the Walnut Diary

There are 800,000 registered practitioners of homeopathy in India.  In the villages cow urine is the Covid-19 remedy most considered due to the lack of other stuff.  The Hindu nationalist culture ties strongly to a tradition of health care which goes back thousands of years.

To Tackle a Virus, Indian Officials Peddle Pseudoscience

I have a problem with the cultural assumptions of “pseudoscience.”  It echoes the cries of heresy and sacrilege of earlier eras, both of which were used to give a moral stance to outright economic competition.  For example, most medieval witches were midwives, and their accusers were doctors.

Since penicillin and anaesthetics gave rise to allopathic medicine (the use of pills or injections and painless surgery to cure or repress the symptoms of illness), a pharmaceutical orthodoxy has suppressed other systems of thought.  Only where allopathy could not find an alternative was traditional therapy still tolerated.  Smallpox vaccinations, a hollopathic treatment, continued, though.

In 1909 the Flexner Report funded by the Carnegie Foundation in the United States essentially wiped out a thousand years of medical knowledge as a condition of the funding of medical schools in North America.  Nelson Rockefeller’s oil gave rise to the lucrative pharmaceutical industry well before automobiles were a reliable consumer of his petroleum products.

The benefit that allopathy has brought to Western Civilization is extensive and obvious, but Covid-19 is mocking a set of beliefs which may no longer hold the answer.

What worries me is the rapid degeneration of the Trump Party into a death cult with its musings about the value of human sacrifice to restore the health of the stock market.

The basic value of liberalism holds that society has the duty of care for those least able to help themselves.  By and large Canada has elected leaders who extolled this value.

When I read about the immunity passport as a thing, I get worried.

Images of grandparents on ice floes rapidly blur into Covid-19 outbreaks on cruise ships denied permission to dock.  And then comes the spectre of patients abandoned in nursing homes.

What if the end of the world comes not with a flash, but with a long, uncontrolled slide down a slope?