If you recognize the subscription model behind magazines or newspapers or the book a month club or membership based golf courses or membership clubs or wine clubs or Amazon Prime or a monthly cable bill or the Dollar Shave Club or Substack, then you recognize the model behind well child visits.
It gives the seller of goods and services a reliable stream of income, often upon which other goods and services can be developed and sold.
Anyone who has had a child in the last twenty years knows this is not a necessary schedule. The following is from Kaiser-Permanente, an organization that was once an innovative healthcare provider taking on the American Medical Association, but which has become as establishment as can be:
Your child’s doctor will recommend a schedule for well-child visits. One example is for visits at ages:
- 3 to 5 days old.
- By 1 month.
- 2 months.
- 4 months.
- 6 months.
- 9 months.
- 1 year.
- 15 months.
- 18 months.
- 2 years.
- 30 months.
- 3 years.
After age 3, well-child visits are usually scheduled yearly through the teen years.
That’s from the Kaiser-Permanente website but is hardly as aggressive as what some Kaiser doctors will recommend, if they think they can get away with it. It is the model posted online for public consumption and is modeled after the American Academy of Pediatrics public-facing guidance.
This schedule of well child visits parallels closely with the childhood immunization guidance.
Yes, anyone who has had a child in the last twenty years knows this is not a necessary schedule.
But you know what, your time is worth zero to them. And the extra visits likely cost you nothing or next to nothing monetarily, since your insurance handles it. That is enough for most people to call it “free.”
So you spend 2 or 3 hours from the time you leave your home to the time you get back, as you go through this charade, convinced it will keep your child well. You show everyone involved that you either do not realize what is going on, or you do not seem to place much value on your time and your child’s time.
Realizing how amenable you are to their nonsense, they, of course, continue to push products and services on you at the pediatrician’s office until you resist. And then they push harder, because they know you are a pushover.
This is really what pediatricians do. It is what many doctors do. The annual checkup is a similar subscription model, and an opportunity to get the customer face-to-face with the white-coated salesman, who will take the customer’s emotions down into the dumps, if the customer will let him, then will propose a miracle solution for all his woes, woes the customer may have known nothing about until ten minutes prior.
If this describes you . . .
Then you are a mark.
You are the exact kind of sucker that the medical system has learned to take advantage of and exploit. And if medical interventions had no side effects, that might be a fine hobby by which you pass the time, but that’s not the case.
Johns Hopkins ran a study in 2016 that claimed these interventions are the third leading cause of death in the US, behind heart disease and cancer. Study authors generously call it “medical error.”
At the same time, other researchers point to a more pernicious cause of death — prescription drugs. They cite a number as big as 783,936 deaths per year, making that the leading cause of death, bigger than cancer or heart disease, and certainly a far bigger ongoing concern than even the most massaged Covid-19 figures would indicate. But Covid-19 fits the narrative. Three-quarters of a million Americans dying every year from legal, safe, healthy, life-extending drugs that their loving doctors prescribed them for the benefit of their patients — That simply does not fit the narrative.
Doctors kill.
But just because you don’t die from a doctor’s scalpel or from a doctor’s pills doesn’t mean they didn’t harm you. Those effects affect far more. And this also impacts children.
Dr. Joseph Mercola pointed out this week in the article “Could Childhood Shots Affect Infant Mortality?” that 200 more babies a month lived longer in April and May 2020, he argues — because there were lockdowns and they could not see a pediatrician. Yes, there were 1/3 fewer deaths among those under 18 in April and May 2020.
Doctors kill children too.
Doctors have largely become wage slave salesmen for large medical conglomerates and for pharmaceutical manufacturers, while riding on the white coattails of what the noble calling of being a doctor once was.
Sometimes they are even paid a bonus for the level of success they have in manipulating you.
When seeking to beef up on your medical know-how, I would like to recommend books written by doctors who started their practice prior to the introduction of the Polio vaccine. They have an entirely different take on the responsibility of a doctor — hint: it’s not to con you into a subscription model and then upsell you through tactics of fear and the intimidation of the white coat.
I’m a fan of the 1987 text How to Raise a Healthy Child in Spite of Your Doctor, by the late Robert S. Mendelsohn, MD, who is so sober in his estimate of a child’s body to heal itself that he must be considered a quack. It is only $9 new in that airport bookstore style mass market paperback, and easily worth $900 for the piece of mind it has to offer, not only a parent with a sick child, but anyone contemplating a visit into the medical system.
There is a lot to be said about doctors who came of age before the polio shot. There is a lot to be said about preserving their thoughts and their thought processes. There is a lot to be said about what each of us may be missing when we say that outsourcing our immune system for some diseases to the pharmaceutical industry is a great idea, while outsourcing our immune system around other diseases are evil. Those who hate this shot and no others are missing something. If that’s where you are, their fear campaign has probably gotten the better of you.
You can do better.
You can find more of his work by signing up for his newsletter at RealStevo.com.
