping, processes performed processing, extruders extruded the byproducts of investigation and discovery.   From petroleum came petrochemicals and the hope that what was quickly vanishing in nature could be replicated by synthesis in a test tube. 

     It was a progress trap.  Synthetic analgesics will not replace the Poppy’s potent opiates. Not yet, anyway, and maybe never.

     Now the world is on the brink and the wonders of science….and no one is arguing that science isn’t wonderful…..have revealed science to also be like an amoral brother or a soul-twisted sister.

     Dr. Farufa Fahrahfakahn of the Kashmir Institute for the Study of Healthcare Racketeering has put it plainly:  “Healthcare is a racket.”

DR:  Demolition and Reconstruction

     Fahrahfakahn believes health care is being held captive by an outmoded model and a disconnected core value: DR.   “ ‘DR’,” said Fahrahfakahn “is demolition and reconstruction.  The society must provide broken bodies or minds in order to provide the demand for society’s healing.  This is a revolving dialectic that the human species has been unable to escape so it has learned to love what is and to refine it.  This path has apocalyptic consequences, but the human mind may be hard wired to accept this as an inevitable consequence of life.  It's this dialectic that had the father of modern advertising, Albert Lasker, using mind science discoveries to sell cigaretts while his wife, Mary, was President of the American Cancer Society and as they contributed heavily to hospitals."

     Fahrahfakahn describes how historians tell us that young boys in Hitler’s Brown Shirts were each given a playful and healthy German Shepherd puppy upon joining the organization.  It took little time for the boys to bond with their puppy which in order to graduate from the Brown Shirts into Nazi soldiers they had to kill.

     "The author of Expendable Elite, Col. Daniel Martin, a U.S. Army Special Forces officer during the Vietnam War has explained how U.S. military medics are trained using the same method. Each medic would be issued a dog which they were required to shoot and then nurse back to health.  The goal of this exercise was to learn the art and science of healing.  As with the Brown Shirts the dog would be killed.  It would be inhumane to subject the dog to multiple woundings," said Fahrahfakhan.

War Is Hell, But also A Powerful Money Mill

     Dr. Fahrahfakahn maintains that the two headed serpent on the pole of the American Medical Association’s insignia is a powerful symbolic reminder of the Association’s core value.  “Anyone who has seen the movie about the discovery at Johns Hopkins Medical School made by Dr.  Alfred Blalock and his assistant, Vivien Thomas, titled Something The Lord Made is warmed by the collaboration between an accomplished Dr. and his self-taught assistant.  In this case their breakthrough is dependent upon demolition and reconstruction.  Dogs were sacrificed in Blalock’s lab in order to study the principles applied to human patients.  Where this might prove problematic in using human subjects, however, active warfare opens up a whole new theater for the advancement of medicine using injured warriors according to Fahrahfakahn.

   During the Korean War the DR principle was applied to the rapid deployment of emergency medicine in Mobile Army Surgical Units and the term MASH was born, thanks in part to Texas surgeon Dr. Michael DeBakey and the Deputy Commanding General of Walter Reed Army Hospital, Dr. Robert Bernstein.  This was the birthplace of medicine's "golden hour".

     “When one understands the place that the DR principle has in the maintenance of the current medical system in America, it is much easier to understand why, for example, complaints about the treatment of Iraq and Afghanistan War veterans are leveled upon their return from the war.  The war was, in essence, like Dr. Blalock’s laboratory, but instead of using dogs the battlefield provides humans for training and research,” said Dr. Fahrahfakahn. 

     "American physicians could accomplish the same thing by influencing laws allowing much higher speed limits on U.S. roads without the collateral damage to foreign nations, but that would discount other incentives like acquisition of natural resources and the profits made from weapon procurements, security and other supply systems," said Fahrahfakahn.

     “During the American Civil War a fine artillery officer saw the value of opiates produced in Turkey, Pakistan, Afghanistan and eventually the Orient.  The New England power elites had already figured that out.   The Indo-Chinese learned to ween themselves off of British and American supplied opiates by producing their own poppies in the Golden Triangle and other regions. The artillery officer,  Eli Lilly, left the military to make a fortune in pharmaceuticals.  This is, of course, the big challenge.  How do you divorce medicine from the love of money and accumulation of creature comforts or at least wed it to moderation through truly free market forces?” asked Dr. Fahrahfakahn.  “Common foot soldier medics tended to be more empathetic toward their fallen comrades and to show greater concern for the immediate application of medicinals rather than in conceiving a business plan while pulling the lanyard on a canon charge or even in a MASH unit at rush hour.  This is the problem with the DR principle of demolition and reconstruction.  Demolition is increasingly mechanized and depersonalized and reconstruction faces an ever increasing profit motive that hides behind expanding research and development costs.    The foot soldiers, in this case, the public, lives in the myth that there is a principle of ‘first do no harm’.   It is the opposite of that really.  ‘First do harm so that you can heal it and become financially independent in the  process',” said Fahrahfakahn who admits that it deeply pains him when people say "you make money off of sick people."

     “One cannot help but remember that in the U.S. the Walmart of medical delivery systems, Colombia/HCA Hospitals with its ties to George W. Bush's friend and surgeon who patched up the wound in the lung of General David Patraeus, Dr. Bill Frist from Tennessee, received the largest Medicare fraud fine in U.S. history,” said Fahrahfakahn.  "I love Miami Beach," said Fahrahfakahn, "but with the former CEO of Colombia-HCA running the state as Flordia Governor I can't really relax there."

    “Occassionally there comes along a physician who sees the futility of the military model and its marriage to the DR approach.  One could argue that the Argentinian-born physician, Che Guevara, was just such a personality.  Having read General Smedley Darlington Butler’s book War Is A Racket, Guevara, a Marxist,  knew of the marriage between modern American medicine and the battlefield.   Some would say that Dr. Guevara was eventually forced to embrace, in order to oppose it, the very system he abhorred. Indeed, Dr. Robert Bernstein’s favorite book was Shadow Warrior: The CIA Hero of A Hundred Unknown Battles, the story of the CIA hit man, Felix Rodriguez, who assassinated Che Guevara,” said Dr. Fahrahfakahn the author of Alvar, Simon, Smedley, Che & Me (2008, Cabaza de Vaca Press)..
     Fahrahfakahn makes an uneasy comparison between Guevara and Simon Bolivar who freed much of South America from the tyranny of European Imperialism in the same way that Washington freed North America from British oppression.  He argues that Bolivar and Guevara were aware of the insatiable appetite of some North Americans for Latin American resources in the same way that the U.S. Northern industrialists longed to separate their Dixie cousins from their assets using the smoke screen of abolitionism.  "If the New Englanders had wanted to free people from bondage they would not have reinslaved them with the China Trade's opium, the same tactic used in the 1980's to fund the private Iran-Contra war.  Simon and Che knew that the U.S.'s power elites wanted to control South America's natural resources and their fears were born out in the William Walker attempt to take over Honduras in the 1840's and Iran-Contra in the 1980's which was a rehashing of William Walker's earlier failed annexation attempt.  The Bechtel water wars in Bolivia is nothing more than a continuation of this battle to get at Bolivia's Lithium deposits," said Fahrahfakahn, "for car batteries, but what they really need it for is to treat their psychotic megalomania."

     Ironically, as a foot soldier-physician Guevara was probably as empathetic as a physician could be and perhaps rationalized his migration toward the same principle embraced by Bernstein and others….picking up the gun instead of the stethoscope…. out of a feeling of self-preservation.

     “Dr. Robert Bernstein would, after leaving Walter Reed Army Hospital, become a key figure in the development of the Texas Health Institute.  With deep ties to the Houston Medical Center at the heart of the most powerful city on earth, a steady stream of prominent political leaders and their families from around the world often receive state of the art medical care in Texas though there has not yet been a medicine-for-assets scandal like the U.N.-food-for-oil scandal that was Texas-based.  Other members of the Texas Health Institute were founding members of the largest medical fraternity in the world, Alpha Epsilon Delta, which originated in South Carolina and Alabama before arriving at the University of Texas with charter members Charles Estill Bloodworth, Hardy Douglas Loe, Jr., Frank Brantly Scott, Jr., Carolyn Marie Adloff and Mary Louise Voorhess in 1929,” said Dr. Fahrahfakahn.



Secretary of Defense for Nuclear Chemical
and Biological, Dr. Dale E. Klein (2nd from R)
Mrs. Becky Armendariz-Klein (2nd from L).
Lt. Gen. Ronald Blanck (L), Lt. Gen.
Robert Bernstein (R).
 

     Fahrahfakahn laments how his profession and its marriage to the Military Industrialist Complex has not gone unnoticed by the general public.  “For the last two decades the most trusted profession in the world is the Registered Nurse.   Doctors, preachers, certainly politicians and lawyers rate far below them.....so do teachers.  The RN has taken the place of Dr. Welby, the physician in many ways, because they are in the trenches with the soldiers who have been wounded by the system.  Unfortunately this system will do to them what it did to Guevara under the guise of creeping socialism.  The only thing creeping is the insanity of a system that in the words of the American comedian George Carlin describe the psychosis when he said ‘fighting for peace is like fucking for virginity.’  The DR system of destroying in order to reconstruct is equally ludicrous,” said Fahrahfakahn.  "Yes, you must break a few eggs to make an omelet, but we are slaughtering the hens in the hen house."

     Fahrahfakahn had high hopes that a change would come after March 31^st, 1995.  It was on that day that over 25,000 Registered Nurses marched on Washington to demand changes in the health care system.  Had they made that march in 1929 when Alpha Epsilon Delta was organized in Texas, back then General Douglas McArthur would have stormed their assembly on horseback. 

     Victoria and Mona Myers went to DC on the bus with other nurses.  Mona remembers that the national baseball strike was going on and that President Clinton was out of the country at the time. She recalled that an estimated 35,000 marchers turned out, and that media coverage was minimal as insurance companies had influenced news coverage of the event, downplaying it.
     As it was, no one heard a word about the march.  It was nowhere on the news cycle, but Fahrahfakahn believes that was for another reason not mentioned by either Meyers, nor by the mainline media, but was perfectly obvious to a seasoned physician whose mind moves quickly to identify systemic causes of illness.  "First of all the march occurred on a Friday. That’s the worst day for capturing attention and the baseball strike had been going on for months, hardly a factor.  Secondly, all eyes focused on the murder in Texas of the Tijuana rock star, Selena.  Selena was murdered by Yolanda Saldizar, a former ROTC member from San Antonio who was accepted to the University of Texas. Her brother was a former Marine drill instructor and most of the RN's around her worked in San Antonio at Audie Murphy Hospital.  Saldizar, also an RN, held the media hostage as she sat in a vehicle outside the hotel where Selena was killed.  So much for trustworthy RN's.  Also that day in Romania an Airbus with over 60 people on board took an inexplicable hard left turn after takeoff to plunge into the earth killing all on board.  Selena’s attorney had represented the famous Duke of Duval County George Parr who is often credited for the Ballot Box 13 election of Lyndon Baines Johnson whose war in Vietnam provided significant opportunity for the honing of surgical skills,  and he also defended a member of the Branch Davidians whose Waco compound in McClennan County was home  to the chief Iran-Contra conduit, Farhad Azima.  A charter member of the Alpha Delta Epsilon fraternity, Hardy Douglas Loe, was Douglas Tinker’s brother-in-law or uncle I think.  Tinker was  Saldizar’s attorney," said Dr. Fahrahfakahn.  “That has always troubled me,” he confessed.  "It was as if someone at the American Nurses Association wasn't looking out for them or worse," said Fahrahfakahn.

“The voice of the nurses was drowned out by a set of unusual circumstances.  If I had been an ad man from that  company that did the Willie Horton ad for George H.W. Bush, Young and Rubican, or Joseph Goebbels during the Third Reich, I could not have been more effective in silencing their voices,” said Dr. Fahrahfakahn.

“The world marvels at the phenomenal success of medicine in prolonging life, but all silver linings have their dark clouds,” he concluded.

Cabaza de Vaca, Simon Bolivar, Smedley Darlington Butler, Che Guaverra and the "Kubrick Stare", the subject
of Dr. Farufa Fahrahfakahn's book Alvar, Simon, Smedley, Che & Me (2008, Cabaza de Vaca Press).