Volume 7, Issue 2, page 7
America's 111-Ne~l~
By HAROLD D. KINNEY
UOTE: "The impression nas developed
thruout the country and the world
that American health is not only
superior but is constantly getting
better... The reports of the people
who prepare t h e national health
surveys a n d the reports for t h e
President reveal that not only is
the American health not superior
but it is poor and continually getting worse."
So many of The ABERREE family have been or
are involved in work in the field of understanding and correcting human ills that your
publication seems a likely medium for a good
look at this overall trend. Anyone practicing
any form of therapy will be better able to do
his job if he has an understanding of some of
the basic factors in our American scene that
are responsible for such a situation. This may
result in some "stands " we may take to press
for correction.
The article that has stirred me to write
the Editor of The ABERREE is taken from the December issue of THE JOURNAL OF OSTEOPATHY, and
is titled "Where Are We Going". May I quote
further
"At the present time, 10 percent of the average American's income goes for medical care.
A recent national health survey showed that 69
million Americans (41% of population) had one
or more chronic disease conditions. About 17
million (1/10th population) are permanently
partly or completely disabled as a consequence
of these diseases.
"These numbers -- people in need of continual
medical help and care -- are steadily climbing.
The amount of mental illness is also staggering. The number of people needing professional
care and hospitalization is also increasing.
As Dubos recently stated, 'One wonders whether
the pretense of superior health is not itself
rapidly becoming a mental aberration. Is it
not a delusion to proclaim the present state
of health as the best in the history of the
world at a time when increasing numbers of
persons in our society depend on drugs and
doctors for meeting the ordinary problems of
everyday life -- for just getting thru the day?'
"In 1952, according to the special report
to the President (of the U.S.A.), 1,000,000
families in this country were spending 50 percent or more of their total income for health
care. An additional 8,000,000 families were in
debt for reasons of health care.
"Perhaps nothing more clearly dramatizes
the basic inadequacy of a system of medicine
which, in the name of science, concentrates so
hard on individual diseases, their causes and
their cure, while in its contempt for what it
regards as armchair philosophy, it so tragically disregards the factors in him that determine his vulnerability to disease in general.
MAY, 1960
"The problem is not merely finding the
causes of disease but also finding and controlling the factors in human life and in the
human organism which permit them to become
causes. We must begin looking to the individual as a whole and to human life rather than
merely to the combatting of disease... Few realize the importance of utilizing natural body
resources to combat disease. The therapeutic
spotlight is still focused more on established
disease than on the developing disease process.
Diagnostic technicians are largely preoccupied
with the pathology, the debris of disease,
rather than with the functional disturbance
which is disease."
So much for the problem.
No one, perhaps, is able to view life
"whole'; Each of us sees a problem in terms of
his own specialization, education, background
of experiences. In my case -- and let me say
that I have no medical education and write as
a rank layman -- I read Rodale's "Prevention"
and tend to think his point has a great bearing on this health problem -- that our foods now
have some 800 chemicals added, and we are as a
whole people being poisoned. Quite apart from
that, I read enough in the field of metaphysics
to accept the teaching that we are primarily
not physical beings, but spiritual beings;
negative emotions such as anger, fear, jealousy, hate, vindictiveness, and the like affect
first the etheric or astral body (the body we
retain after we ditch this physical body),
which effect is then impinged on the physical
body as disease. This does not necessarily
imply that all disease is the result of such
reflexive action, of course. Bacteria and viruses act directly on the physical, naturally,
Can we agree at all, then, on the idea that
the steady increase in disease is due to a
slow poisoning of our physical bodies, which
lowers resistance to bacteria and viruses, and
to the general inability of Americans to face
life's tensions without recourse to negative
emotions? We'd better shy away from the causes
of increasing tensions in American life, as
the subject is too large, ranging from poor
education in character, routine jobs, more
leisure with less ability to use it constructively, too much money and freedom for youngsters, too much of the wrong foods, etc.
(ED. NOTE -- To say nothing of the fears of
war, fear of cancer-polio-heart disease-thisaand-thata, fear of hell and death, fear of inflation, fear of poverty
