Day 16

There is not a more helpless feeling then when a loved one is in pain and there is nothing you can do about it.  You can try to comfort them but that does not ease the pain that they suffer from.  With all the advances in medicine that have been made still the best they can do is give you an addictive drug that only blocks the pain for a while.  Nerve damage has got to be the worst of it all.  There is no open wound to heal and yet the pain signals continue to be sent.  When this kind of wound exists it is hard for people to understand what is going on sometimes unless they have had the experience themselves.  Now with the issues of people stealing drugs from someone that has been prescribed these powerful drugs the medical community has had to fight back by withholding giving more drugs to the person who has had them stolen from them.  This is to prevent someone that has another reason like selling these powerful drugs from having an endless supply to sell.  Then there is the third choice of the person that is prescribed is taking too much medicine.  This makes for the multi sided problem of what to prescribe to someone in pain.  The drug companies have little or no incentive to see an end to pain because then their billion dollar business would fail.  Who is going to pay for research to end pain when the major players do not want to change the status quo? This leaves us with the only choice is for our collective need to be filled by the government.  The problem with that is the lobbyists for the drug companies will fund big dollars to keep things the way they are.  The party that to me seems to be the ones that are taking this kind of big money is the GOP but trust me I feel that the Democrats are taking it too.  What chance does much needed research stand if there is so much big money against it.  We need to get rid of the system that allows for lobbyists to control the government.  I say throw the whole bunch out of Washington.  There is another seedy side of the lobby that maybe others do not see but a lot of times people will get elected to congress and then after their term is up they either quit or are not elected again and then they go to work as a lobbyists.  I do not want to deny these people a job after they have served in the government but it just feels slimy for them to turn around and get paid big bucks to work in the favor of one company.  It’s almost like they are using their position in the government to learn the ins and outs of it and then turn to the dark side and use this information against us.  I feel this also about stocks and congress being able to profit from knowing things that the average person does not know and making a huge profit from it.  It is another issue that feels slimy.  I want to see the people take back the government out of the hands of those that just want to profit from us.   Medical research is one area that is easy enough to cut out of the budget because it is not going to directly kill someone.  The reverse is true lives may be saved by research.  Are we going to be a country that uses greed to drive anything that gets done or are we going to see a greater good in doing things that in the long run could benefit many?