Medical Malfeasance

Apologies for not blogging the past few days. I have been fighting the dry hacking flu bug that has been going around. I'm really bad with the coughing. I take some medication – the cough goes down for a few days. Then it comes back with a vengeance.

So a friend of mine gave me an herbal remedy. I asked what was in it and, much to my surprise, most of it I could grow in my backyard. The rest I could grow in a small greenhouse in my house, if I had the space. I'm not going to say what was in it because, undoubtedly, some corporate hack is going to say that it doesn't work and will work to get it “banned” or something.

Yes, corporations work to get herbs that you can grow in your back yard banned from medical use because they can not make a profit off of something that they can not sell. The one herb grows wild around my house on occasion. The others are a bit more tricky to find, but I can find most of them. One is a tropical (or more tropical) plant and I would need a greenhouse to grow it. (If the climate keeps changing the way it is, I won't need the greenhouse in a few years.)

Well, as you can guess, the concoction worked. Very well. On occasion I get a bad hack and I take a dose of the concoction. That and a nice hot soaking bath. With Epsom salts. And sleep. Plenty of liquids – there are some nice herbal remedy teas that I have found in the local grocery store that my friend tells me work “as advertised.”

So I asked what other conditions could be “cured” or better treated with herbal remedies that cost next to nothing to make. (Every capitalist's nightmare.) She has books that have many remedies from traditional sources (First Nations traditions), to “old wives tales,” to who knows where these things came from. I have a few wilderness survival books on my shelf and began looking at some of the survival foods listed. Then I did a bit of questioning and research and discovered some of these survival foods have medical properties as well.

Which brings me to the hedge fund manager turned criminal, Martin Shkreli, who took a low cost medication and turned it into a $750 a pill nightmare. For a drug that had its patent expired. This isn't some cutting edge medication that was just developed. It was old, in the “public domain” and available for anyone to produce. He sought to make a killing off of it. IMO – If anyone died because they couldn't afford the medication because of what he did, he should be brought up on murder charges.

Two simple points.

1. This is why we need a single-payer insurance system. Medicaid for all, It is also why all medical production and research needs to be publicly owned and run in the interests of the public. Screw Wall Street. As a Christian friend of mine said - “Medical care is a right to life issue.” I think they nail it right on the head.

2. How many medical conditions could be treated (if not cured) with low cost herbal treatments? Herbs that you and I can grow in out houses or back yards? I am told there is a strain of malaria that is immune to current treatments. It still falls to the tribal cure derived directly from the Qaw-Qaw tree. So, what is medical science messing up?

Where science can help us treat a condition, I am all in favor of using it.

However, we sometimes need to look to our traditions for treatments.

Ones that won't kill us or our pocketbooks.