1 result for (book:nopr AND session:661 AND stemmed:medic)
[... 49 paragraphs ...]
Furthermore, the natural elements of sun, air, and earth are refused him. The stability of familiarity is withdrawn. Now with your set of beliefs you are indeed more or less obligated to go to hospitals in severe conditions. I am not saying here that many doctors and nurses do not try their best to promote healing, and certainly healings occur — but they do so despite the system and not because of it. In many cases the belief of a doctor in a person who is ill revives him and rearouses his own belief in himself. The patient’s confidence in the doctor will then reinforce the entire medical procedure, and he may then be filled with faith in his recovery. But as there are natural healing processes within animals, so there are in your race.
[... 10 paragraphs ...]
When and if it is killed by its brothers, this is not an act of cruelty but an innate understanding that the creature can no longer operate physically without agony; a quite natural euthanasia is involved, in which the “patient” also acquiesces. In your society such a natural death is most difficult, and because of the power structures can hardly be promoted. No one who decides upon death is saved from it by the medical profession, however. On deeper levels the quite normal desire for survival requires that the individual leave his or her body, in your terms, at one time or another. When that period arrives the person knows it, and the great vitality of the spirit no longer wants to be encased by a suffering physical body.
Yet here the medical profession often takes care to see that every technological advance is brought to bear to force the self to remain within its flesh, when naturally soul and flesh would part. There are normal interlocking mechanisms that prepare the self for death, even chemical interactions that make this easier physically — bursts of acceleration, in your terms, to propel the individual easily out of the body. Drugs can only hamper this.
Certain kinds of medications can indeed help, but those given in your hospitals simply drug the consciousness out of its own understanding, and inhibit the body mechanisms that make for an easy transition. In your prisons you do the same thing, of course, isolating groups of people with like beliefs — denying them all natural stimuli so that a greater contagion of similar beliefs ensues. You separate such people from the normal contact of their loved ones, and all usual conditions for growth or development.
[... 2 paragraphs ...]