Below is an excerpt from Dr. Emmett Miller's book Deep Healing on some (unexpected) connections between what we normally see as "health" and what we normally see as "politics". And it's not just well-known things like subsidies for tobacco and other much more familiar examples, either..

In the third and final part, I will share excerpts in which Dr. Miller (who usually is not directly political in his tapes) shares very insightful comments on links between consumerism and indeed capitalism, on the one hand, and self esteem (or lack thereof) on the other..in one of his tapes.

Here however is the promised excerpt from his book..

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Emmett Miller, M.D. starts discussing the need to seek out root-causes.

For example, if Miller gave a patient with high blood pressure drugs to treat it, without addressing underlying stressors coming from work, family, addictive behaviors, etc, the patient would be temporarily helped, Miler found, but would just need higher doses a few months later..
And what is "the cause" of an illness anyway? In fact, there isn't just one single cause, if we look carefully.
Let's say several people are exposed to a virulent disease-producing organism. Let's say it's a rare bacterium. Only half of them get sick at all. On fourth of those who get sick remain ill for several months. A few even die. The only differences among them are the adequacy of their immune systems. In some sense, then, we might say that the condition of their immune system as was much the "cause" of the disease as was the rare bacteria that the medical lab discovered in their diagnosis of the cause (elsewhere Miller talks in more detail about links between stress, diet, etc, and the condition of one's immune system).
Or suppose two people are in a car accident. Suppose they are driving virtually identical cars, and each is hit in the same way, with the same force.
However, one is tall and slender, and suffers severe whiplash injury leading to many months of disability. The other is short and muscularly built; this musculature prevents the whipping motion of the head which caused the first person's injury. This second person walks away from the same accident with no problem at all. Couldn't we then say that the first person's genealogical heritage is as much the cause of their problem as the car accident?

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These are not "political" examples per se, but Miller is suggesting we look more carefully and more broadly when we ask about "causes" of injuries, symptoms, and illness. The stress behind the person with the high blood pressure is the most familiar example, but these add more depth and details.

Now finally consider the following scenario (some of Miller's scenarios are taken from his own private practice, as this one may have been)..

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A woman had a particularly violence prone father.
When he was unhappy with dinner or the cleanliness of the house, he would call her names and slap her so hard it made her ears ring and her head ache.
Many years later, as a single parent, she finds herself working as a secretary for a very angry and verbally abusive boss.
During a time when his business is doing especially poorly, this man begins to take it out on her.
He stands over her desk, yelling at her, telling her how incompetent and worthless she is.
An old reflex in her nervous system is triggered.
Her neck and muscles on the side of her face and scalp tense up.
Before long she develops chronic headaches and ringing in her ear. The pain becomes so incapacitating she is unable to work.
..One could say that the cause of her headaches was tension in her muscles.
..One could also say that it is a disease induced by stress, of which the boss is the cause.
..One could just as well say the cause of her disease was her dysfunctional family dynamic [childhood].
If we were to call her father's behavior the "cause," then perhaps we ought to consider that his extreme frustration was the result of an extremely unfortunate war incident. He had been captured, bound, gagged, and forced to watch two of his best friends tortured to death.
Is the war, then, the "cause" of this woman's ailments?

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As we look at examples such as these, we begin to see that the issue of symptoms and how we can truly restore health isn't as simple as it might seem. Moreover, we may suddenly discover that even though we may be convinced that we're looking for our proverbial keys where we dropped them, we're really looking under a lamp-post a mile away -- like looking a the superficial symptoms or even looking at the more immediate causes without looking at deeper personal, family, social, political, environmental, or even global factors which are indirectly -- yet intimately -- connected to the disease in question.

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Based on Deep Healing by Dr. Emmett Miller [pp 45-46]

www.drmiller.com