THE MEDICINE BILL

New Zealand Listener, Volume 35, Issue 901, 9 November 1956, Page 5

THE MEDICINE BILL

Sir,-Quite a surprise is in store for your correspondent "Medical Student" when he awakens, as he will one day, to the fact that, of the two great causes of disease and preventers of recovery in the world today, orthodox medical attempts at prevention and cure have become the worst. The other, of course, is that people are living unhealthily. A hundred and fifty, years ago, when New Zealand was peopled only by "savages," there were no doctors, no hospitals, no nurses, no chemists, no poisonous vaccines or drugs, and-how strange -practically no disease. Now, three thousand doctors and thousands of nurses are paid ten million a year, with five million more for poisonous vaccines and drugs, trying to get health by "fighting diseases"; twenty million more for Disease Factories; and "God’s own country" is littered and plastered from end to end and side to side with mad, maimed, diseased and prematurely dead. When our people 4re sincerely taught, and encouraged (and enabled) to live healthily, within a very few months at least eighty per cent of doctors and nurses and chemists. will be out of a job; nearly all the hospitals will be closed; the teaching and research staffs at medical schools may well be on the mat for spiritual mayhem; and the Department of Disease will have become a Department of Health. But since, obviously, the whole medical set-up depends for its very existence

on disease, any lack of enthusiasm for a healthy community can be readily understood. The medical system (like the financial, religious, educational and political systems), being spiritually excentric, is upside down; but in spite of frantic attempts to prevent it, all these systems are about to be turned right side up, and though it will almost certainly take an atomic world smash to break their stranglehold, the day of deliverance from scarcity, violence, and disease is at hand.

ULRIC

WILLIAMS

(Wanganui).