Special to L. Neil Smith’s The Libertarian Enterprise

“Never regard study as a duty but as an enviable opportunity to learn to know the liberating influence of beauty in the realm of the spirit for your own personal joy and to the profit of the community to which your later works belong.”
— Albert Einstein

For the last few months, Mimi Johnson and Jim Davidson have been working closely with the team at KanehCN3.com which is developing Mimi’s inspirations and inventions into useful healing products. Our work makes clear certain facts about the healing arts and the people seeking to dominate them for exclusive profit. The current system is failing to heal because healed people are not revenue resources for those seeking to profit from their suffering. Other paths must now be explored.

Mimi’s Experience

“After a bout with debilitating inflammatory symptoms stemming from my autoimmune disease, I took a hard look into the medical treatments I was prescribed. At the low point I was taking up to seventeen (17) different drugs a day for symptoms management. Looking closely, I realized that all the drugs I’d been prescribed for my inflammatory illness were actually promoting inflammation! They were exacerbating disease as well as causing a host of unwanted side effects. The current pharmaceutical offerings leave a large gap in inflammation treatment. We believe Kaneh has the answer with Kaneh Cannabis Omegas which we call Kaneh CN3.

“After the birth of my son, now age ten, I was in pain and prescribed hydrocodone as a first line of treatment. I was not informed about it being Vicodin and it was labelled differently than the drug we are warned about. I was coached into a drug habit under the guise and pretence of treatment. My pain was a symptom of an inflammatory disease and as the total number of prescriptions increased to seventeen separate daily medications, an opiate was always a regular drug in the mix.

“My family experienced a great deal of difficulty from this situation as I became addicted. They knew there was an issue, that my choices were not making good sense, yet I had the medical system, every doctor and specialist that I saw prescribing the same medicines that were in effect destroying my life. There is an enormous barrier to change for an addict who is following medical advice. The very people we have been taught should be respected and trusted, the supposed medical professionals, were in effect pushers. Getting through to me, persuading me that I had a problem, was made very difficult by this aspect of the situation.

“My husband and I are still dealing with the fallout from this situation. It feels very unfair. My family was victimised by my addiction. I was also a victim of my addiction. And although I would never have taken the first pill had it been identified to me as Vicodin, after months of daily use I was addicted. My tolerance increased and my dosage was increased. When I was pregnant with our second child after six years, my dosage was 60 milligrams per day of Percocet.

“Owing to the difficulties with the birth of my first child and my inflammatory illness thereafter, I was told if I came off those drugs, my doctor would drop me because there are no studies on what to expect. I was forced to go on methadone in order to keep my medical care. To be clear, methadone is a legal form of heroin ‘with Tang and Metamucil’ added, according to Stephen Goldner, its inventor. Stephen also invented some important extraction technologies which come into the picture later.

“The cocktail of drugs I was prescribed increased in complexity to combat side effects. The opiates made it hard to sleep so I was prescribed Ambien. Alertness was scarce so I was prescribed Adderall to wake me up.

“As I examined the details of each medicine, I noticed the pattern that they were contributing to inflammation. So my inflammatory disease at the heart of the situation was not being ameliorated, it was being exacerbated. The medicines and the addiction were ruining my life.

“Even though I never got medicines from anywhere but my doctors, even though I never exhibited any of the supposed red flag behaviours, even though I felt justified by the prescriptions from the doctor and specialists, I was addicted. I followed their rules to a T and felt, like an alcoholic might say ‘as long as it is after 5 pm,’ I was not doing anything wrong. Since then, I’ve come to terms with my addiction and am clean and sober.”

Iatrogenesis

There is a source of adverse consequences of healthcare and that source is the healthcare professionals themselves. The term “iatrogenesis” means “born of healer” or “from the healer.” And the problem in our world is huge.

There are conflicting loyalties. Your doctor should work for you, for your healing. But doctors are visited by representatives of pharmaceutical companies and doctors are encouraged to prescribe medicines. It is fair to say that doctors are busy and have a lot on their minds, so the free samples and the brochures about new medicines are taken with some enthusiasm by some doctors and with less enthusiasm from others.

The practice of compensating doctors for prescribing medicines is not legal everywhere, but it very clearly does happen in some places on Earth. Doing so creates an inherent conflict of interest. Any compensation, any gift, any discount, any benefit from a pharmaceutical company to a doctor or hospital or healthcare service provider at any level necessarily interferes with the healer-patient relationship and creates a conflict of interests. Doing no harm is the highest oath of the healer, and serving the patient must come foremost and without regard to any other consideration. But not everyone acts in accord with the guidance of Hippocrates.

As a result, the epidemiology is quite start. Between 230,000 and 280,000 people die in the United States from iatrogenic illness. Hundreds of thousands experience iatrogenic poverty as they are told to take more and more prescriptions. Healing has been thrown away by greedy people. At least half the deaths are due to non-error prescriptions with deadly side effects.

Nor is the centralisation of hospitals a positive. Despite extreme efforts at hygiene, for which healers and hospitals should be congratulated, there are still illnesses that come from prolonged stays at hospitals. Putting a bunch of sick people together in one place does not necessarily serve their best interests.

All these effects are well documented and widely understood. What is somewhat less well known has been mentioned in many studies in the last two decades by people interested in agorism and voluntaryism. In the late 19th Century, mutual aid societies hired doctors and paid for medical clinics, often in remote communities where their mining, logging, farming, or other activities took them. People were enjoying the benefits of reduced cost medical care through voluntary cooperation.

The American Medical Society and the state medical organisations hated this fact. The doctors were very arrogant and supercilious. They did not want working class men and women to sit in judgement of their effectiveness, and they ranted and railed against such oversight. In every single state in the United States, mutual aid societies were forbidden, by the late 1920s, from hiring doctors. The only major exception was that universities could have a clinic available to students with doctors and services paid for from student fees. The “crisis” of too many doctors and too low a cost for healthcare was fought by the organised medical profession, and the crisis we have today of scarcity and high cost is the inevitable result.

Solutions

The solution, as always, is to decentralise. Take away from the untrustworthy any authority over your life. Stop delegating your healthcare to other people. Learn to heal yourself, learn to work with healers who have specific knowledge and skills, learn how to use diet, exercises, meditation, and healing arts to choose for yourself what supplements and what medicines you need. Stop believing that arrogant men and women with expensive degrees are actually interested in your well-being.

Technologies are on hand, now, to support you. An enormous amount of work has gone into making diagnostic tools available as attachments for your cell phone. Computing power is increasing, software is becoming more available, and even your DNA can be evaluated by tools and techniques that are being developed for widespread use.

Of course, the very same cartel of giant pharmaceutical companies and the very same cartels of licensed medical professionals who got us into this mess are going to oppose any and all solutions. They will go to those who claim to rule you and demand that the government prevent you from having any power over your health. They will continue to seek regulatory and legal obstruction to nutrition supplements. They will seek to gain control over medical marijuana and other solutions.

You can watch the analogous situation play out in the tobacco and vape controversy of recent weeks. Hundreds of thousands are killed by cigarettes every year, and less than a dozen might have been killed by vape use. But, because vape is a threat to the cartel and the tax revenues, vape pens are being banned. People have been using nicotine vape to quit smoking, but those in power do not care. Your health, your life, is of on interest to politicians, bureaucrats, pharmaceutical executives, defence contractors, finance companies, big banks, and those who profit from your suffering. They are bought and paid for by profit-seeking maniacs.

Yes, you do have choices. No, nobody in power is going to make it easy for you to exercise those choices. But, really, did you even expect them to do so?

Developing and deploying 3D printing technologies for building buildings and for building tools for all kinds of uses has dramatically reduced the ability of regulators to have any meaningful control over what people do in the privacy of their homes and garages and basements and offices and factories. The same is true of financial instruments such as Bitcoin and Litecoin. The same is true of information resources available not only through the mainstream Internet, but also through private channels and encrypted resources. The people who know how to make things are making those things available to everyone because the simple fact is: the knowledge we’ve been given is meant to be beneficial.

Love

We aren’t here to hurt one another, torment one another, make each other suffer, or profit from suffering, death, and destruction. We are here to love one another.

When you put it in those terms, you should be able to see that you’ve been suffering from an addiction that entire cultures here on Earth are exhibiting, the addiction to power, the addiction of being subjugated and told what to do. Some people do want to be led, to be guided, and to be ordered about, because it eases the difficulty of thinking and choosing.

If one is “only following orders” then one may feel exonerated from the consequences of those choices. But, as those sentenced to death at Nuremberg were told, following immoral orders is immoral. You cannot evade your responsibility for your choices. And you cannot make your life as good as you possibly can if your neighbours down the street and around the county and throughout the country you live in have chosen to accept a coercive authority that prevents you from choosing for yourself.

Not one person on Earth is better at judging for you than you are. Not one person on Earth is more aware of all the details of y our situation than you. No one is better at choosing for you, so no one else should have authority over you.

We can do better. We can make technologies, information, and alternatives available. We can decentralise healing just as we have been decentralising software, networks, finance, currencies, technologies, manufacturing, and construction. So we are doing those things. We who want to be free are freeing ourselves. It has always been the only way out of our cages.

 

Mimi Johnson is an inventor, entrepreneur, and ceo of Kaneh LLC.

Jim Davidson is an author, entrepreneur, and cfo of Kaneh LLC.