I’m one of those persons blessed with good health most of my life. Growing up with a mother who repeated like a mantra, “Be your own doctor, your own banker, own preacher, and own counselor,” I developed a do it yourself mentality relative to many areas of my life.
However many things I cannot do for myself and must rely on others. I’m so non-mechanical, and have difficulty dealing with anything electronic or mechanical, have trouble operating a can opener. I struggle with operating a computor and anything out of the simplest task, I call a technician.
However regarding my health, I was taught a number of home remedies for ailments, and my parents took me to osteopaths and chiropractors for any structural misalignments. Growing up on a farm, playing in trees, jumping from one cotton bale to another, and in highschool playing basketball, I would sometimes have neck and spinal misalignments, from playing rough games.
Later on living in the Orient, I learned about some of their methods of healing, herbs, accupuncture, accupressure, steam baths, and massage therapy.
However, there comes a time when it is necessary to see a medical doctor and I experienced the necessity for having one as a result of children involved in accidents. And so grateful for the availability of doctors, hospitals, and all the facilities when I need them.
I have never had a broken bone, nor surgery aside from dental, until about 3 years ago, and since several operations, hospital stays, dozens of test like the MRI, and have seen more than a dozen doctors. I still refrain from taking medicine unless absolutely necessary.
In my earlier years, spending over twenty years as a military wife, moving around and being required to do certain things, like must-have shots to go to another country. Frequently military bases are in remote areas or not close to a city, therefore it was necessary to use on-base military medical facilities. Plus the fact my husband’s military pay was quite meagre and it was costly to use outside medical facilities.
When I visited the on-base medical facilities, the doctors were always quite young, and I felt like I was seeing medical personnel who were doing on the job training duty. And never felt all that comfortable seeing a military personnel doctor.
I’ll describe one incident in particular, while stationed in Tennessee. I was pregnant when my husband received orders to go to Vietnam. We lived near the military base and I started seeing an on-base doctor. My visits were routine, but I began gaining excessive weight. The young intern-type doctors seemed more interested in giving me a difficult time over weight gain, and venting themselves at me, rather than providing health care. No empathy for my uncomfortable weight gain. No solutions offered.
After almost nine months of emotional beatings from the military base doctor, I was just past eight months when I went for a check-up, and the doctor launched a tirade at me. I will never forget what he said. “I dont see how any white woman could let themself go and put on this much weight.”
I had other children to care for, my husband was fighting a war in Vietnam, and I had the responsibility of taking care of everything – the house, car, kids, big time problems with the school system, plus about to have a baby.
After the military doctor made that remark, I told them to gather up my medical records, give them to me right now, I will not be back. A clerk made copies, I left and went into Murfreesboro about 20 miles away, and found another doctor that day.
My friends were shocked, over my decision and actions to find a new doctor in my last month of pregnancy. Not only that but incurring a substantial hospital and doctor bill, when I had free medical care under the socialized military system.
There is something about a socialized system of anything, where government-paid employees are in charge, they have an attitude of superiority, and authority and upper hand attitude. A glaring attitude which attempts to convey, you are not in control, I’m in charge and you are not. This is pervasive in all dealings with government employees.
If this government- sponsored health care program passes, and there are no longer doctors in private practice as we know it today, we’re in for some trying times. In the incident I describe, if the entire country had been under government-controlled health care, I would have had no alternative to choose a more satisfactory situation for myself. One socialist-minded doctor sends records to another just like him. There will be an absence of choice.
This is the bottom line, a system of socialism removes choices and control of one’s life to do with it as they choose. Freedom is self-control and self-responsibility. The dynamics change in a socialistic system. Self-control and choices are removed and one’s life is dictated by those operating the system. We are already far down that road. It will not get better but progressively worse.
LET FREEDOM RING
JUST ME
AC
email: annecleveland@bellsouth.net
