By Christopher Kennedy
It does not surprise me that young doctors have mental problems at twice the rate of the general population. It was only one hundred and twenty years ago that doctors figured out what the heart did. Two hundred years ago they were also the town barber and surgeon. They had no idea. Doctors may look confident and capable but it has not been very long since they figured out, what looks like to us now, some fairly simple deductions.
Another example is the washing of hands between births. A young doctor come up with the idea in Germany in the 18th century but it took thirty years before the bloody-minded mainstream medical establishment agreed with him that some sort of basic hygiene would save the lives of now millions of babies. That is thirty years of needless deaths of infants. Let us be frank, the medical establishment is not particularly enlightened quite often.
Let us take vaping and e-cigarettes. I vape. I am fifty years old and my friends are starting to die of cancer and I want to try other options. So I tried vaping. My teeth are now clean, as is my fingers, I have my breath back, I am doing more exercise. All good, I have a much better life. Yet the doctors are demanding that I give up that because they don’t like any type of cigarettes. To justify this they argue that anyone can give up cigarettes. They support a large and well-funded anti-smoking lobby; I have yet to see another schizophrenic give up cigarettes, though all have tried very hard. The medical establishment doesn’t give a toss about that though either.
Another contentious area is cannabis. The argument put up by the head of the AMA recently was that cannabis had not been tested in controlled experiments. If one in six people are smoking pot in this country then the doctors must either be blind or neglectful if they can’t see it in their own patients.
One morning I went to the psychiatrist and noticed that the files for patients he was seeing that day laid out on his desk. On the files where the names of a group of people I shared some cannabis with that morning. I pointed out to the psychiatrist that he was in for an easy day. Like me they where going to come in, grab the script for their medicines and get the hell out of there as soon as possible.
This particular psychiatrist, a very good and empathetic healer in my and my friends opinions, was pushing a rock up a hill trying to stop people from smoking cannabis.
As for the theory linking schizophrenia and cannabis, don’t make me laugh. The increase in cannabis use has been so widespread that the number of schizophrenics would go through the roof. But it hasn’t changed. As for them going mad after a joint they are mad to start with and they are simply mad and stoned when they have a joint. They are alright but their carers tend to get annoyed. The stoned schizophrenic sit in their rooms laughing to themselves. I should know, this complex I live in has seventeen schizophrenics in it.
It’s simply the cheapest and most effective drug around for many ailments. For some people it may not be suitable but no one has died from trying it. And the fall in opoid addiction rates and the general well-being of people where it has been legalized is becoming more and more newsworthy.
I would like to get this medicine, which is fairly tame compared to the anti-psychotics I am on, proscribed to me with an intelligent discussion from a doctor outlining what the suitable levels of CBD and THC (the active ingredients in cannabis) are for my anxiety and depression are. Buying off the street you have no control over that. Yet every doctor in Western Australia refused to undertake training in medical cannabis. This has no medical basis; it is a political statement. The rot has set in.
How far has this rot gotten? Take a story on the second page of the West Australian newspaper from last year which caused a ruckus among the pro-cannabis group. A professor from the University of Western Australia, associate Professor Stuart Reece, announced that cannabis caused inter-generational genetic defects. This is a professor from what I use to think was a good institution, however once you put his name into the computer you find that in “September 1999 he was raided for his reckless naltrexone, addictive benzodiazapine and faith healing caper. Threatened with closure he claimed that the QLD government would have blood on its hands if he did not get his way. 20 months later, 25 patients where dead … He was raided and closed down again.“ This is quoted from the website “Losing in the Lucky Country” written by Paul Gallagher.
Heaven knows what department of voodoo Dr Reece runs and how he came to be running it but a professor is supposed to be a medical leader. I cannot see how he got to be an associate professor. Mind you, this is the university that was going to give a chair to a climate denier in return for a government grant (but that is a whole other story). Definitely the department of voodoo.
So we are faced with the same bloody-minded mainstream medical establishment, which as far as I can tell doesn’t give a bugger about our predicament. So much for the medical establishment but I cannot say I hope the doctors enjoy their brushes with mental illnesses, as it serves them right for pretending to be God, but rather feel pity for those young doctors who are being put under so much pressure by such an unyielding establishment.
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