This piece first appeared at LewRockwell.com.
If you recognize the subscription model behind magazines or newspapers or the book a month club or membership based golf courses or membership clubs or wine clubs or Amazon Prime or a monthly cable bill or the Dollar Shave Club or Substack, then you recognize the model behind well child visits.
It gives the seller of goods and services a reliable stream of income, often upon which other goods and services can be developed and sold.
Anyone who has had a child in the last twenty years knows this is not a necessary schedule. The following is from Kaiser-Permanente, an organization that was once an innovative healthcare provider taking on the American Medical Association, but which has become as establishment as can be:
That’s from the Kaiser-Permanente website but is hardly as aggressive as what some Kaiser doctors will recommend, if they think they can get away with it. It is the model posted online for public consumption and is modeled after the American Academy of Pediatrics public-facing guidance below.
This schedule of well child visits parallels closely with the childhood immunization guidance. (it’s a waaaaay too complicated list to screenshot and have it make sense here in this format, so I leave you that link)
Yes, anyone who has had a child in the last twenty years knows this is not a necessary schedule.
But you know what, your time is worth zero to them. And the extra visits likely cost you nothing or next to nothing monetarily, since your insurance handles it. That is enough for most people to call it “free.”
So you spend 2 or 3 hours from the time you leave your home to the time you get back, as you go through this charade, convinced it will keep your child well. You show everyone involved that you either do not realize what is going on, or you do not seem to place much value on your time and your child’s time.
Realizing how amenable you are to their nonsense, they, of course, continue to push products and services on you at the pediatrician’s office until you resist. And then they push harder, because they know you are a pushover.
This is really what pediatricians do. It is what many doctors do. The annual checkup is a similar subscription model, and an opportunity to get the customer face-to-face with the white-coated salesman, who will take the customer’s emotions down into the dumps, if the customer will let him, then will propose a miracle solution for all his woes, woes the customer may have known nothing about until ten minutes prior.
If this describes you . . .
Then you are a mark.
You are the exact kind of sucker that the medical system has learned to take advantage of and exploit. And if medical interventions had no side effects, that might be a fine hobby by which you pass the time, but that’s not the case.
Johns Hopkins ran a study in 2016 that claimed medical interventions are the third leading cause of death in the US, behind heart disease and cancer. Study authors generously call it “medical error.”
At the same time, other researchers point to a more pernicious cause of death — prescription drugs. They cite a number as big as 783,936 deaths per year, making pharmaceuticals the leading cause of death, bigger than cancer or heart disease, and certainly a far bigger ongoing concern than even the most massaged Covid-19 figures would indicate. But Covid-19 fits the narrative. Three-quarters of a million Americans dying every year from legal, safe, healthy, life-extending drugs that their loving doctors prescribed them for the benefit of their patients — That simply does not fit the narrative.
Doctors kill.
But just because you don’t die from a doctor’s scalpel or from a doctor’s pills doesn’t mean they didn’t harm you. Those effects affect far more. And this also impacts children.
Dr. Joseph Mercola pointed out this week in the article “Could Childhood Shots Affect Infant Mortality?” that 200 more babies a month lived longer in April and May 2020, he argues — because there were lockdowns and they could not see a pediatrician. Yes, there were 1/3 fewer deaths among those under 18 in April and May 2020.
Doctors kill children too.
Doctors have largely become wage slave salesmen for large medical conglomerates and for pharmaceutical manufacturers, while riding on the white coattails of what the noble calling of being a doctor once was.
Sometimes they are even paid a bonus for the level of success they have in manipulating you.
When seeking to beef up on your medical know-how, I would like to recommend books written by doctors who started their practice prior to the introduction of the Polio vaccine. They have an entirely different take on the responsibility of a doctor — hint: it’s not to con you into a subscription model and then upsell you through tactics of fear and the intimidation of the white coat.
I’m a fan of the 1987 text How to Raise a Healthy Child in Spite of Your Doctor, by the late Robert S. Mendelsohn, MD, who is so sober in his estimate of a child’s body to heal itself that he must be considered a quack. It is only $9 new in airport-bookstore-style-mass-market-paperback, and easily worth $900 for the piece of mind it has to offer, not only a parent with a sick child, but anyone contemplating a visit into the medical system.
There is a lot to be said about doctors who came of age before the polio shot. There is a lot to be said about preserving their thoughts and their thought processes. There is a lot to be said about what each of us may be missing when we say that outsourcing our immune system for some diseases to the pharmaceutical industry is a great idea, while outsourcing our immune system around other diseases are evil. Those who hate this shot and no others are missing something. If that’s where you are, their fear campaign has probably gotten the better of you.
You can do better.
Allan Stevo is the bestselling author of “Face Masks in One Lesson” and “Face Masks Hurt Kids.” You can find more of his work by signing up for his newsletter at RealStevo.com.
100%🙌🏼
We have Dr.Mendelsohn’s book sitting out in our home even tho our kids are all adults now and out of the house. The title gets attention!
Ya miss one important point--in some states (ours is New Yawk!) if you don't have yer medi-cull papers--you have no way to show that your kids ARE cared for and ARE healthy /un-molested and this could mean hot hot hot water (worse than shellin' out for such a farce as annual checkups). You have to prove your innocence in the SYSTEM because it's assumed you are guilty of...just about everything!
Homeschoolers in particular are targeted by ACS (aka CPS) and mean neighbors an' landlords use ACS/CPS to get folks to move out (so rents can be jacked up!), spouses use it as a weapon in divorce scenarios, etc. -- many've us have been unfairly targeted (don't ask about gettin' these crazy things expunged--takes YEARS!). SO if you don't do annual well visits and just take care'a things yerself, they come after ya like white on rice!
So we found a semi-holistic dok-turd (jabs optional, thankfully but I knew way more than she did in terms of holistic stuff...) to do our annual check ups which were a joke (hello, height, weight, eye chart, blood pressure, little nonsensical chat, $250 an' up each kid thanks bye); we NEVER asked her advice for anything, just shelled out the $ (private cuz insurance docs would mostly put ya with jabs-mandatory folks vs payin' thru the nose for the jabs-optional ones that'll sign yer paperwork). Each year we had her fill in the easy-peasy forms PROVING we were submitting our kids to mandated state examinations, and thus we had something on paper we could shake in the face of authori-tease -- these "stoopid" docu-"mints" they find so tasty (that supposedly demonstrate you are responsible /not negligent). Rinse and repeat for the dent-ist an' eye-doc-turds. Sigh. It's a dumb show... BUT...
Some who opted out and never bothered (families I know!) had their laissez faire choice bite them in the u know what when they got investy-gated... or had to go to family court (talk about trauma!) because they had no "paperwork."
In Amerika you must show yer papers or else. Just like in Nazi Germany...
So for those of us who are very much Mendelsohn fans an' treat our own kids natur'ly--we are forced to do a little dance in our fascist repug-lick... it's costly but the consequences for not doin' this may mean losin' our kids!