Just a couple of months out from this year's political election, Prime Minister Julia Gillard was drawn into a leadership challenge from Kevin Rudd. She had replaced Rudd in similar fashion several years earlier, and Rudd had been pining for his old job ever since. The condition this time though - set by Gillard herself - was that whoever lost the caucus vote should retire from politics to end the Labor bickering. She subsequently lost, went to the backbench, and then did not contest the political election. After a couple of months in the wilderness, she has now described the psychoemotional pain of losing the Prime Ministership as feeling like being hit with a fist. This pain was later exacerbated by watching, alone, the Labor Party lose the September 7 Election to the Liberal National Party (under its leader, Tony Abbott).
Gillard's revelation has been picked up by the media as an example of psychological health issues related to emotional pain feeling like physical pain. Channel 7's Weekend Sunrise, for example, asked their science expert, Dr Karl, to explain this phenomenon - and referred to recent research that showed that people can literally die from a (emotionally) broken heart. Dr Karl said that the experience of emotional and physical pain share the same neurological pathways in the brain, and that this is why an emotional pain can feel like a physical pain. But, crucially, he could not offer any medical science-based solution to resolve such pain - only describe the research "evidence" for it's existence. He also stated that when he himself once suffered from the emotional pain from a broken heart, he lessened its effect through the physical means of going for a run [but not healing the pain directly].
It is encouraging to hear Gillard - a person who has occupied high office - articulating the pain that she felt while enduring a stressful and traumatic event. It will go a long way in helping her to integrate that pain. It also shows that people are becoming more aware of psychological phenomena. And it brings politicians back down to earth, and puts them on an equal footing with everyday human beings, who also struggle with such stresses and pains in life. However, as good as this example is, one aspect still remains perplexing: Gillard and her health ministers never supported a cure for such pain while they were in office. I wrote to her health ministers twice about the laws of pain as an experiential-based science that can heal this type of pain from the past (and, hence, heal numerous health and behavioural problems). I wrote once to Nicola Roxon, and again to Tanya Plibersek after she took over as Health Minister. Neither minister took it any further than to dismiss it with a spiel about the process involved in providing evidence, possessing qualifications, submitting to a committee - in other words, going through the official "scientific channels" (AKA medical science) to gain acceptance. There was no real recognition of human beings suffering from unresolved psychoemotional pain - and needing a cure for it right now. Instead, Gillard's government did what all governments around the world do: just default to medical science as the favoured authority on health matters. Governments have not yet cottoned-on to the fact that most medical research efforts only end with promises of cures 5, 10, or 20 years into the future - and rarely anything for today.
In the meantime, Julia Gillard has accepted an honorary Professorship qualification in History and Politics from Adelaide University. It was given to her on the basis of her "knowledge and experience" in politics - and not for any actual study or research. And here we see an example of a double standard in operation in public life: politicians reject experiential-based science in health care, in favour of research or evidence-based science by qualified scientists - then they turn around and accept "experiential-based" qualifications themselves.
This double standard highlights an alleged increasingly corrupt relationship that exists between government and conventional science - especially medical science. (It is similar to the corrupt relationship that developed between government and religion that it replaced over a century ago.) It is like a cartel - but not a price-fixing cartel that we are used to; rather, a treatment-fixing cartel. It is not a product of deliberately corrupt individuals, but rather the once beneficial arrangement has drifted into an alleged corrupt state due to the march of time and changes in society. Here's how it works. New discoveries related to healing human health and behavioural problems are made with the experiential-based science of pain-resolving psychotherapy. But those discoveries are ignored and even denounced by conventional science, because it likes to promote a genetics-based theory for the cause of health and behavioural problems. However, in the background, scientists take ideas and research leads from those new experiential-based discoveries. They then obtain government or organisational funding for related research projects; their resultant papers are published in prestigious science journals claiming "new discoveries" attributed to genetics-based science; and no credit or mention is given for the original source of the discoveries. Governments then provide funding for treatment programs and drug developments based on that "evidence-based" science. Although this is not strictly copying - as their is original work and novel thinking involved (and all scientists learn from each other) - there is no doubting that the core of this activity is in "rechannelling" experiential-based healing discoveries into conventional medical science (where they do not belong, because they come under a completely different healthcare theory). This is done in order to maintain its favoured position of being sole advisor to government, sole public health treatment provider, and sole recipient of government funding. Examples of this process include the "discovery" that emotional pain of a broken heart can lead to a heart attack; treatments that are claimed to "rewire the brain"; the "discovery" that cancer cells behave like a (bee) colony, and the "radical new view of health" involving the body's cells cooperating like a community. The first claim was discovered decades ago in Primal Therapy, while the latter three were discovered with the laws of pain.
This skewed government-science relationship continues to prevent everyday people from receiving the most up-to-date and effective treatment to resolve psychoemotional pain, and its myriad of eventual physical health problems: such as cancer, heart attacks, strokes, and Alzheimer's Disease.
