“Seth material” search engine (Jane Roberts)

Behind such announcements there is the authority of the medical profession, and the very authority of your systems of communication as well. You cannot question the voice over the radio. It is disembodied and presumes to know.

Once again, the elderly were singled out. It seems obvious that they are more susceptible to diseases. That susceptibility is a medical fact of life. It is a fact, however, without a basic foundation in the truth of man’s biological reality. It is a fact brought about through suggestion. The doctors see the bodily results, which are quite definite, and then those results are taken as evidence.

Their belief systems, therefore, you must admit, are quite practical. Nor are they surrounded by medical professions. Later in the book we will return to the subject. Here, you have, however, what almost amounts to a social program for illness — the flu season. A mass meditation, it has an economic structure in back of it: The scientific and medical foundations are involved. Not only this, however, but the economic concerns, from the largest pharmacies to the tiniest drugstores, the supermarkets and the corner groceries — all of these elements are involved.

Pills, potions, and shots supposed to combat [colds and the] flu are given prominent displays, serving to remind those who might have missed them otherwise of the announcements [about] the coming time of difficulty. Commercials on television bring a new barrage, so that (amused) you can go from the hay fever season to the flu season without missing any personal medications.

Your private beliefs merge with those of others, and form your cultural reality. The distorted ideas of the medical profession or the scientists, or of any other group, are not thrust upon you, therefore. They are the result of your mass beliefs — isolated in the form of separate disciplines. Medical men, for example, are often extremely unhealthy because they are so saddled with those specific health beliefs that their attention is concentrated in that area more than others not so involved. The idea of prevention is always based upon fear — for you do not want to prevent something that is joyful. Often, therefore, preventative medicine causes what it hopes to avoid. Not only does the idea [of prevention] continually promote the entire system of fear, but specific steps taken to prevent a disease in a body not already stricken, again, often set up reactions that bring about side effects that would occur if the disease had in fact been suffered.

There are individuals who very rarely get ill whether or not they are inoculated, and who are not sensitive in the health area. I am not implying, therefore, that all people react negatively to inoculations. In the most basic of terms, however, inoculations do no good, either, though I am aware that medical history would seem to contradict me.

At certain times, and most particularly at the birth of medical science in modern times, the belief in inoculation, if not by the populace then by the doctors, did possess the great strength of new suggestion and hope — but I am afraid that scientific medicine has caused as many new diseases as it has cured. When it saves lives, it does so because of the intuitive healing understanding of the physician, or because the patient is so impressed by the great efforts taken in his behalf, and therefore is convinced secondhandedly of his own worth.

In this country, your tax dollars go for many medical experiments and preventative-medicine drives — because you do not trust the good intent of your own bodies. In the same way, your government funds [also] go into military defenses to prevent war, because if you do not trust your own body’s good intent toward you, you can hardly trust any good intent on the part of your fellow men.