I want to provide some extra detail and explanation about my last blog entry now. The previous one consisted almost entirely of a letter I wrote to our future president, Mr. Obama, and I was exceedingly annoyed that the only thing I got back in reply to that letter was junk email. Since there was a link for suggestions at change.gov, I thought I would send one in and got promptly ignored. As time goes on, I get the impression that Mr. Obama wants to pick up where Franklin Roosevelt left off. His first big idea is creating civil works jobs just as Roosevelt did upon taking office. All that is fine if you are a Democratic Republican, and I use that term now not only as a reference to Thomas Jefferson's original party name. I use it to point out that the Democratic Party is just the left wing of the monolithic Republicratic Party that has a political monopoly on power in the United States. The Republican Party is the right wing, and Franklin Roosevelt (a Democrat) took over where Theodore Roosevelt (a Republican) left off. So it really does not matter if one is a Republican or Democrat, because they are entirely the same thing. During this last election, when the Republicans needed it, they put up someone who would have never gotten to run for president under normal circumstances, John McCain. He would generally be considered too leftist and radical to be a Republican presidential candidate, but the Republicans have made such a mess with the Iraq war and wasted so much money domestically by spending like the house is on fire and they have to get rid of everything that no one wanted to vote for any of the normal Republican candidates. That meant John McCain got to be the stooge who got stomped all over in the general election, but I vote Libertarian, and these problems are not because of my folly. All this is also partly because of how the US Constitution is set up, because it encourages a very conservative (compared to other democratic, republican, westernised governments) and mostly homogeneous style of government. My original point, though, was that I wanted to explain some things about my last blog , and the first point is that the two most common symptoms of Lupus are hair-loss and weight-loss. The physician I had accuse me of being a drug addict was the one I asked for Prednisone. I asked because she totally ignored everything that was happening, was extremely belligerent, and I felt I had nothing to loose by asking for what I wanted. Prednisone has almost no abuse potential among anyone who is not a weight lifter or other type of athlete. I am a thirty-five-year old white man, and I am about five-seven or perhaps five-eight. So I am neither a weight-lifter nor an exceptional athlete in any way, unless you consider Everquest an Olympic event. The reason I wanted the Prednisone was that I had lost thirty or more pounds, and since I weigh around 150 pounds most of the time, that is approximately twenty percent of my body weight. That sort of weight loss is not uncommon in Lupus, but it was the first time it ever happened to me, and my mother was convinced I was starving to death. I was very eager to gain some of it back. Another obvious point is that people who are drug seekers tend to want Lortabs, Dilaudid, Morphine, Oxycontin, Morphine, Codeine, etc. No one looking to get high ever asks for steroids, and anyone who understands my description will laugh at the very proposition that anyone would want to get high off Prednisone. Steroids also have very severe side effects, so no one but an extreme masochist would take Prednisone recreationally. They tend to give many people terrible headaches, and they especially make me dream up horrific acts of violence. I do know violent ideation and acts are a side effects of the drugs, though, so I do not act on these violent thoughts. The second rheumatologist I went to just told me he thought I was a mentally ill hypochondriac, and he further told me he did not want me to ever come back to see him. He called me a liar every time I told him anything any other physician had said, and he generally acted like a giant buffoon. That is what passes for medical care when one is sick with a serious illness. When my Lupus first appeared, my prostate became inflamed and has been for the past fifteen years or more. Generally men do not develop enlarged prostates until they are in their fifties, so it was extremely unusual for a person younger than twenty to have that particular symptom. The urologist I went to denied there was anything wrong and accused me of having a sexually-transmitted disease. If I had actually had such an illness, it was malpractice for him to make such an allegation and then not treat the condition, so it was obvious that he was trying to bluff me and draw my attention from his own ability to make an adequate diagnosis. And whether this is good or bad, he was a Mormon, and some of them have a cultural bias that holds there is something wrong with someone who is not married by twenty or twenty-five. The only reason I point this out is that I think his responce was culturally-motivated, because he asked me about a dozen time if I were married. My reason for going into such detail about all this is that no sick person should be treated the way I was and expect to pay to be called names and abused. It was unprofessional at best and negligent or criminal at worst. This is purely an opinion, but I think that many physicians are encouraged when they are in school to adopt a very bad attitude towards their patients. They seem to assume that the people who go to see them in good faith seeking help for illnesses are criminals looking to constantly engage in drug abuse or some sort of sexual debauchery. I really wish my life were as exciting as these people think, but I do not feel well enough at most times to do the things they mention. My primary-care physician finally felt of my prostate and confirmed that it was enlarged, and he was shocked. He had already given me a lecture that presupposed the bizarre assumption that I did not understand the sensation that indicated I needed to urinate. He told me that his toddler thought he had to go urinate each time a commercial came on television. Believe it or not, I was toilet trained quite well by the age of eighteen or twenty, and I understood all the myriad sensations that accompanied such a complex process as voiding one's bladder. Now, my original point to Mr. Obama was that each US citizen should have the right to medicate himself as he chooses. Since physicians seem to think they can turn away sick people at their sole discretion, and illnesses that take time (and keep them from making the maximum amount of money per second) or acumen to diagnose are written off to patient insanity or moral corruption. Each person has the right to medical care, and if he cannot obtain it from a person who is licensed, he should be able to act as his own physician. Each person represents himself as a person legally, and when a person retains an attorney, he gives that person power of attorney, either generically or as it pertains to particular matters. We do not have that right when it comes to medicine. In every other respect of life in the United States, a person has a right to self-determination. A person may change his name at his discretion. People choose their own occupations, and they decide where they live or their marriage partners. These are not trivial decisions, and terminally ill people can decide if they want to end their lives in a manner prescribed by law in the state of Oregon. Women in many states can decide to have surgical abortions, and there are a huge number of other non-trivial decisions that people make every day that make huge differences in their lives. What about medical care? We are all at the whim of the American Medical Association when it comes to medical care. I have spasms in my throat and need a drug called Metoclompramide to quiet them, but it takes a prescription to get this medication, assuming it has not gone over the counter since I got the last bottle of it. The drug has no known significant side effects last time I looked, but I still have to get a permission slip from someone with a license to diagnose and prescribe drugs to get it. How is it that a free people can let his health rest entirely on anyone but himself? This is evidently not obvious, but individuals are the only ones who have their own best interests in mind. Physicians have most of the populace convinced that they cannot take care of themselves, but the fact is that we all have to look after ourselves, because no one else will. Medicine is just trial and error along with learning what works and what does not. I would not suggest that you do your own surgery or go out and take drugs at random, but we should all have the legal right to obtain our own medications if we cannot get them from physicians. Since we are each only responsible for ourselves. I suffered for a lot of years and am only now able to get the help I need, because all the medical doctors thought I looked well. And their test did not indicate any apparent disease states. Wait until you are the one suffering, and you will see that we all have to get together and take back our legal right to medicate ourselves as we see fit. Up until around 1906, each person in the United States had this fundamental right, and the earth did not explode. Everything will be just fine if we take back our right to bodily self-determination tomorrow.