Statist Medicine

n important book published recently is Alexander Podrabinek’s Punitive Medicine.1 The author is now serving a sentence of exile in Siberia. This is a careful and documented account of the use of psychiatry for political purposes in the U.S.S.R.

Notable opponents of the communist regime are discredited by being sentenced to mental institutions, there to be drugged and tortured into submission. The psychiatrists act on orders from above. They justify this prostitution of their profession by saying that no man in his right mind would speak out, take a stand against, or contradict and challenge the state system and the official ideology. “Normalcy” and mental health to them means living with the system. To question or fight the system is for them not a normal act nor a sensible one; hence, it is a sign of mental problems...

Read On For Complete Essay»

The Demise of the Golden Goose?

As children many of us became familiar with the Aesop fable about the goose that laid the golden egg. A man and his wife owned this very special goose who morning by morning deposited a golden egg at their feet. From it the couple grew very rich.

But then one day they got a brilliant idea. Why not kill the goose and take out all of her eggs at once? That way they would be even more rich. Once the goose was killed, however, came the shocking reality. Not only had they killed the good for the perfect, but in so doing they had lost the good. There were no more golden eggs. And now there was no goose to lay a golden egg tomorrow.

We in the United States have a healthcare system which is probably the best in the world. Flawed, yes. But still the best. The greatest test of its efficiency lies in the fact that when people in other countries need special medical care they still try to come here, even when they can afford to go anywhere in the world.

Let’s keep the golden goose, feed her better, change her environment a little, but not kill her in order to get something we think might be better. We may end up with simply a dead goose, a failed healthcare system.

Read On For Complete Essay»

American Education: Curriculum for a Constitution

by Verna M. Hall and Rosalie J. Slater

One of the modem myths, due to our ignorance of history, is that the educational level of our pre-Constitutional period was very low. Consequently it follows that most Americans believe the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution of the United States were written by and were representative of only a small minority of educated men. On the contrary, the educational level of our pre-Revolutionary population was considerably higher than our national level of education today.

At the time of the Declaration of Independence the quality of education had enabled the colonies to achieve a degree of literacy from “70% to virtually 100%.” This was not education restricted to the few. Modern scholarship reports “the prevalence of schooling and its accessibility to most segments of the population.”

How did American education produce such a remarkable people--even before we became a nation? The answer begins with the predominance of the Bible in American life and learning.

Read On For Complete Essay»