13 replies to this topic

[voltaire]

So back to bloodletting: If "It took 2 generations for doctors to let go of bloodletting", how long will it take to stop the mindless, endless government bleeding of our children's future?


From “Wastebook 2012”

• Free bus rides for Super Bowl attendees who were able to pay $3,000 for a game ticket!– $142,419

• A covered bridge in Ohio that is not used by cars or tied to any walking or bike trail will be rehabilitated with federal funds $520,000

• Pet shampoo company fetches more than half a million dollars – (NE) $505,000

• Tax loopholes for the National Football League (NFL), National Hockey League (NHL) and Professional Golfers’ Association (PGA) – professional sports leagues that generate billions of dollars annually in profits ($91 million in taxes)

• Moroccan pottery classes (part of a $27 million grant from U.S. Agency for International Development)

• Efforts to promote caviar consumption and production ($300,000)

• Robotic squirrel named “RoboSquirrel” (part of a $325,000 grant from the National Science Foundation)

• Promotion of specialty shampoo and other beauty products for cats and dogs ($505,000)

• Corporate welfare for the world’s largest snack food producer, PepsiCo Inc. ($1.3 million)

• Government-funded study on how golfers might benefit from using their imagination, envisioning the hole is bigger than it actually is ($350,000)

• “Prom Week,” a video game that allows taxpayers to relive prom night ($516,000)

• Oklahoma’s layover boondoggle, a scarcely used airport in Oklahoma receiving nearly half-a-million in taxpayer dollars only to transfer funds elsewhere in the state ($450,000)

• The 2012 Alabama Watermelon Queen tour paid for in part by the U.S. Department of Agriculture, “to promote the consumption of Alabama’s watermelon through appearances of the Alabama Watermelon Queen at various events and locations” ($25,000)

• No laughing matter, a cartoon school with very few students receives real taxpayer money – (VT) $255,000

• Science research dollars go to "boring" musical about biodiversity and climate change – (NY) $445,444

View a complete list and summary of Wastebook 2012 projects: here

Those are fun anecdotes, but explain to me how that federal spending "bleeds our children's future." Is there a time machine where we go to the future and break open their piggy banks?

You know, WW2 was really, really expensive - have you seen any guys from the 1940s wonderng around breaking kids' piggy banks?

I'm really interested in how you think this notion of 'future stealing' actually works in the real world.

I suspect if we got rid or armies that invaded sovereign nations that much more could be spent of health care.

Its funny that nations that invade others get attacked while those who respect the sovereinty of others are not attacked.

When was New Zealand last attacked?

The French did sink one of their boats because they protested against nuclear testing in the Pacific.

[stocks]

What finally ended 2000 years of bloodletting? -- The microscope and statistical evidence.

Why did it take so long? -- Doctors were determined that no scientific discovery would alter their traditional therapies of bleeding, purging, and vomiting.

The key obstacle to medical progress was not economic self-interest nor was it some insuperable intellectual obstacle; it was the cultural identity of the medical profession, an identity transmitted through the texts of Hippocrates and Galen, and symbolized by the leech, the lancet, and the tourniquet

Chronology:

1865 Antiseptic surgery and the germ theory of disease begins with Louis Pasteur and Joseph Lister. Bloodletting's days are numbered.

1925 Bloodletting finally ends completely.

Wootton, David (2006-06-22). Bad Medicine : Doctors Doing Harm Since Hippocrates (Kindle Locations 395-398). Oxford University Press. Kindle Edition.

1865-1925 It took 2 generations for doctors to let go of bloodletting.

How come everyone knows about Galileo and the Catholic church, but no one knows about 2000 years of useless bloodletting therapy?

In 1875 an English doctor, W. Mitchell Clarke, wrote ‘we are most decidedly living in one of the periods when the lancet is carried idly in its silver case; no one bleeds; and yet from the way in which I find my friends retain their lancets, and keep them from rusting, I cannot help thinking they look forward to a time when they will employ them again’.

Similarly in 1903 Robert Reyburn, an American, was asking ‘Have we not lost something of value to our science in our entire abandonment of the practice of venesection?’

Heinrich Stern, publishing The Theory and Practice of Bloodletting in New York in 1915 declared that ‘like a phoenix, the fabulous bird, bloodletting has outlasted the centuries and has risen, rejuvenated, and with new vigor, from the ashes of fire which threatened its destruction’—he thought bloodletting a useful treatment for drunkenness and homosexuality. Others recommended it for typhoid, influenza, jaundice, arthritis, eczema, and epilepsy.

Wootton, David (2006-06-22). Bad Medicine : Doctors Doing Harm Since Hippocrates (Kindle Locations 3723-3725). Oxford University Press. Kindle Edition.

How I Discovered The Hidden Side of History

What you learned in school was a partial, cartoon version of history. You learned what made the big bosses look good, and no more.

1981: I was looking through some old books that somehow ended up at my parents’ house. Among them, I found a set of history books from the 1930s. With an innate interest in the topic, I began reading them, and was absolutely shocked by what I found.

The last book of the series covered what were then modern times, and to my horror, I found lavish praise for – of all people – Benito Mussolini.

What a man! I have lost my heart!
- Winston Churchill

The greatest genius of the modern age.
- Thomas Edison

I am much interested and deeply impressed by what he has accomplished and by his evidenced honest purpose of restoring Italy.
- Franklin Roosevelt

Obviously, these quotes are no longer mentioned in ‘respectable’ circles. And that’s my point: What is inconvenient to the current ruling establishment is dropped from the books.



http://www.freemansp...hidden-history/

[stocks]

So what did cause the long-term doubling of life expectancy in England from 32 in 1680 to 65 in 1942? There is general agreement that medicine was not responsible and that the major factor was better resistance to disease, and that the only thing that could have made this possible was better nutrition.

At the moment the best explanation for increases in life expectancy between the 1870s and the 1930s is improvement in foetal and childhood nutrition, and improved nutrition continues to be a major factor (though perhaps no longer the major factor) in rising life expectancy. What matters is not just the number of calories consumed, but also the consumption of protein and vitamins.

How much has modern medicine contributed to the increase in life expectancy? The answer seems to be about 20 per cent, much less than improved nutrition and improved sanitation.

It is easy to adopt a patronizing attitude to those patients who, from 425 BC to 1865, imagined their doctors were doing them good when they were only doing them harm. But we too are credulous. We owe much less to modern medicine than we can imagine

Wootton, David (2006-06-22). Bad Medicine : Doctors Doing Harm Since Hippocrates (Kindle Locations 4196-4200). Oxford University Press. Kindle Edition.

[stocks]

"Everybody Knows" that the bubonic plague in Europe was spread by fleas

Researchers have always known that was false because the disease spread too quickly for that to be true.
We all believed in a falsehood rather than admitting "we don't know what killed half of Europe."

Now we get to change what "everyone knows":

Growing up, children have been taught that the Black Death, which spread throughout London in the mid-1300s and killed roughly 60 percent of the population, was caused by fleas off the backs of rats traveling on boats from Asia.

However, researchers believe the disease, previously thought to be bubonic and spread through fleabites from human to human, was actually an airborne virus given its fast-spreading nature, according to the Washington Post. Such a pattern of transmission would make the black death a pneumonic plague, not a bubonic one.


http://www.latinpost...gue-instead.htm