Confessions of a Medical Heretic

by

Robert Mendelsohn

Doctor Death

Modern Medicine is an idolatrous religion, for what it holds sacred are not living things, but mechanical processes. It doesn’t boast of saving souls or lives but of how many times this or that new machine was used and how much money was taken in by the process.

What resides at the core of every religion, the core from which hope radiates when all human attempts to deal with earthly conditions fail, is the Deity, the One Who Transcends it all. To get to the core of Modern Medicine you have to wade through an ocean of man-made drugs and fight your way through endless tons of machinery. If you then don’t understand why the Church is savagely idolatrous and must be destroyed, you will when you stare its Deity in the face. The God of Modern Medicine is Death.

In fact, a new word was recently coined by Dr. Quentin Young to describe one activity of Modern Medicine: iatrogenocide. Iatrogenocide (iatros is the greek for doctor) is the systematic destruction of a large group of people by doctors, An example of iatrogenocide is the infant sacrifices in developing countries, which I described in the preceeding chapter. This widespead marketing of infant formula among people who can’t afford it or implement it safely amounts to a doctors’ crusade against unsuspecting, defenseless infidels.

How truly deadly the Church is comes into stark relief whenever there’s a doctors’ strike. In 1970 in Bogota, Colombia, there was a fifty-two day period in which doctors disappeared altogether except for emergency care. The “National Catholic Reporter” described a “string of unusual side effects” from the strike. The death rate went down thirty-five percent. A spokesman for the National Morticians’ Association said “It might be a coincidence but it is a fact.” An eighteen percent drop in the death rate occurred in Los Angeles county in 1976 when doctors there went on strike to protest soaring malpractice insurance premiums. Dr. Milton Roemer, Professor of Health Care Administration at UCLA, surveyed seventeen major hospitals and found that sixty percent fewer operations were performed. When the strike ended and the medical machines started grinding again, the death rate went right back up to where it had been before the strike. The same thing happened in Israel in 1973 when the doctors reduced their daily patient contact from 65,000 to 7,000. The strike lasted a month. According to the Jerusalem Burial Society, the Israeli death rate dropped fifty percent during that month. There had not been such a profound decrease in mortality since the last doctors’ strike twenty years before! When the doctors were asked to explain this phenomenon, they said that since they only attended emergency cases, they could invest their best energies into the care of the truly ill people. When they didn’t have to listen to the day-to-day, presumably unimportant complaints of the average patients, they could devote themselves to a greater saving of life.

That’s not such a bad answer. I’ve been saying right along that what we need is a perpetual doctors’ strike. If doctors reduced their involvement with people by ninety percent and attended only emergencies, there’s no doubt in my mind that we’d be better off.

We just can’t get away from the fact that a disturbing amount of doctors’ energies are devoted to death-oriented activities. I tell my students that to succeed in Modern Medicine all you have to do is look for some field that encourages death or thinking about death and you’ve got a brilliant future ahead of you. As far as Modern Medicine is concerned, death is a growth industry. You can’t pick up a medical journal without reading the latest on: contraception, abortion, sterilization, genetic counseling and screening, amniocentesis, zero population growth, “death with dignity,” “quality of life,” and euthanasia. All of these activities have as their purpose the prevention of termination of life. Things such as mass genetic screening and compulsory amniocentesis with the option of abortion are now merely at the talking stage, but talk is a prelude to action.

In our rush to embrace these activities -- with enthusiasm I can describe only as religious fervor -- we are duped into both ignoring their dehumanizing effects and their lack of scientific justification. They are sacraments, after all. Sacraments of death.

For example, thanks to Modern Medicine’s sanction, what were once called sins are no longer sins at all. Thus, homosexuality is now called an “alternative lifestyle.” This and other forms of non-procreative sexual activity are encouraged, promoted, indeed glorified. In my lifetime I’ve seen society’s attitudes towards masturbation, for example, go through three distinct phases. When I was young masturbation was sinful and dangerous. It either made you blind or grew hair on your palms. Of course, scientists didn’t even try to determine whether or not this was true. Later, when I was in college, masturbation was neutral, it was neither harmful nor good. Now, however, we’re in the third phase of masturbation. Not only is masturbation OK, but it’s normal, healthy, and good. If you don’t do it, there’s something wrong with you. And if you don’t know how to do it, there are people who will teach you -- especially if you’re a woman.

I explain this radical shift in attitude within the space of a generation by relating it to society’s attitude towards population. When having children was good, masturbation was less than good. When the tide turned and having children became bad, masturbation, homosexuality -- and anything else that helped us not to have more children became good!

We are programmed for life very deeply in our natures. Our strongest urges are procreative and life-supporting, but these are the instincts and activities that Modern Medicine attacks. Thus, dangerous forms of birth control -- abortion on demand, masturbation, and homosexuality, all non-procreating forms of sexual activity -- result in diminution of population growth. These “alternative lifestyles” which do not promote life are acceptable, but things people have been doing for thousands of years to promote life are not.

The only “alternative lifestyle” that is not acceptable is any one which precludes participation in the Church. It’s a sin if you have your baby at home, but not a sin if you have an abortion. It’s a sin if you honor a foreign god by going to a chiropractor, but it’s not a sin if you go to one of the shrines of Modern Medicine for a sex change. Any biological stress these activities may have on the body and soul are ignored.

What is wrong here is that the Church exaggerates its encouragement of non-life activities while it exaggerates its contempt for life. The common sense, more human appoach is trampled. Modern Medicine, for example, says that any woman should have the right to an abortion. Whether or not this is politically beneficial, it’s important to recognize that biologically there may be more to it than simple freedom of choice. Some traditional ethical systems, such as Jewish law, mandate abortions when the life of the mother is at stake. A judgment is made that the life of the mother is more important than the life of the infant. But in the way Modern Medicine encourages abortion, it doesn’t consider life at all, either the mother’s or the infant’s -- its main interest is its own technology.

One of the sacred catastrophes of the past twenty years is the Church’s promotion of birth control at all costs. Here the difference between a moral sin and a biological “sin” is most clear. Birth control, per se, is not morally wrong. Certain methods of birth control, however, are biologically wrong in that their effects on the life of the user are negative. Short of refusing to deal with harmful methods such as the Pill and the IUD, if doctors acknowledged to every woman the real dangers involved and allowed every woman to make an informed choice, there would be little problem. But doctors never allow a patient to choose or not choose a procedure based on a balancing of the biological risk with how much a woman wishes to endanger her life. They simply ignore biology; they ignore the fact that a partlcular procedure may do more harm than good. So profound is their devotion to this ignorance, the only explanation is that the deep purpose of Modern Medicine is being loyally served through it.

When I was a medical student in the late 1940s and early 1950s, I thought medicine was concerned almost exclusively with saving and prolonging life. I hardly remember any serious discussion about what is now referred to as “the quality of dying.” I learned to treat death by denying it, by maintaining hope. Denial is supposed to be a bad word nowadays, despite the fact that a number of research studies show that patients with cancer and other serious diseases seem to live longer when they deny and fight their disease than when they “accept” it. In the British Medical Journal (Novemder 22, 1975) there appeared this tidbit: “Evidence from research certainly supports the view that psychological factors can play a part in determining the length of survival. Weisman and Wordan recently compared patients with cancer who survived for longer than survival statistics would suggest with others whose death occured sooner than predicted. They found that motivation to survive, as expressed in ‘rising resentment’ as the illness progressed and a positive attitude to treatment, was associated with longer survival. Conversely, patients who expressed a wish to die or a ready acceptance of death died sooner than expected. Similarly, several studies suggest that patients with coronary thrombosis who are prone to depression or become depressed after an infarction are less likely to survive than those who are not melancholic. All in all it seems that attitudes of determination and hope prolong life, whereas acceptance of death or attitudes of gloom and despondency shorten it.”

I was recently at a medical meeting at which a doctor who treats cancer patients with chemotherapeutic agents admitted that as interested as he was in saving lives and in discovering new methods of treatment, he was even more interested in making sure his patients’ deaths occurred with a certain degree of “acceptance and peace.” He and his staff spend a major part of their time and resources counseling dying patients, preferably in the absence of their families. It’s no mystery to me why these Salesmen of Death insist on “counseling” patients in the absence of the patient’s family, the family’s whole purpose, and therefore its influence, is for life, not death.

This doctor -- and many like him who make a study of death -- operate under the assumption that a person should accept death. In effect, they “treat” the patient to death, since they can’t treat him or her to life. They assert that denying death is in some way mentally unhealthy. Thanatologists claim that if you don’t talk about death, face it, and resign yourself to it, you’ll make yourself sick!

As far as I’m concerned, thanatologists and everyone else who counsel resignation to death have it backwards. A doctor who tells a patient that there’s no hope for his or her life is not doing that patient any good at all. First of all, the doctor is making an enormous assumption n presuming his power is the only one that can restore the patient’s health. Telling a patient he or she is going to die is tantamount to a curse. The patient believes it so it comes true.

We are just beginning to find out how the mind can affect the body’s own healing powers. Of course, doctors will be the last to acknowledge that the body has significant power to heal itself. But you can see how deserving optimism should be the first priority. Rather than pronouncing the patient’s doom, the doctor should help the patient plan his or her future. It’s one thing to inform a patient that he or she suffers from a deadly disease and that the magic of the doctor doesn’t go far enough to do any good. But it’s another thing entirely to tell a patient that the end is inevitable.

Of course if the doctor were to admit that he had no power over the patient’s affiction but that other powers -- such as those of other healers of the patient’s own -- may, he would lose his control over the patient. Furthermore, since Modern Medicine’s rites are not only growing less and less successful but also more and more deadly, it makes good business sense to prepare the patient for the inevitable results of the doctor’s work. Once death is accepted as “just another part of life,” it can be given its proper place on the hospital menu.

Modern Medicine is now better geared for killing people than it is for healing them. You see this best at both ends of life, where life is more delicate and death is closer and easier to ascribe to “natural causes.” It’s becoming increasingly dangerous, for instance; for a Mongoloid newborn with an intestinal obstruction to reside in a nursery. Though the obstruction is surgically correctable, there is an increasing likelihood that he will be deprived of care and allowed to die. The same goes for retarded children in state hospitals who are unfortunate enough to fall seriously ill.

At the other end of life, “undesirables” are allowed or even encouraged to die. Old people in nursing homes, despite the flowery advertisements accompanying these places, are put there to keep them out of “real” people’s way. They’re put there to die, and they generally take the hint. It doesn’t take much to recognize a curse when it’s directed at you.

Doctors actually encourage old people to get out of the way and die. Their attitudes towards old people and their problems amount to a sentence of long, slow death. Such phrases as “You’ll just have to learn to live with it,” and “What do you expect at your age?” tell the old person that his or her problems are to be expected. Consequently, old people expect them. And get them. Because the doctor doesn’t admit that the problems usually associated with old age are not inevitable at all and that they can be prevented or dealt with naturally, the patient is wide open for the whole array of palliative -- and deadly -- drugs. In cultures not yet under the death swoon of Modern Medicine, people live to advanced age in full possession of their capacities. But Modern Medicine renders old people incapable, and rather than prolonging their lives, it just makes dying longer and harder.

I’ve always believed that if you want to find out what a society’s really all about, look at its mottoes and what it claims to prohibit. Look on a coin and you’ll see “In God We Trust.” Now if there’s a society that trusts less in God than the United States, I haven’t heard of it. The motto of the medical profession has always been “First Do No Harm.” As we’ve already seen, that motto is respected more in the breach than anywhere else, but it serves a very useful purpose. The medical profession can hide a lot of atrocities under the guise of doing no harm.

The first thing to change when one cultural force overcomes another and takes over a society is language. When you control a people’s way of describing things, you control their way of dealing with them.

We have a population “explosion,” which makes a lot of babies sound ominous and harmful. We have pregnancy “planning” or pregnancy “termination” to make abortion sound clinically detached from life and death. We say “euthanasia” instead of “mercy killing,” which somehow was too accurate a description even with the nice adjective. The most outrageous attempt to hide reality by changing vocabulary is the term “death with dignity.” Now, death is all right under any circumstances as long as it’s with “dignity.”

The funny thing is that in the situations in which this term is most often employed, the act of “pulling the plug” removes all possibility of dignity from the event.

To me, all these death-oriented activities are frighteningly reminiscent of the Nazis. The medical profession in Germany drifted into these same activities prior to World War II. German doctors willingly got rid of “useless people” such as severely retarded and deformed children. Liberalized abortion and euthanasia were followed by the “death with dignity” of old people -- meaning they were allowed and encouraged to die. Later came the murder of gypsies; then the rounding up of anti-Nazis and Jews. The Nazis were fighting a Holy War, too.

As Modern Medicine’s War on Life intensifies, hospitals are rapidly becoming unable to handle the overload. So we have to build “death centers” called -- again, using a very comfortable sounding word to hide the reality hospices. Death counselors are also moving into hospitals, which I’ve already identified as Temples of Doom, to prepare patients for the institution’s major product. Of course, this is nothing if not good marketing strategy. What you have to do to sell anything is create a desire and an acceptance of your product. Since the product of Modern Medicine is death, we are “softened” to the idea of non-life first. Once we are alienated from our own instincts for life, accepting dehumanizing, dangerous procedures is easier. Finally, with only a purgatory of drug-induced semi-life to look forward to, we welcome the salesman of death when they come to counsel us out of this world.

When that moment comes, the full attention of the Church is directed at your participation in the Central Mystery. Like the Catholic Mass, which celebrates the Resurrection, your death in the intensive care unit is the supreme sacrament. So sacred are the preliminary ceremonies that you are separated from your family, just as I’m sure sacrificial victims of earlier religions were kept apart from relatives who might interfere with the machinations of the priests. Instead of holding the hand of a family member, you’re connected to the finest and most advanced electronic gadgetry. At last, deep within the Temple’s Holy of Holies, you fulfill the Promise and commune with the God of Modern Medicine.

When a new religion wants to discredit an old religion, it does so by blaming the problems of the people on the old gods. Modern Medicine says your disease is caused by a virus. Who created the virus? The old God. And so on. It’s not you or we who are causing your disease, it’s natural things such as viruses and bacteria and the tendency of cells to divide irregularly and heredity and .... The old God is responsible -- the God of Life.

Modern Medicine can free you from the bonds of the old God. Modern Medicine can give you a new God that can counterract all the pesky forms of life that get in the way, suchas bacteria, viruses, cells dividing out of control, inconvenient fetuses, deformed or retarded children, and old people.

Fortunately, the same natural processes that Modern Medicine attacks appear to have the weight of history on their side. If you examine the major religious groups that have survived the longest -- the Jewish, Christian, Moslem and Oriental religions -- all have ethical systems which are not too different. They favor large families and respect of older generations by younger -- within limits, of course. All judge a society by its treatment of marginal groups such as premature babies, retarded children, and old people. They discourage non-procreative forms of sexual activity. Of course, there are differences among them, but not as formidable as their differences from religions that are death-oriented and which haven’t survived. Ancient Greek and Roman religions favored population control, abortion, infanticide, killing of old people, homosexuality and other non-procreative forms of sex -- all in the name of quality of life.

Yet quality of life is very simply a function of quantity of life. The reason I’m interested in long life is that I hope to have many grandchildren. The quality of my life depends on how many grandchildren I get to see grow up. I want to live as long as I can. If I’m truly alive as long as I’m living, then the quality of my life will take care of itself. I won’t need a gang of professionals around to counsel me on the quality of my life. Of course, the professionals -- led by the doctors -- are aggressive in their intrusion into the quality and quantity of our lives. What we need to do is find doctors who are life-oriented, doctors who share our regard for life and who use their intelligence and skills to protect it.

That, unfortunately, may be the hardest job of all.

The Devil’s Priest: Chapter 7