Report warns of major health care cost in coming 20 years

[nec209]

Historically, the process was a little more indirect. The allopathic physicians got together under the umbrella of their professional assoction, the AMA, pooled their assets, and 'influenced' the government to declare that anything other than allopathic medicine was a fraud. This closed all the rival schools of medicine and drove their practitioners out of business, with the result that the number of certified physicians went down and fees went up for them.

 

You mean cut backs in the mid 90's or late 90's? In Canada ?

 

I see no conspiracy to keep western medicine over orthodox medicine.If any thing it is doctors pushing for a private sector has they make more money in the private sector .

[Marat]

I was talking about the great effort to close down all sorts of alternative forms of medicine with the Flexner Report in the U.S. in 1904 and its spinoffs in other countries. There was nearly complete medical freedom before that, and anyone could call himself a doctor with as much authority as the next person, with it being up to the patient to satisfy himself as to the education, experience, school of medical thought, and intelligence of the individual doctor he was dealing with. Thomsonianism, eclecticism, homeopathy, electric medicine, allopathic medicine, and a host of other branches of the healing arts were all open to unrestrained market forces and the free choice of the public. Medical schools varied in size from five or six students to hundreds, and offered a wide variety of approaches to treating disease. Today, of all these alternative forms of medicine, only osteopathy survives with any real legal authority to educate doctors who can legally sue for recovery of fees and prescribe medicines, and even this alternative has this status only in a few states of the U.S.

 

Similarly, the patient's medical freedom was also not yet restricted prior to the Flexner era. A patient could buy any chemical from a pharmacist, even poisons, though most poisons were dispensed only if the purchaser signed his name and address first, in case it was used in a crime. Opium was sold in grocery stores, Coca Cola actually had cocaine in it, and America had its highest number of drug addicts per capita from all the old ladies addicted to the morphine in Laudanum.

 

Doctors prefer a private healthcare system to a public one, since in a private system they 'negotiate' with patients for their fees when the patients are sick and helpless, so they can get what they want, while public systems control their fees. But what they want most of all is for government to come to their aid to block all their competitors in the health field so that the allopathic physicians can monopolize the field by government licensing restrictions, and then to leave them alone by not also protecting the public with a public healthcare service. In short, what they want is modern America.