More Measles Musings from a Swollen-headed Narcissist
Jennifer Schmid
My free eBook, Naturally Empowered: Staying Healthy with Superfoods and Stress Relief, is now available! Enter your email below to receive your free copy.
When it was first published, my blog about why I’m not afraid of measles got over 21,000 hits and 5000 Facebook likes in 3 days. Since then, it has been viewed by almost 100,000 people.
People are so hungry (ahem) for nutritional solutions to health care issues. The feedback for the blog has been overwhelmingly positive, with people reaching out from around the world to say that they aren’t afraid either, that they, too, have seen earth-based medicines, whole food nutrition, and other non-conventional options like chiropractic and osteopathy boost immunity and improve lives, whether in themselves, their children, or their clients.
Of course, I have also been called selfish, racist, elitist, classist, stupid, irresponsible, a quack, a left-wing liberal nut, a creationist Republican, a pseudoscientist, a killer, and my favorite, a swollen-headed narcissist. Someone even commented that using whole food nutritional strategies to boost the immune system was akin to “snake oil.”
There is so much fear out there. There are so many people who truly believe that pharmaceuticals such as drugs and vaccines are the only answer, and without “modern medicine”, we are are all going to die.
I have such compassion for people who live in that fear, because a) I used to live that way, and b) it’s not a joyful way to live.
Anyway, to recap: We don’t have to be afraid.
The expensive, naked truth about health care
What we do need to do is call a spade, a spade. We need to have an open and honest discussion about the true state of health care in the United States and most of the “developed” world.
Even though most health care practitioners would like the system to change, what we currently have is not health care. It’s disease management through pharmaceuticals and expensive, drastic, and invasive interventions. It’s the philosophy that pharmaceuticals (and radiation and surgery and other conventionally-accepted practices) are the only option, and if conventional medicine doesn’t have an outright cure, then there is nothing you can do, no path you can take towards wellness, except hope that you might be one of the lucky ones to survive it. Or, just as bad, you have to cope with taking mountains of medications to manage your chronic illness(es). In that world, you have no control. You are powerless.
Are you familiar with the Hans Christian Andersen fairy tale, The Emperor’s New Clothes, where the Emperor was swindled into thinking that he was wearing the finest fashions made of invisible cloth, when really, he was buck naked? And everyone else went along with it because they felt like they had to? Wow, how embarrassing that would have been for everyone involved.
Does this mean the Emperor was a bad guy, or stupid, or anything like that? No! It means that the truth is not what he thought it was, partly because everyone else was afraid to speak up for fear of being ridiculed themselves in case they were wrong.
In this same vein, conventional medicine, the foundation of our U.S. Health Care system, is not what we’re led to believe. Does it save lives at times? YES! Does it destroy lives at times? Sadly, yes it does, over 11,000 a day, according to US Senate trials this summer, at a cost of $1 trillion/year.
11,000 lives in deaths and major complications each day, and $1 trillion per year. Wow.
Even worse, it ridicules those who provide options and/or expose the lack of scientific proof behind which conventional medicine is supposed to be built. Doctors practice medicine. Medicine is not an exact science, yet it hides behind the veil of “science,” and if you disagree, raise a red flag, or offer someone an option where they actually have the tools to heal themselves without pharmaceuticals and/or invasive interventions, you are [insert insult here]. It was only in 2014 that MDs in California were finally able to educate their patients about potential cancer therapies besides radiation, chemo, and surgery without the threat of losing their license to practice. (Physicians in some other states still face this threat.) 2014. That's how great the bias is. How many patients' lives were shortened because of it?
Here’s the thing. I can’t gloss over the hopelessness of a young mom who is told by her doctors that “it’s all in her head” and that every time she goes in to address her valid, medication-induced health concerns, instead of offering simple, doable solutions, they offer a psych consult or psychiatric drugs. I can’t ignore the life-altering side effects of clients told that they have to go on medications for the rest of their lives, even if those medications come with a boatload of negative problems such as diabetes and cancer and aren’t even proven to be helpful in that situation, or worse, were proven 10+ years ago that they do not help but are still prescribed because doctors have no other options to offer. And I can't criticize a parent who has concerns about vaccine safety when they have researched the VAERS database and done their homework.
We all have options
With measles you can choose vaccination, nutritional strategies, even homeoprophylaxis, which means using homeopathy to boost immunity. You don’t have to choose just one. You can choose them all, or two of the three. What's important is that it's your choice.
We all have options. You may have to pour over the Internet to find them, you might have to fight tooth and nail for them, and you may have to sweat and work at getting and staying healthy, but the options are there. And I will be here with you every step of the way, no matter which option(s) you choose.
That's my job, and that's my joy.
Together, we will make a difference.
My free eBook, Naturally Empowered: Staying Healthy with Superfoods and Stress Relief, is now available! Enter your email below to receive your free copy.