Triggerband Web Journal

Ich hatte versucht Christoph und die EFDMA zu ignorieren und mich auf meine eigenen Pläne zu konzentrieren, um Fortschritte mit dem FDM zu machen. Christoph postete aber auf seiner Website eine herbe Kritik über mich und meinen neuen Partner, Frank Römer und so sehe ich mich jetzt gezwungen, darauf zu antworten.

Im Januar diesen Jahres begann meine Partnerschaft mit Frank und Sina Römer, die fachkundige Therapeuten sind und erfahrene FDM-Lehrer. Frank hat an einem umfassenden Training verschiedener Methoden und Techniken teilgenommen und gelangte zu der Meinung, FDM sei die beste und für seine Praxis am besten geeignete.

Frank glaubt, so wie ich, dass für alle qualifizierten Therapeuten ein FDM Lehrgang zugänglich sein müsste. Nach Beendigung der Kurse bei der EFDMA, begann er also mit der FDM Ausbildung von Physiotherapeuten. Anstatt Frank zu unterstützen und ihm im Sinne von FDM zu danken, lehnten Christoph und die EFDMA ein Kooperationsangebot von Frank ab. Und als Frank Erfolg hatte mit dem FDM-Unterricht, begann die EFDMA ebenfalls Physiotherapeuten in FDM zu unterrichten!

Während unserer Zusammenarbeit, stellte ich fest, dass Frank und Sina effizient und kompetent sind und es einem leicht machen, mit ihnen zusammen zu arbeiten. Es besteht ein gutes Gleichgewicht zwischen Prinzipien und Pragmatismus.

Christoph postete, ich würde Franks Kurse zertifizieren. Wir kamen überein die Kurse „Typaldos Certified“ zu nennen, so wie Christoph seine Schule „Typaldos Akademie“ nennt. Es mache Sinn, dass ich mir einen kompetenten FDM-Lehrer suche, um FDM Physiotherapeuten und Chiropraktikern in den USA zu erschließen. Es ist unsinnig zu behaupten, dass dies schlecht wäre!

Christoph hat Frank auch wegen seines neuen FDM Lehrbuchs angegriffen. Es ist wahrscheinlich, dass er dies nur sagt, weil Christoph sein eigenes FDM Buch schreibt. Christoph behauptete mir gegenüber sogar, dass sein eigenes Buch „besser“ wäre, als das Textbuch meines Vaters.

Christoph ist einfach sauer, dass er und die EFDMA Konkurrenz bekommen haben. Er weiß, dass meine Kooperation mit Frank und Sina uns Möglichkeiten erschließt, die die EFDMA nicht hat, wie zum Beispiel die Veröffentlichung einer Deutschen Übersetzung der 4. Ausgabe, die Veranstaltung von Seminaren unter Verwendung der Traningsvideos meines Vaters, sowie das Training von Physiotherapeuten und Chiropraktikern in den USA.

Ich habe die Arbeit von Christoph immer geschätzt, aber er übersteigt seine Grenzen. Wenn er Frank kritisiert, sollte er zuerst genug über das Buch von Frank wissen und die Art unserer Zusammenarbeit.

Thorsten Fischer sagte nichts zu Christophs Vorwürfen auf der Website. Er versuchte eher das ganze so zu drehen, also würden er und Christoph zusammen auf einer Linie sein und als würde Frank Christoph angreifen! Frank verteidigt sich gegen Christophs krankhafte Kritiken.

Wenn Christoph der Meinung ist, dass er besser ist als Frank, sollte er dies als Lehrer in seinem Klassenzimmer zeigen und nicht falsche Informationen über seinen Konkurrenten auf der Webseite der Typaldos Akademie oder in seinen Kursen veröffentlichen.

Alex Typaldos

Last spring, Democrats won a long, politically damaging fight with Republicans to enact a national healthcare reform bill. It is known by many as Obamacare, after the name of our president who pushed so hard to get it passed in the House and Senate. Although his party controlled strong majorities in both chambers, there were Democrats who did not want to vote for such a contentious bill during an election year. Their concerns proved warranted – at least initially – as Republicans destroyed Democrats in the 2010 mid-term elections.

I supported reform at the time and I still do, albeit with a bit less enthusiasm after the public option and a national insurance exchange were left out of the final law. They were in the House’s version of the bill, but the House eventually passed the Senate version, with modifications, because Democrats in the Senate lost a filibuster-proof majority when Republican Scott Brown won Ted Kennedy’s Senate seat in a special election in Massachusetts.

When the legislative “sausage making” process was over and Obama signed his healthcare reform bill into law, it looked like little more than a government welfare program with subsidies to most Americans so they can buy quality insurance at a reasonable price.

However, there is much more to the Affordable Care Act, and I am not speaking of the numerous gimmicks like allowing children to stay on their parents’ insurance until age 26 or filling in the donut hole for prescription drug coverage under Medicare. What this law does is it gives the federal government control over healthcare. In the Affordable Care Act itself, that control is exercised primarily over health insurance coverage. But the Act provides a framework for the federal government to easily exercise authority over other facets of healthcare at a later date through additional legislation or administrative rules.

This may sound unnerving to anyone who does not implicitly trust the judgment and discretion of our national government. Let me ask you a question. What other body is there in the United States that is large enough to solve the problems of our mammoth, disorganized healthcare system?

Now that Obamacare is law, the federal government has the power to try to solve a lot of the problems in healthcare. The first of these problems is the unfairness in our insurance markets, which the Affordable Care Act addresses nicely come 2014. Other equally important, and closely related, issues include rising healthcare costs, physician shortages, and hospital errors. Those are not adequately addressed by this Act so they will have to wait for future legislation or executive orders.

Of course, I must conclude by mentioning that while our government is doing what it can to address financial and administrative concerns in healthcare, we will accomplish the most good by reforming the medical profession itself. I believe there is a medical revolution on the horizon, and I encourage you to be a part of it.

Alexander Typaldos

If you understand how the financial system works – and it doesn’t work very well – you will see that our government ran up the debt on purpose and actually has a good reason for it.

The mortgage loan crisis and the recession that followed caused banks to stop lending. I’m going to breeze over why this part happened and say that it had to do with their reduced liquidity (ability to lend) and dismal growth forecasts (desire to lend).

In our financial system – and the financial systems of other developed nations – money is created through debt. When you borrow money to buy a car, the bank does not lend you its own money. It takes a very low-rate loan from the Federal Reserve Bank and lends you their money at a markup. The Federal Reserve Bank that “loans” money to your local bank does not draw from cash sitting in an account. Instead, it actually creates money out of thin air. When it writes a check, money is created.

Only 5% of money in our nation is hard cash; 95% is numbers on a screen, and it is created when businesses, individuals, and governments take out loans. So when the stock market nearly collapsed in September of 2008, those “numbers on a screen” dropped precipitately in value, and the result was a reduction in the available money supply.

I’m sure you understand how the money supply relates to inflation and deflation. An increase tends toward inflation – each dollar is worth less. A decrease, however, tends to cause deflation in the absence of competing factors. Deflation means that each dollar is worth more. This might sound like a good thing at first glance, but it really means that all your debts, expenses like rent and food, along with consumer goods, effectively become more expensive and burdensome. Do you see why? There are fewer dollars to go around and so they are more difficult to come by, while expenses stay the same for a period of time.

That period of time is not indefinite, but long enough to have a devastating spiral effect on our economy and then the global economy because they are all intertwined. The only known way to avert this is to pump massive amounts of money into our economy. Banks were unable and unwilling to do it themselves, so our government did it. As mentioned above, in our current financial system, the way to create money is by taking debt, and that is exactly what happened. Our national debt exploded, but our lives continued without a great depression.

Politically, leaders in government cannot say they are increasing the debt solely to increase the debt. But that is what they’re doing and they have sound financial and economic reasons for it. Is this okay? In our current system it is necessary, but I would like to see a new system where government creates its own money rather than the Federal Reserve creating it through loans.

What effect will this have on our quality of lives? We’ll probably have another lost decade or two of economic growth. We’ll work longer, retire later, cut back our lifestyles, and spend a greater share of our income on necessities. However, there is still the possibility there could be a financial collapse similar to the one the bailout and stimulus averted.

One more thing: Republicans understand how the financial system works, and they don’t want the economy to collapse on their watch. Expect most of them to say one thing and do another concerning the national debt.

Alexander Typaldos

As physicians we practice modern medicine. However, we must not become confused about what this means. True, we may be more medically knowledgeable than our predecessors of a generation or two ago; but let this not suggest that our knowledge is reality and theirs was not. Reality is massive and intricate, paradoxical and overwhelming. As humans, we simply do not have the perspective to gauge it accurately.

Medical knowledge is limited to our own personal experiences, the perspectives of others who have told us what they think reality is, as well as hard data that has been recorded over lengths of time. Consider this unsettling hypothetical: What if all forms of medical knowledge suddenly disappeared? What would we do to rebuild our knowledge banks?

We would probably do what medicine has always done. Break our understanding of the world into pieces, form conclusions, and test them. We would, in essence, make models of the world; small insights of predictability that represent a working knowledge. And this is exactly what we do today. We work with medical models – not reality.

Some of today’s models seem to sensibly represent the world. They appear efficacious for the most part. Other models, however, make little sense. They survive because the political clout which birthed them continues to fight for their existence today.

We must be careful about what we believe. The history of science is filled with preposterous “truths” that stood lifetimes – even centuries – to be finally discarded as rubbish. Certainly, some of today’s most cherished medical beliefs will meet a similar fate. “Why?” you might ask. For the same reason those others were discarded: they are not tenable. Once the political and financial matrix that holds them in place disintegrates, they will lose support. Other models with more efficacy will nibble at their edges, then devour them. Old models will be replaced by new models; which will, hopefully, be more workable mechanisms of thought. However, if stronger political or financial incentives arise that support less workable models, they may replace their predecessors instead. When this happens, medicine, in a sense, steps backward.

Medicine is constantly marching. It may take two steps forward, one step back, then a step to the side. This is not a march to reality, but rather from one vague point in the past to another vague point in the future. Surely, some aspects of medicine will improve, while others will actually become more harmful. Many models and treatments will change neither for better nor for worse. Technology continues to improve, yet breast cancer is increasing. Bubonic plague may no longer be a threat, but AIDS is a pandemic. Tuberculosis was well-controlled twenty years ago, but more and more resistant strains are developing around the world. Although immunizations have saved millions of lives, only one disease has been completely eradicated.

Many of our twentieth century victories may be hollow. They may not even be victories at all. Instead, they may be no more than a natural or technological reprieve from the onslaught of future ills.

. . . .

Stephen Typaldos, D.O.
July 1994

I urge all of you who support healthcare reform to write your U.S. representative and senators. You should write even if you do not support reform, because that is how the system works. Of course, political forces can do only so much to reform healthcare, but it is a good start.

Our representatives are facing a lot of pressure from interest groups and need to know they at least have the support of their people at home. Here is the letter I sent to my congressman:

Dear Fred Upton:

Alexander Typaldos