SARS-CoV as a Medical and Social Challenge : Will Our Response Be Dictatorship or Representative Democracy?
Good medical ethics and sound governmental practices are both ideally governed by time-proven ideas, norms and principles that are often forgotten or knowingly sacrificed to preserve or increase the wealth, power and social status of a person, group, or private or public institution.
Whether you are medical personnel or a potential patient, please do not succumb to the illusion that the following, and other similar questions, are irrelevant to your health and well-being and that of your loved ones in our time:
- In the last years, whose voices have been amplified, and whose silenced, under the guise of protecting people from dangerous viewpoints and erroneous information?
- Who has grown richer and who poorer, who more politically powerful and who more powerless?
- Whose professional statuses have been enhanced and whose have suffered?
- What diagnostic and therapeutic approaches have been foregrounded and which driven into the background, suddenly and rapidly, with no sound, justifiable scientific and medical basis?
- What combination of the following measures provides the best approach to protect one’s health from the real threat posed by SARS-CoV? To strengthen one’s immune system? To take sane hygienic precautions? To receive vaccination doses containing genetically modified and synthetic chemical ingredients, whose benefits are claimed to outweigh known and potential risks?
The following quote from an article by Drs. Wynia and Wells, published in 2007 by the Israeli Medical Association Journal, is relevant as we ponder these medical and social issues:
<<Our task in remembrance, as a profession, is to encourage eternal humility and vigilance. Medicine is powerful – perhaps more so today than ever – and doctors hold a powerful position in society. So the spectrum of professional conduct has doctors as saints, or virtual demi-gods, at one extreme. But at the other end of this spectrum, where doctors use their power to harm or even to kill, lie the flames of hell.
These flames burned brightly in the ovens of Auschwitz – and they were, we must acknowledge, lit and tended by doctors. We can neither ignore this historical fact, nor can we afford to believe that it has no relevance today, merely because we are not today living in the flames.
The flames of hell cast a light. As a lighthouse can mark a reef, medicine can and must use the light from the flames of hell, the lessons learned from the Nazi doctors, as a warning beacon. >>
Source: Wynia, M. and A. Wells. “Light from the flames of Hell: remembrance and lessons of the Holocaust for today’s medical profession.” The Israel Medical Association journal : IMAJ 9 3 (2007): 186-8 .
Is the momentum in the scientific and medical establishments moving in this direction in many countries today? And in the emerging global order?
Are we headed along a perilous trajectory as the medical profession, global institutions and national governments advocate laws and public health policies that, for many thinkers, violate fundamental human and civil rights of the individual?
<<During the twentieth century, many nations – including Russia, Germany, and China – lived under extraordinarily brutal and oppressive governments. Over 100 million civilians died at the hands of these governments, but only a small fraction of their brutality and oppression was necessary to retain power. The main function of the brutality and oppression, rather, was to radically change human behaviour, to transform normal human beings with their selfish concerns into willing servants of their rulers. >>
Source: Caplan, Bryan, ‘The totalitarian threat’, in Nick Bostrom, and Milan M Cirkovic (eds), Global Catastrophic Risks (Oxford, 2008; online edn, Oxford Academic, 12 Nov. 2020), https://doi.org/10.1093/oso/9780198570509.003.0029, accessed 20 Sept. 2022.
Some questions you might want to ask include:
- Are science and medicine being instrumentalized in the interests of the wealthy and powerful and in what ways?
- What personal and social health measures are truly benefitting you and your loved ones, and which will be most beneficial to you in the time ahead?
- What is being propagated or marketed as beneficial when, in fact, it is a law, policy or directive working against your health and well-being as a free individual.
I will leave the reader to draw her or his own conclusions in reflecting deeply on very real risks and dangers evident in our current socio-economic and political order. And in the wake of this reflection, let freely chosen action as a responsible individual and member of society follow.
We can be ruled and governed by Love, Freedom and Benevolence, or by fear and hate, servitude and malevolence. May we choose wisely as individuals and as societies.
Warm regards,
Joseph Michael Contrada
Heilpraktiker (Lic. German Medical and Psychotherapy Provider)
Medical Philosopher and Journalist
Natural and Alchemical Medicines
Divine-Spiritual Healing and Energy Therapies
Meditation Instruction
Therapeutic Yoga, Medical Qi Gong
www.heilpraxis-contrada.com (English)
www.merkurraphaelmedizin.de (Deutsch)
Original post 10 April 2021, last revised 20 September 2022