Who is Looking After Our Kids?
CHAPTER 16
Health Freedom in America
The history of America from our earliest colonial days up to the present, has been a succession of struggles for freedom. The current struggle for health freedom may in time be recorded as another milestone and precedent in our nation's history.
Probably transcending any other problem in America today is that of the deteriorating health of our children. Steadily increasing allergic, immunologic, and neuro-behavioral problems are occurring on a scale unknown in earlier generations. Unless reversed, this adverse health trend threatens the future of our nation.
Leading research scientists as well as a large and growing portion of the public are coming to believe that the causes of the deteriorating health of American children include toxic environmental chemicals, chemical food additives, pesticide residues in foods, commercial processing and denaturing of foods, polluted water, fluoridation, overuse of antibiotics, and excessive use of drugs to the exclusion of more natural therapies. We would add the current mandatory childhood immunization programs as among the many threats to the health and well-being of children.
The problem is of momentous importance, not unlike other crises in our nation's history. Public discontent with our present health system exists on a vast scale. The public is not being adequately protected against toxic environmental chemicals. Chemical food additives are rarely, if ever, thoroughly tested for their safety. Our present health system, which is largely drug-dependent, is increasingly coercive.
Many foreign countries have traditions of natural healing in which natural therapies are fully legal and extensively used. In America, these therapies are banned and practitioners harassed. One is reminded of the era of alcoholic prohibition in America (1919 to 1933), a time characterized by gangsters and lawlessness. If the prohibition of alcohol with all of its evils did not work, will the prohibition of natural healing, with its many potentials for good, remain enforced?
The ultimate answer is to restore free enterprise and freedom-of- choice to our health system. This will go far toward defusing present tensions.
Finally, children are far more vulnerable to toxic chemicals and to the effects of drugs than adults. If we are to save a generation of children, and with them our future as a nation, positive changes must come about soon.