Confessions of a Medical Heretic

by

Robert Mendelsohn

If This is Preventive Medicine,
I’ll Take My Chances with Disease

A fellow doctor once wrote and asked me how the medical profession “might play an inspirational and practical role in the quest for world peace.”

My answer was: “Go out of business.”

We’ve already seen what a disaster curative medicine has become, but so-called preventive medicine is just as dangerous. In fact, the juggernaut of Modern Medicine’s drive for power over our lives is preventive medicine. It’s no secret what mayhem power-hungry institutions -- including governments -- can get away with hiding behind the intention of “preventing” trouble. Modern Medicine gets away with even more. For example, the Defense Department explains the billions it spends by forwarding the old “we’re protecting you from camels” routine. Though a great portion of those billions is no doubt wasted money, at least the Defense Department can point to the virtual absence of camels as evidence that some of the money is spent on worthwhile activities.

Modern Medicine can’t even make that claim. There’s no way anybody can justify the billions of dollars we spend every year on “health care.” We’re not getting healthier as the bill gets higher, were getting sicker. Whether or not we have national health insurance is, at best, irrelevant and, at worst, one of the most dangerous decisions facing us in the years ahead. Because even if all doctors’ services were free, disease and disability would not decrease.

I wonder if we can really expect anyone to ask whether more of what we already have too much of will do us any good. Modern Medicine has succeeded in teaching us to equate medical care with health. It is that equation which has the potential to destroy our bodys, our families, our communities, and our world.

We’ve already seen how much of what Modern Medicine describes as “preventive” medicine is not only ineffective but dangerous. The sacrament of the regular physical exam exposes you to the whole range of dangerous and ineffective procedures. From this “act of faith” you receive the absolution of the priest -- if you’re lucky. First you have to give him a full confession, a complete and honest history, including things your wife and best friends don’t even know. Then he’ll pass the ceremonial stethoscope over your vital parts -- a stethoscope that has a good chance of not working properly. The doctor will check your orifices, further the humiliation by having you give a bottle of urine to the nurse, hit you ceremoniously on the knee with a rubber hammer, and pronounce you saved! Or write out your penance in Latin.

Or -- if your sins have been legion -- send you to a specialist for really sophisticated punishments.

Screening progams could be called a Comedy of Errors if the results weren’t so often less than funny. The tuberculin test, for example was originally very valuable as a method of identifying people who required further investigation for tuberculosis. But the current very low incidence of tuberculosis means that the test has instead become used as a method of “preventive management.” This means that in order to prevent the possible one case out of 10,000 or more, potent and dangerous drugs such as INH are given for months and months to people who are so-called “primary reactors.” There is also considerable psychological damage that can result when a person becomes a social pariah because friends and neighbors find out that he or she is a positive reactor. Doctors now have to caution mothers against letting neighbors and even relatives know that a child has had a positive tuberculin test, since the test doesn’t usually indicate communicability in a child. If you follow the sounds of medical- governmental drum-beating in favor of a ”preventive” procedure, you’ll more often than not find yourself in the midst of one of the Church’s least safe and effective sacraments. For instance, with some immunizations the danger in taking the shot may outweigh that of not taking it!

Diphtheria, once an important cause of disease and death, has all but disappeared. Yet immunizations continue. Even when a rare outbreak of diphtheria does occur, the immunization can be of questionable value. During a 1969 outbreak of diphtheria in Chicago, four of the sixteen victims had been “fully immunized against the disease,” according to the Chicago Board of Health. Five others had received one or more doses of the vaccine, and two of these people had tested at full immunity. In another report of diphtheria cases, three of which were fatal, one person who died and fourteen out of twenty-three carriers had been fully immunized.

The effectiveness of the whooping cough vaccine is hotly debated all over the world. Only about half of its recipients benefit, and the possibility of high fevers, convulsions, and brain damage is too high to ignore. So great are the dangers that many public health authorities now prohibit the use of the vaccine after age six. Meanwhile, whooping cough itself has almost completely disappeared.

Whether or not the mumps vaccine is advisable is also in doubt. While the vaccine definitely lowers the incidence of mumps in those who receive it, it does so at the risk of exposing them to the dangers of mumps later on after the immunity has worn off.

Furthemore, diseases such as mumps, measles, and German measles -- for which vaccines have been developed over the past few years -- dont’t have the dread implications of smallpox, tetanus, and diphtheria. Contrary to popular belief, measles cannot cause blindness. Photophobia, which is merely a sensitivity to light, can be treated as parents years ago did: by pulling down the windowshades. Measles vaccine is supposed to prevent measles encephalitis, which is said to occur in one out of 1,000 cases. Any doctor who has had decades of experience with measles knows that while the incidence may be that high among children who live under poverty and malnutrition, among well nourished middle and upper class children the incidence is one in 10,000 or even one in 100,000. Meanwhile, the vaccine itself is associated with encephalopathy in one case per million and more frequently with other neurologic and sometimes fatal conditions such as ataxia (discoordination), retardation, hyperactiviy, aseptic meningitis, seizures, and hemiparesis (paralysis of one side of the body).

German measles or rubella vaccine remains controversial in that there is little consensus regarding the age at which people should be immunized. Vaccine for rubella may also do more harm than good, since there is a risk of arthritis arising from the drug which, although temporary, may last for months. In the United States, rubella vaccine is given to children rather than to women contemplating pregnancy. It’s debatable whether this does any good in protecting unborn fetuses since the rate of deformed babies born to mothers with obvious, diagnosed rubella varies from one year to the next, from one epidemic to the next, and from one study to the next.

Immunization isn’t the only factor determining whether or not a person contracts a disease. Numerous other factors such as nutrition, housing, and sanitation all figure strongly. Doubts persist as to whether the whooping cough (pettussis) vaccine has really had much to do with the decline in that disease -- as well as to whether the vaccine would pass Food and Drug Administration standards if introduced today.

Sometimes the vaccine itself can trigger the disease. In September, 1977, Jonas Salk testified along with some other scientists that of a handful of polio cases which had occurred in the United States since the early 1970s most were likely the byproduct of the live polio vaccine which is in standard use here. In Finland and Sweden, where the killed virus is used almost exclusively, there have been no cases of polio in ten years. No one who lived through the 1940s and saw children in iron lungs, saw a president confined to his wheelchair, or who was forbidden from using public beaches for fear of catching polio, can forget the frightening spectre raised in our minds. Today, when the man credited with stamping out polio points to the vaccine as the source of the handful of cases which do exist, it’s high time to question what we are gaining by using the vaccine on an entire population.

The mad vehemence of Modern Medicine is nowhere more evident than in the yearly infuenza vaccine farce. I can never think about flu shots without remembering a wedding I once attended. Strangely enough, no grandparents were among the participants and no one seemed to be over age 60. When I finally asked where all the old folks were, I was told they had all received their flu shots a few days before. They were all at home recovering from the shots’ ill effects!

The entire flu shot effort resembles some massive roulette game, since from one year to the next it’s anybody’s guess whether the strains immunized against will be the strains that are epidemic. We were all afforded a peek at the real dangers of flu vaccines when in 1976, the Great Swine Flu Fiasco revealed, under close government and media surveillance, 565 cases of Guillain-Barre paralysis resulting from the vaccine and thirty “unexplained deaths” of older persons within hours after receiving the shot. I wonder what would be the harvest of disaster if we kept as close a watch on the effects of all the other flu shot campaigns. Dr. John Seal, of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Disease, says, “We have to go on the basis that any and all flu vaccines are capable of causing Guillain-Barre syndrome.”

Again, besides children and old people, women are more vulnerable and, therefore, more often abused by the medical profession. No good evidence exists that screening for breast cancer does anybody any good. Yet doctors have whipped the populace into such a frenzy over breast cancer ”prevention” that what I can only call “Alice -in- Wonderlandish” events start to occur. Consider the suggestion that the danger of breast cancer and other female-associated cancers is so great in some families that surgical removal of breasts and ovaries should be performed as a preventive measure! Another example of this sort of “preventive surgery” is the current practice of vaginectomy (removal of the vagina) in adult women who have no symptoms but whose mothers received DES during their pregnancies. Women should be very careful what they tell their doctors about themselves or their family. You never know what he might want to remove from your body in order to “protect” you. Men, on the other hand, probably don’t have to be so careful, since doctors will never start surgically removing penises to protect men from anything.

Of course, besides the fact that these “preventive measures” are ineffective and harmful, doctors do further harm by withholding information that might really prevent disease. I’m thinking of the four causes of breast cancer which all women should know about. I’d be willing to wager that very few of the women who do know these four causes found out about them from their doctor. The four ingredients in the recipe for breast cancer are: small number of children or no children at all, bottle-feeding rather than breastfeeding, use of the Pill, and use of post- menopausal hormones such as Premarin.

Another campaign carried on against women in the name of “prevention” is the widely promulgated notion that women over thirty shouldn’t have children. When I was in medical school, I was taught that women should not have babies if they’re older than forty-five. By the time I was an intern, it was down to forty. When I was a resident, thirty-eight. Ten years ago it was down to thirty-five. And now it’s hovering between thirty and thirty-two. The reason usually given by doctors for restrictions on the age of a mother is that something happens to the eggs of a woman as she gets older, they get worn out and tired. So we have “tired egg syndrome causing deformities in babies. You never hear anything about “tired sperms.”

Actually, age has nothing to do with whether a mother gives birth to a deformed baby. A study at Johns Hopkins revealed that the incidence of dental and medical x-rays in mothers who have given birth to Mongoloid children is seven times as high as in mothers of comparable age who have given birth to normal children. This study has been backed up by other studies, too, so the real cause of deformed babies is associated with age only in that older women -- if they haven’t been careful -- have exposed themselves to more medical, dental, therapeutic, and largely useless x-rays.

At the other end of life, women are told not to have babies if they’re too young! Teenage pregnancies have a bad reputation, but again, the real threat has nothing to do with the age of the mother. Teenage pregnancies get their bad reputation from the fact that most of them occur in poor women. If a middle or upper class, well-nourished and cared for teenager gets pregnant, she has as good a chance -- maybe better -- as anyone of having a healthy baby.

Modern Medicine’s brand of preventive medicine is so dangerous that we really should abandon the term. There’s nothing wrong with the idea that people should take care of themselves so that they won’t get sick, but Modern Medicine’s concept of prevention is as far from that as you can get. Preventive medicine performed by the Church is as oppressive and dangerous as “curative” medicine -- maybe more so, since doctors use the shield of preventive medicine to hide any number of truly aggressive procedures.

In the first place, Modern Medicine does not address itself to health. Most doctors don’t know how to describe a healthy person. The most they can come up with is,“”this is normal.” Furthermore, since the doctor can run the patient through an incredible arsenal of tests, the limits of what is “normal” are practically all-exclusive. There’s always going to be something wrong with you, because the doctor doesn’t get anything out of the situation if you’re “normal,” or healthy.

Public health doctors were once held by their colleagues in very low esteem. They dealt with sanitation and other basic items that tended to keep people away from doctors. However, since public health doctors have adopted screening as their primary activity, they’re now held in very high esteem because they are the procurers of Modern Medicine. They deliver patients instead of keep them away.

Modern Medicine doesn’t believe that a person can do anything about staying healthy, since doctors believe that disease is just a curse inflicted anonymously and warded off not by concrete actions but by symbolic sacraments that bear no relation to the real world. And because Modern Medicine recognizes no slns but those against its laws, everyone comes into the world with the original sin of potential disease. Doctors assume you’re sick until you prove otherwise. You cannot be cleansed merely by “claiming” to be healthy and symptom-free. You have to go through the exam, the proof of your immunizations, and the “confession” of your and your family’s history. Doctors make judgments just like other priests. When you are questioned during the “confession,” and asked whether you’ve ever had venereal disease, do you know what the doctor writes down if you say never had VD? He writes: “Patient denies VD.” There are no other diseases that doctors are taught to write “patient denies.”

If a doctor practices real preventive medicine his patients are going to be healthier and will therefore require fewer visits to his office. You can see right away that this is as contrary as you can get to Modern Medicine’s idea. The Church is primarily interested in its authority, so anything that lessens it -- such as fewer visits to the doctor -- is taboo. Modern Medicine thrives on disease, not health. The more frightened people become of all the disease ”out there” waiting to strike them down randomly, the more susceptible they are to the come-ons and put-downs of Modern Medicine.

One of the mechanisms doctors use to enhance the general frenzy is the Blame The Victim game. It’s your foult if you’re sick, not because of disease-producing habits you developed and refused to exchange for health-producing ones, but because you didn’t receive the sacraments of Modern Medicine soon enough or at all. Though a doctor will never give up and declare a patient “in God s hands” until he has exhausted his supply of potions, mutilations, and sacriftces, a patient sometimes goes all the way to God sooner than expected. Even when the worst occurs, doctors never admit that it was the sacrament that killed. Using their semantic privilege they turn it around and make it the victim’s fault. He was too far gone.

If you believe in Modern Medicine, you believe that you never really can expect health. You never really know what to expect, since disease is a random process. You live in a neurotic state of tension, fear, and guilt, anesthetized against your responsibilities and powers. You are primed to be passively taken over by the nearest will stronger than your own.

The fact that patients often don’t take their medicine drives doctors up the wall. Patient compliance is a very big research field, because Modern Medicine wants to improve its methods of getting patients to do what it tells them. The ideal would be a constant electronic monitoring system that would allow the doctor to keep tabs on the “compliance” of every patient, with perhaps an optional electronic buzzer or “cattle” prod to remind the patient to take his medicine. Until this kind of enforcement of doctor’s orders becomes socially acceptable, Modern Medicine has to satisfy itself with keeping the flock in line through more conventional, indeed medieval, methods.

When enough people are radicalized by too good a look at a religion, that religion goes on the defensive and institutes a theology. To prevent heretics from unsettling a comfortable status quo, church fathers freeze the religion’s beliefs and practices and invent or exaggerate the importance of already existing mytholggy. By harking back to previous successes, the doctor-priest glorifies contemporary practices by giving them the aura of divine revelation. Then, to protect the priest’s interpretation of the divine, Modern Medicine declares itself infallible.

Argue with that and you’re a heretic. Anything outside the narrow sight of Church Law, any treatment not part of standard procedure, is termed unorthodox, thereby banishing it to a netherworld of suspicion.

I’ve already discussed how Modern Medicine neutralizes effective preventive action by ignoring true causes of disease. The same mechanism by which we are taught that heart disease is a matter of chance rather than diet and lifestyle is also used to divert our gaze from other causes of disease, namely, political causes.

Most of the diseases which are killing us nowadays are the result of “pollution” of our physical, political, economic, community, family, and individual psychologcal environments. True preventive medicine cannot ignore these issues when addressing a problem of health, yet doctors declare the problems strictly medical, thus solvable through the sacraments of the Church of Modern Medicine.

One of my favorite examples of this process is lead poisoning. Doctors are taught in medical school that the cause of lead poisoning is pica. Pica is defined as any abnormal appetite for non-food substances. In this case, the offending substance is lead. Where do the children get the lead? From windowsills and various parts of a building where paint is peeling. As long as we believe that, we don’t recognize the root cause of lead poisoning, which is that the child is eating paint off the windowsills because there’s no food in the refrigerator. Even in the days of interior lead-based paint, middle and upper class children never got lead poisoning. Why should they eat paint? They can go to the refrigerator when they’re hungry!

If we are allowed to see the real cause af lead poisoning as hungar, we either must write off the children in danger or decide to address the problem at its roots, since the medical treatment of lead poisoning is mostly ineffective and often dangerous. Once you decide to get at the roots of the problem of lead poisoning, you open a closet full of medical-political skeletons. After you look at hunger, you have to look at lead in the air from fuel-burning, lead in toothpaste, and lead in baby formula. It’s so much simpler to blame the mother for letting the child suck on paint. Of course, it also makes the political climate much more amenable to the growth of Modern Medicine.

Medical sanction and promotion of birth control at all costs and small families doesn’t serve any proven medical purpose, but it sure serves the interests of the industry- government complex. Once again, women and children are on the wrong end of the process. Many women must work in an outside job merely to make ends meet in the household. That strikes me as a political-economic problem more than anything else, since the head of a household -- man or woman -- should be able to support the family without the other adult having to go to work. Facing that problem requires taking on some of the basic inequities of our society. So we call in the doctors to medicalize the situation. Since large families require a mother (or father) to stay around the house longer before going to seek employment, doctors declare small families better than large ones. Then, doctors supply the apparatus needed to keep families small and put less strain on the institutions that like to maintain economic and political control, institutions that would have to yield some power if it suddenly became an issue that one wage-earner per family was simply not enough anymore.

Large families require more time and money, but they also provide a support for their members, which ultimately makes them more independent of the government and the industrial employer. If a man has brothers, sisters, aunts, uncles, and parents close-by, he can count on their support if conditions on the job make working more unhealthy than not working. But when the family is small and isolated from relatives, there is no such cushion at home. The nuclear family best serves the interests of the employer, since the worker has enough responsibility to require employment, but not enough to motivate him to exceed the limits acceptable to industry, When the home is strong, however, job, hospital, and government have less chance of appropriating the will of the people. Doctors promise a woman ”liberation” from her biology, but deliver her into the hands of far less considerate slavers. Doctors don’t really address the problem of what causes cancer. They declare a ”War on Cancer” which is a futile assault on symptoms. Identifying the pollution of our air, water, food, and lifestyle would require the same kind of political action Modern Medicine mustered to elevate immunizations, fluoridation, and silver nitrate to the level of Holy Waters enforced by law.

Because Modern Medicine is the Church of Death, the stronger its influence on society, the worse off all human elements will be. A public order brought about through the tools of Modern Medicine will resemble the peace of the cemetery. Wherever Modern Medicine gains significant influence in the life of a community, that community is more often than not harmed rather than helped. Government food programs dictated by nutritional experts, for example, assault minority communities by forcing them to eat “standardized” American food, which may be intolerable to their habits as well as their biology. In school lunch programs and nutrition programs for older people, little attention is paid to cultural, familial, or religious food traditions. Modern Medicine simply says that everybody needs the Big Four: vegetables and fruits, grains, meats, and dairy products. We know, of course, that many cultures cannot tolerate cows milk because of enzymatic deficiencies. We also know that traditional cultural diets are quite nutritious, since they have developed over hundreds of years of adaptation. American nutritional habits, however, are dictated by a variety of considerations, some of which are healthy, but most of which are not.

Communities also are damaged by mass screening programs designed to isolate carriers of certain racially- associated diseases. Screening for Tay-Sachs disease has been controversial within the Jewish community because of its effects on the morale and behavior of anyone who is identified as a carrier. The same is true within the black community, which must endure the invasion of community health officers screening for sickle cell anemia.

The first ingredient in my recipe for turning a healthy community into a slum is to build a hospital right in the middle of it. Once the hospital has established a beachhead, Modern Medicine can launch its first attack, which is against the family. If I were out to destroy family ties among the poor, the first thing I would do is hospitalize them for childbirth and make sure they gave their children formula instead of breastmilk. At the University of Illinois Hospital about thirty years ago, ninety-nine percent of the new mothers were breastfeeding. Today it’s down to one percent. Next I would institute family planning in poor neighborhoods. I’d hire a whole bunch of poor people to teach contraception to other poor people. The federal govenment started to do all this twenty-five years ago with the intentions of preventing illegitimacy and venereal disease. What has been the result after twenty-five years? The poor people have more illegitimacy and venereal disease than ever before, and family ties are weaker.

The next thing I want to do, once I’ve softened them up with forays of infant formula and family planning, is to make the inhabitants of poor neighborhoods -- black people -- feel inferior. So I institute a sickle cell anemia screening program which identifies one out of seven blacks as carriers. Then I reassure the carriers just as I reassure people with functional heart murmurs, that it doesn’t mean anything to be a carrier. Of course, they don’t believe it for a minute. They are convinced they’ve got “bad blood,” so they have to be careful about whom they marry, and they let it weigh them down for the rest of their lives.

So much for the poor neighborhoods.

Doctors make sure other segments of society remain poor, too. Discrimination against old people begins with the “curse” on them, which says they will necessarily decline in all talents and abilities which make people worthwhile members of society. Thus medically cursed, the old person is forced to retire and become a ward of the state, or -- better still -- a ward of the Church as an inmate of a rest home.

Of course, the ultimate goal is that we would all become wards of Modern Medicine. Doctors exhibit a dangerous tendency to take advantage of every opportunity to force individuals to do things just for the sake of doing them, If doctors didn’t want more and more power over the individual, why would more and more medical procedures be showing up as laws? Why should you have to fight with a doctor in order to have your baby at home, breastfeed it, send it to school or treat its illnesses in any manner you believe effective?

I’m not too surprised that normally alert and powerful organizations like the labor unions and the American Civil Liberties Union haven’t responded to this threat against our freedom. They fail to acknowledge the problem because they subscribe to the religion of Modern Medicine. Instead of saying that every person is entitled to not have an x-ray or an abortion, they say the opposite. They won’t notice when the Church requires first older mothers, then all mothers, to submit to amniocentesis to rule out birth defects. They won’t notice when the Church forces these mothers to have abortions, either. And when your turn before the Medical Authorities comes up -- who knows what for? Maybe you’ll need preventive surgery -- you’ll stand alone.

Whenever a revolutionary group adopts a word, the reactionary group adopts it. This is precisely what Modern Medicine has done with the term “preventive medicine.” By making a distinction between preventive medicine and other forms of medicine, the Church controls the concept and legitimizes its own obsession with crisis medicine.

If they want to call what they’re doing preventive medicine, let them. But let’s not call anything we do preventive medicine. On the other hand, if they want to label revolutionary procedures according to their own interests, that’s OK, too. You can be referred to as child abuser for encouraging mothers to have their babies at home. If necessary, instead of fighting over the words, you should be perfectly willing to be identified as a child abuser. If somebody says that breastfeeding ties down mothers and increases the child’s dependency, say you’re in favor of mothers being tied down and of children being dependent on their mothers. If anybody says that people who want their food to be pure and natural are nuts, faddists, and extremists, refer to yourself and your friends as nuts, fadists, and extremists.

Modern Medicine may label unorthodox doctors as quacks; maybe what we need is more “quacks.” Words aren’t important. Action is. And the kind of action that’s required is nothing less than the destruction of the Church of Modern Medicine.

Across the country there are hundreds of brilliant people performing research on ways to fight and prevent killer diseases such as cancer and heart disease, but because their ways aren’t orthodox, they must tread on very light feet if they don’t want to be hounded out of town by the Church. Witness the denial of funds to Nobel Laureate Linus Pauling, who simply wanted the National Cancer Institute to grant a modicum of funds to find out if ascorbic acid really provided some benefit for cancer patients -- which his earlier research indicated. Witness the fact that more than one doctor I have spoken to has admitted that he would use outlawed cancer therapies on himself or his family. Is this the kind of system you can work within?

People should work to liberate themselves completely from Modern Medicine. It will take an army of heretics with firm resolve to be of Modern Medicine and with the courage, cunning, and resources to reconstruct society’s attitudes towards health and disease.

What’s needed is a New Medicine, a new vision of medical care.

The New Medicine: Chapter 9