Confessions of a Medical Heretic by Robert S. Mendelsohn, MD

"I have written this book precisely to scare and to radicalize people before they are hurt. Let this book be your radicalizing experience."

The more I come into contact with modern medicine, the more I've watched my elders' lives intersect with it, the more I've observed the field's neomania and accompanying iatrogenic harms, the more I realize that everyone--everyone!--should read the following four books:

H. Gilbert Welch: Less Medicine, More Health

Ivan Illich: Medical Nemesis

Dr. John Sarno: The Divided Mind

Robert S. Mendelsohn: Confessions of a Medical Heretic

While reading these works, it will be worth noting your internal reaction to them. Do you agree? Do you strongly reject? Why? And what might this indicate about your attachment to your existing beliefs about medicine?

In Confession of a Medical Heretic, author Dr. Robert Mendelsohn frames up modern medicine as a type of religion, complete with priests (read: doctors), sacraments, rituals, and even churches (hospitals) and a sacred language (medical jargon). It's a helpful and rhetorically powerful metaphor, not least because a shocking number of medical interventions are done literally on faith--despite near-constant assertions that healthcare is "evidence-based."

And even though it came out in 1979 (!) this book rhymes strongly with the modern era. You'll see frequent examples of 1960s and 1970s-era drug trial malfeasance, you'll see the wholesale guinea-pigging of entire populations with therapies (see: DES, the Dalkon Shield, thalidomide, Vioxx, and of course opioids), and worst of all, you'll see the intransigence and denial of the medical establishment when confronted with its therapeutic missteps. It can take years, decades even, for the healthcare profession to accept that certain therapies should be discarded even in the face of clear evidence that the harms outweigh the benefits.

The author was red-pilled inside his own profession by two events in his medical career. One was the rollout of DES therapy and his profession's strident deafness and blindness to the harms that resulted from that therapy. The other was a very telling incident with a urology department that "needed" him to order more child cystoscopies. He wrote this book as a warning to the rest of us about the various cult-like practices and twisted ethics of the healthcare industry. 

The rhetoric in this book is bombastic, and it contains some harsh, cynical (and often highly useful) warnings, like this doozy: "Assume that if [your doctor] prescribes a drug, it's dangerous. There is no safe drug. Eli Lilly himself once said that a drug without toxic effects is no drug at all. Every drug has to be approached with suspicion." 

If you are a blue-pill believer in medicine this book will both offend you and likely cause you to dig in on your views. As such I'd recommend the more measured Less Medicine, More Health by H. Gilbert Welch. In order for a reader to extract value from this book, you'll already need to be at least partially red-pilled about modern medicine.

Notes: [Warning: do not read! These notes and copy-pastes from the text are far too long and almost certainly not worth your time.]

* Shocking how many things stay the same, how very little has changed. See for example the autonomic reaction of hospitals to an epidemic: they limit visiting hours! I guess the visitors are to blame?

* Another clear aggregate conclusion from this book is to be alert to the "system" of healthcare and its effects on you and your family: the way it separates people, causes them to lose their dignity, privacy and power; how it makes patients "compliant" through various techniques and practices, etc. It is a system: Be aware of how it works and the mechanisms by which it exercises its power over you, the patient.

 

11: DES as a catalyzing event for the author, he "believed" in the therapy and only later (and to his horror) learned of its atrocious harms. Likewise he saw/regrets O2 therapy for preemies, causing blindness in wealthy hospitals where it was frequently used, but only much later was the connection discovered. 

13-14: "I believe that more than ninety percent of Modern Medicine could disappear from the face of the earth--doctors, hospitals, drugs, and equipment--and the effect on our health would be immediate and beneficial."

15: "If you're unfortunate enough to be near a hospital when your last days on earth approach, your doctor will make sure your $500-a-day deathbed has all the latest electronic gear with a staff of strangers to hear your last words. But since those strangers are paid to keep your family away from you, you won't have anything to say. Your last sounds will be the electronic whistle on the cardiogram. Your relatives will participate: they'll pay the bill."

16: No wonder children are afraid of doctors. They know! Their instincts for real danger are uncorrupted. 

17: Modern medicine as "religion"

18:  "...there's no more dangerous activity than walking into a doctor's office, clinic or hospital unprepared. And by prepared I don't mean having your insurance forms filled out. I mean you have to get in and out alive and accomplish your mission. For that, you need appropriate tools, skills, and cunning."

Chapter 1: Dangerous Diagnosis

23: See the child with the harmless heart murmur: the doctor has a decision to make: do I tell the mother? The mother and the child may go their whole lives believing there is "something wrong." 

24: EKGs as unreliable even back when this book was published. "...more than half of the readings taken of healthy people were grossly abnormal." A good example of pathologizing an abnormality.

25: Re the unreliability of EEGs: "About twenty percent of people with clinically established convulsive disorders never have an abnormal EEG. Yet fifteen to twenty percent of perfectly normal people have abnormal EEGs!"

26-7: On risks of low level radiation from diagnostic tests (Xrays, etc)

28: Striking how so much of these risks were already known to (at least to dissident doctors) even back in 1979: "Hundreds of thousands of women are still lining up every year for breast x-rays, despite the well published scientific evidence that the mammography itself will cause more breast cancer than it will detect!"

29: On lab testing variability, erroneous results, botched tests, etc. Various custody chain issues to think about here. 

30: "My favorite study is one in which 197 out of 200 people were "cured" of their abnormalities simply by repeating their lab tests!"

31: On addiction to quantitative information from lab tests ["the light's better here" fallacy] which crowds out common sense and the qualitative judgment of truly good diagnosticians. 

34: Some of the examples here are literally revolting: see the cystoscopy example: where the doctor's clinic required mothers to be asked "Is your child toilet trained?" which drove higher numbers to get cystoscopy, which drove testing/teaching numbers for the urology department: "Then he told me more about what was going on. The real problem was that I was destroying his residency program because in order for a residency to be approved by the accrediting authorities, the residents have to perform a certain number of cystoscopies every year. In this case it was around 150. I was taking away his source of cystoscopies, and I got into trouble over it." Holy fuck.

35: "Because of the increased danger of being used for the doctor's own purposes, it's best to regard any doctor who does research or teaching as potentially harmful."

36: On regular checkups: "The fact that you're there in the first place means you don't know how you are or what is going on with you and that you want the doctor to tell you. So you're ready to give up a precious liberty, that of self identification. If he says you're sick, you're sick. If he says you're well, you're well. The doctor sets the limits of what's normal and abnormal, what's good and what's bad." 

37: "You have to consider--and beware of--the doctor's self interest. Doctors almost always get more reward and recognition for intervening than for not intervening. They're trained to intervene and do something rather than observe, wait, and take the chance the patient will get better all by himself or go to another doctor. As a matter of fact, one of my key pieces of subversive advice to medical students is this: To pass an exam, get through medical school, and retain your sanity, always choose the most interventionist answer on a multiple choice test and you're more likely to be right. ...This piece of advice has carried more of my students through various crucial examinations, including national boards and specialty exams, than any other lesson."

41-2: "You must realize, however, that the mere act of submitting to the diagnostic procedure implies that you're asking for treatment, at least as far as the doctor is concerned. In no uncertain terms, if you show up, you're asking for it... you've got to understand that the doctor's standards are different from yours and that his are no better."

43: "If you do have symptoms, if you are sick, then your first defense is to become more informed about your problem than the doctor."

44: Good questions here on determining the accuracy of lab tests, the accuracy of specific labs, etc. Useful in this era of oligopolized lab testing companies. 

44-45: "The most important way to subvert the diagnostic procedure for your own protection is to ask the doctor questions. In some cases, he'll answer the questions. That's the rare exception. In most cases, the doctor will get upset. Ask the questions anyway--short of getting yourself thrown out of his office. From his attitude and his responses, you can judge him as a human being and get an idea of his expertise."

46: Interesting point here on docility-inducing things done to you in a doctor's office or hospital: "Sometimes a doctor will have you placed on a cart to be wheeled into the x-ray room. This is a typical ploy to deliberately humiliate, depersonalize and demean perfectly capable men and women and transform them to docile, cooperative, accepting, manageable patients. If this ever happens to you, jump off the cart and stand on your own two feet."

48-49: On the necessity of lying to your doctor at times, on the need to "get the jump" on him (sometimes you'll say you don't want some test or procedure or whatever, but end up finding it's ordered for you anyway). "You have to know more about it than he does."

50: Seek out people with wisdom about your condition/situation: friends, family, etc. 

Chapter 2: Miraculous Mayhem

51 ff: On the miracles of penicillin and other antibiotics, but also their overprescribing and also occasional damage they do (rash/reaction, tetracycline teeth/bones, etc.) [note that tetracycline was commercialized in 1953 but the FDA didn't black box it until 1970]

56: "A person may need penicillin or some other antibiotic three or four times during his or her entire life, at times when the stakes are worth the risks."

58: "Of course, if drugs were merely products of medical science, dealing with them would be a matter of science, rationality, and common sense. But drugs aren't merely scientific--they're sacred."

60: Note all the contraindications and side-effects of Prednisone were known by 1979 when this book came out. (!!!)

61: [There's a much longer history of using humans as guinea pigs than I thought]: "A couple of years ago, the University of Chicago was slapped with a $77-million class-action suit filed on behalf of more than 1,000 women who unwittingly took part in a University experiment, some twenty-five years ago, with the synthetic hormone DES. This suit has special significance to me since I was then a student at the university's school of medicine and spent part of my time at Chicago Lying-In Hospital. I knew of the experiment, which tested the use of diethylstilbesterol in preventing threatened miscarriages. Being a conscientious medical student who trusted his school and believed his professors knew what they were doing I didn't even question the experiment. Of course neither I nor the 1,000 or so women should have trusted the school, because the professors didn't know what they were doing. In 1971, Dr. Arthur L. Herbst, then of Harvard Medical School, first announced that an alarmingly high rate of daughters of women who had taken DES were developing vaginal cancer. Later on we learned that male offspring of these women had an alarmingly high rate of genital malformations. And a statistically significant number of the women themselves were dying of cancer."

62: "Since the damage has already been done and doctors have been exposed as ignorant of the possible dangers of the drugs they use, all that can be done now is retreat into the sacred language and make it look like the mistake wasn't a mistake at all, the danger not a danger at all."

67: "Many people who receive high blood pressure medication are really borderline cases: their blood pressure isn't high enough to warrant a drug with the side effects of antihypertensives... There's little doubt that many patients don't need to lower their blood pressure at all, since as soon as they leave the danger zone of the doctor's office, their blood pressure returns to normal."

67: "One of the unwritten rules in Modern Medicine is always to write a prescription for a new drug quickly, before all its side effects have come to the surface."

69: "In the case of at least one antiarthritis drug, Naprosyn [this is the original brand name for Naproxen, also Alleve], the sacrifice has graduated into a farce. Though the FDA has discovered that Syntex, the drug's manufacturer, falsified records of tumors and animal deaths during the safety tests for its drug, the government is unable to remove the drug from the market without long and tedious proceedings."

69-71: Note how this author (in 1979!!) heavily criticized drugs for "hyperactive" children. "... the drugging of children as a means of control."

72: Modern Medicine's "Holy Waters": ocular silver nitrate for newborns, fluoridation, routine immunizations, etc. 

73: "when you hear the sound of hoofbeats, think of horses before zebras." (consider the most obvious, common sense cause.)

74: On drug trial malfeasance: "In a third of the reports checked by the FDA, the trial had not been carried out at all. In another third, the experimental protocol was not followed. In only a third of the tests could the results be considered scientifically worthwhile! [Journal of the American Medical Association, November 3, 1975]"

76-77: "...doctors have throughout the ages embraced the wrong ideas...medicine has always been hazardous to the majority of patients."

78:  Assume that if he prescribes a drug, it's dangerous. There is no safe drug. Eli Lilly himself once said that a drug without toxic effects is no drug at all. Every drug has to be approached with suspicion."

78-79: "Hundreds of drugs are marketed long before their effects on the fetus are known. Unless you want to donate your baby's welfare to science and be one of the first to find out a drug's effects, don't take any drug unless your life is at stake."

79: "That includes aspirin. Though it's been around for eighty or more years doctors still don't know how aspirin works."

79: "Before you take the first dose of any medication your doctor prescribes, you should make it your business to find out more about the drug than the doctor himself knows. Again, learning more about your situation than the doctor won't be all that difficult. Doctors get most of their information about drugs from advertisements and from detail [marketing] men and their pamphlet handouts." 

80: On the importance of reviewing the Physician's Desk Reference (PDR): this used to be forbidden literature for non-medical people, contains info on drug side effects, drug companies ward off liability by including information in it, etc.

81: See also the AMA's Drug Evaluations book: "The American Medical Association publishes a Drug Evaluations book which in some cases gives even more information than the PDR. For one thing, the AMA book has a list of cross-referenced symptoms in the back. You look up your symptom or your side effect and it will tell you which drugs are indicated or suspected."

82: See also Eric Martin's book "Hazards of Medications" "which give[s] lists of drugs which interact with a given drug."

83: Holy cow: "You should be aware of all the drugs for which the side effects are the same as the indications. This isn't as rare as you might think. For example, if you read the list of indications for Valium, and then read the list of side effects, you'll find that the lists are more or less interchangeable! Under the indications you'll find: anxiety, fatigue, depression, acute agitation, tremors, hallucinosis, skeletal muscle spasms. And under the side effects: anxiety fatigue, depression, acute hyperexcited states, tremors, hallucinations, increased muscle spasticity! I admit I don't know how to use a drug like this: what am I supposed to do if I prescribe it and the symptoms continue? Stop the drug or double the dose?.. Maybe [doctors] are merely trying to sanctify a patient's original symptoms by giving a drug that causes them?"

84: "Like a game of Russian Roulette, for the person who gets the loaded chamber, the risk is 100 percent. But unlike that game, for the person taking a drug no chamber is entirely empty. Every drug stresses and hurts your body in some way."

84: "As in all confrontations with doctors, his reaction may tell you more than you bargained for. You may once and for all recognize that his opinion is no more valid than yours."

85: "You should also monitor the drug's effect subjectively. How does the drug make you feel?"

Chapter 3: Ritual Mutilations

91-2: "...various studies have put the number of useless operations between eleven and thirty percent. My feeling is that somewhere around ninety percent of surgery is a waste of time, energy, money, and life."

92: "The formation of committees to review tissue removed in operations has resulted in some telling statistics. In one case 262 appendectomies were performed the year before a tissue committee began overseeing surgery. During the first year of the committee's review, the number dropped to 178. Within a few years, the number dropped to 62. The percentage of normal appendices removed fell fifty-five percent. In another hospital the number of appendectomies was slashed by two-thirds after a tissue committee went to work."

93: Other examples of needless surgery or surgery that isn't proven to help: tonsillectomies, hysterectomies, coronary bypass surgery, many cancer surgeries, etc. 

93: "Back around the same time I got into trouble for cutting urological workups on children at an outpatient clinic, I got into trouble again for not discussing the size of tonsils. There are very rare cases--less than one in 1,000--where someone may need a tonsillectomy. I'm not talking about when the child snores or breathes noisily. But when it really impedes the child's breathing, if he or she is really choking, the tonsils may have to come out. You don't have to ask a child or a parent about it. It's obvious! So I cut out that question on the examination. Of course, the number of tonsillectomies went way down. As you might expect, I soon got a call from the chairman of the ear, nose, and throat department: I was threatening his teaching program."

93: "Parents are lulled into believing that the operation 'can't do any harm.'...Mortality ranges in different surveys from one in 3,000 to one in 10,000." See also other injuries done, particularly psychological injuries, when children have surgery: they become fearful, withdrawn, depressed, afraid, etc.

95: "Of course, when the male doctors took over childbirth, it did become a disease." Also see various "standard" practice examples like the old forceps delivery, episiotomy, Caesarian deliveries, etc. 

97: "The delivery room is really an operating room disguised by the simple addition of an incubator" thus making it that much more likely that we should have a full blown operation. "Hence the obstetrical sacrifice graduates beyond the simple mutilation of the episiotomy to the most sinister development of modern obstetrics, the epidemic of Caesarean deliveries."

98-99: "In many hospitals the induced, "nine-to-five" delivery has become the rule. Working only from his calculations of when the baby is due--which can be off by as much as six weeks!--the doctor induces labor when he feels like it, not when the baby is naturally ready to pass through the birth canal."

100: "Yet the rates of induced deliveries and Caesarean sections are going up, not down. I can remember when if a hospital's incidence of Caesarean deliveries went above four or five percent, there was a full scale investigation. The present level is around twenty-five percent. There are no investigations at all. And in some hospitals the rate is pushing fifty percent."

100-101: "Surgery goes through three phases, but none of them has the least to do with progress. The first phase a new surgical procedure goes through is enthusiastic acceptance. Of course, the natural order of things says that a new development should be treated with skepticism before enthusiasm. But that's not the way things work in Modern Medicine. Once an operation is proved possible, its enthusiastic acceptance is guaranteed. Only after an operation has been around for some time and the real usefulness has had plenty of chances to emerge from the fog of early enthusiasm, does skepticism begin to seep in from around the edges."

101: See with coronary bypass surgeries: "Mortality rates for surgery patients were not significantly different from those medically treated. In fact, among the low-risk patients, the mortality rates after four years were slightly higher among those receiving the operation."

102: The third phase of surgery is "abandonment": "But operations die hard, especially enormously profitable ones like the bypass...Fortunes, careers, and lives still depend on it."

103: "Modern cancer surgery someday will be regarded with the same kind of horror that we now regard the use of leeches in George Washington's time."

105: On why there is so much unnecessary surgery/agency problems of surgical medicine: "The simplest reason is that surgery can be put to many uses besides the stated purpose of correcting or removing a disease process. Surgery is a great teaching tool as well as a fertile experimental field--although the only thing that's ever "learned" or "discovered" is how to perform the surgery."

106: "In prepaid group practices where surgeons are paid a steady salary not tied to how many operations they perform, hysterectomies and tonsillectomies occur only about one-third as often as in fee-for-service situations."

106: Interesting thoughts on what an oversupply of MDs and surgeons we actually have: puts into perspective (the likely baseless) fears of a shortage thanks to COVID/vax requirements today

107: "It's basically a problem of belief: doctors believe in surgery."

110: "You should be especially wary if your doctor recommends one of the common operations, such as tonsillectomy, hysterectomy, umbilical hernia repair, etc. Remember that the doctor doesn't view surgery as a potentially harmful invasion of your body, but as a beneficent ceremony that can't help but bestow some good."

112: "Although it's best to simply declare the fact that you don't want the operation and you're not going to have it, you may feel better playing the 'I'll think about it' game. Once your doctor has tried to persuade you to have surgery, he may not be able to retreat from that position and continue as your doctor. After all, if he has told you that surgery is the only avenue, he can't very well treat you some other way can he? One way or the other, if your decision to stay in one piece means you lose a doctor, you're better off."

113: "People often ask me how to go about picking a surgeon if they 'must' have surgery. I always say that if you really 'must' have surgery, you're most likely in no position to make a choice because the only 'must have' situation I recognize is the emergency. And in an emergency you don't have a choice. If you're in an accident and you need surgery, you take any surgeon you can get. In any situation short of an emergency, you've got plenty of time not only to decide whether or not you need the surgery but also who should perform the operation."

113: On questioning a surgeon: "you start to pick a surgeon by asking questions. You should talk to several surgeons, and ask each and every one: How many times have you done this operation? What's your batting average? How many of the operations have been successful? How many haven't? What's your rate of complications? What is the death rate from this operation? How many of your patients have died during or shortly after this operation? Can you refer me to some of your patients who've had this operation? Would they be willing to talk to me?"

113: Also this one: "My favorite question to ask a surgeon is, 'If you were out of town when the operation was performed, who would you recommend for the operation?' A variation of that is, 'If you need the operation, doctor, who would you go to?'"

114: "...don't neglect to ask each surgeon, once again, if the operation is necessary. This may sound like a waste of time once you've already decided to have the operation. But you may come across new information, or a doctor who does have an alternative treatment. In any case, if you are exposed to new information, hit the books again and check it out."

115: "When you approach a different doctor with post-operative problems, you should challenge him with the following questions: Can you give me an honest opinion with regard to the other doctor's performance on this operation? Would you give me an honest opinion even though it were to result in a malpractice suit against the other doctor? Or against your hospital?"

115: "Depending on how he answers these questions, you can decide whether or not to trust him. In this and any other medical situation, your reluctance to give away your trust is your first defense. Make every doctor earn it, especially if he wants to mutilate you."

Chapter 4 The Temples of Doom

117: "A hospital is like a war. You should try your best to stay out of it. And if you get into it you should take along as many allies as possible and get out as soon as you can." It's amazing how this book sings out from time to time with a real banger of a quote. 

118: "When I hear someone--usually an older person who wasn't born in this country--say that the hospital is 'where you go to die,' I say to myself that he or she has been hearing what the gods are saying... Children, again, provide us with a message from their unclouded perception: kids are unabashedly afraid of going to the hospital. Just as their fear of doctors is something we could all cultivate to our advantage, so is their fear of hospitals."

119: Various disgusting examples of unsanitary conditions in hospitals: "Such discoveries don't shock me anymore, since I've realized that these conditions are the rule rather than the exception."

121: "Masks become so contaminated after just ten minutes that they serve as bacterial cultures rather than shields."

123: "As bacteriologically overrun as hospitals are, I've rarely seen an epidemic that was blamed on the hospital or the staff. They always pin it on the visitors! The inevitable aftermath of the epidemic is restriction of visiting hours." Hmmm, how things haven't changed.

124: Hospital/medical errors: "Everything gets mixed up in hospitals--including patients. My brother went to the hospital for a hernia operation many years ago. He was scheduled for surgery at 11 a.m. I went up to his room at 9:30, but he wasn't there. I knew right away what had happened. I ran down to the operating room, and sure enough, there he was. They'd taken him instead of another patient. The only reason he escaped was that the other patient was supposed to get a hysterectomy."

125: "As far as I'm concerned, one of the best arguments for having your baby at home is the distinct possibility that you'll go home from the hospital with the wrong baby."

125-6: "Another hazard that threatens you in the hospital is the likelihood of an accident. In a suburban hospital in Pennsylvania, it was discovered that oxygen and nitrous oxide labels were accidentally switched when a construction crew installed gas lines in the emergency room. Until the mixup was discovered, people who should have been getting nitrous oxide were getting oxygen and people who were supposed to get oxygen were getting nitrous oxide. It took six months for the hospital to discover the error. The hospital admitted to five deaths from the accident, but said that all thirty-five deaths in the emergency room during that period were not caused by the switch because some of those were dead on arrival and some were too far gone to benefit from oxygen even if they had received it. If that sounds like the kind of fudging doctors use to cover up a treatment-related death, you're getting my message."

128: "Whether you consciously acknowledge it or not hospital procedures and environments encourage despair and debilitation rather than hope and support. Nobody's optimistic. You see the long faces of the people suffering and dying, and you see the faces of the people who must watch them suffer and die. You see the hospital staff denature their responses and become machines."

129: "The effect of all these psychological pins is that you relinquish any notion you may have had about having control over your health. Your captors isolate you, alienate you, scare you, depress you, and generally make you feel so anxious that you submit to their every wish. Your spirit broken, you are ready to be a Good Patient."

129: "It's no mystery why children who have had as little as one or two nights in the hospital without their parents regress in their behavior to where they lose their toilet training or their ability to speak."

131: "Hospital procedures have absolutely no respect for a person's dignity... Hospitalization degrades you."

132: The author experiments with reducing hospital admissions to a bare minimum in favor of at-home treatment and ends up getting fired because the hospital needed more "volume." Several anecdotes here about hospital conditions, regulatory problems and lack of response, the insufficient self-accreditation/self-policing of hospitals, etc. 

136: "It's well-known that Modern Medicine doesn't act on scientific knowledge until public awareness grows strong enough to demand it." Holy cow this is more true now than then...

137: "Whether the Temple or any of what goes on inside does good or harm is irrelevant. What's important is that the faithful are faithful and that they show their belief by showing up for the sacraments, which are sold not on the basis of what they do but what they're supposed to do."

138: Various reasons why "teaching hospitals" are the worst: "There used to be another piece of conventional wisdom which stated that if you had a very rare or serious condition you were better off in a teaching hospital. That's no longer true, either. The teaching hospitals are there, don't forget, to teach the orthodox treatments. What you're going to get is the orthodox treatment, whether it works or not. If you want to get the latest, unorthodox treatment, you have to go to a smaller hospital or even one outside the reach of the Church--out of the country."

142: "So if someone tells me they have chosen a teaching hospital, I tell them to be on their guard because they're in serious danger."

143: The author calls the media in on his own hospital when they threatened to call the police to escort a woman out for staying with her crying child: "Then I called up the administrator and asked him to hold off for just twenty minutes more because the TV camera crew was on the way to film the policeman escorting the woman out of the hospital.... And he made a deal with me: 'Your patients' visitors can stay as long as they want, but nobody else's. I don't want you to bring this up with the rest of the staff.'"

145: See the family of gypsies who showed up with "muscle": a whole family, strong young brothers, etc. "Visiting hours were long over, but there wasn't one nurse or doctor who was going to go in there and tell those gypsies to leave."

146-7: Have a friend or relative there to check meals, bring extra food/calories, check meds, verify tests/procedures: " A friend or a relative provides an invaluable link to your real life, to your identity, and to your dignity that can keep you alive and strong when the hospital staff and procedures gang up on you. Even the best hospitals are frightening and dangerous."

Chapter 5 Holy War on the Family

150: "Family medicine, for example, should mean the healthy influence of the family. To the doctor, however, family medicine is the necessary intervention in the family by the doctor for sacramental purposes. Any influence the family might have is less than secondary: it's useless and to be avoided."

153-4: Doctor control of OB/GYN situations, hospital visit restrictions, "advice" etc. "The first broadside the pediatrician delivers to the new mother-child relationship is his "advice" regarding the feeding of the infant. As if God made a mistake in not filling her breasts with Similac, the new mother is told that man-made formula is every bit as good for the baby as her own breast milk."

155: "Bottlefeeding--the grandaddy of all junk food--wasn't then, isn't now, and never will be "as good as" breastfeeding."

159ff: Many examples of how we sociologically atomize the family with various mechanisms: encouraging both parents to find a "fulfilling" job outside the home while strangers feed and raise your baby, etc. "...a situation where the child is influenced at a crucial period in its development by strangers."

163: OT stuff here on how schools and society have usurped parenting. While true, this is off topic from healthcare. Some legit points here though: "Clever tactics such as changing styles of teaching--new math for one generation, old math for the next--keep parents from playing a significant role in their children's education."

164: "By nature, psychiatry is family-divisive. Psychiatrists encourage people to say bad things about their relatives."

166: On aging: "Modern Medicine would much rather have old people separated from their families, their talents, and their respect. That way they provide a much better potential patient population... Not only is the person isolated from the family at the last moments of life, strapped and wired into the Intensive Care Unit, but sedatives and tranquilizers handed out by the family doctor at the funeral rob mourners of any emotional release they may get from crying."

167: "As Modern Medicine gets stronger, more forceful methods are used to attack the family. You have to submit to the Church in order to go to school. They won't let you in the door unless you can prove that you've received all the sacramental immunizations. Sooner or later doctors and some school districts are going to get really rough and go after people who refuse to have their children immunized. They'll simply declare the children victims of child abuse and remove them from the home."

168-9: On child abuse allegations if your child happens to have a bruise, neglect allegations if you are breastfeeding and cross a doctor: "...if you take a child into the emergency room and he or she has a few bruises you're immediately questioned by a social worker. With the thousands of empty beds in hospital pediatric units, it's to everybody's advantage--except the family's--to try to establish a charge of possible child abuse." 

169: "I now warn parents to be extremely careful when they bring their children to a hospital emergency room because you never know what can happen once a doctor starts to examine a child."

172: " In 1952, ninety-five percent of Chilean mothers breastfed their children beyond the first year. By 1969, only six percent did, and only twenty percent of the babies were being nursed as long as two months. This decline in breastfeeding--and similar declines across the world--has been brought about by doctors allowing salesmen from the formula manufacturers to go into the maternity wards and sell mothers on the 'modern' way to feed your baby.... Furthermore, by the time the free sample runs out, the mother's breasts are dry and her pocketbook empty."

173-4: "Modern Medicine attacks the family for the simple reason that if you want to convert someone to a different religion, you first go after his family ties. Don't listen to your mother or your grandmother. Those are old wives tales. Listen to us. We are taught not to depend on anyone but the professionals--the doctors. With the family influence gone, what I call the vertical transmission of values from one generation to the next is gone, too. All you're left with is horizontal transmission of values through the influence of peers and other contemporary sources of information such as research studies, news media, and the entertainment-advertising industry. And doctors."

175-6: On peds textbooks from the 1920s containing preposterously wrong advice. "...you first should recognize that experts seldom have a better idea of what's 'right' than you do."

178: "At all points along the way you should learn to identify and question rules that separate families." Great, great heuristic here. 

178: Wow: "Even if the hospital promises rooming-in, you should be aware that hospitals sometimes revoke the privilege without warning. At one hospital, rooming-in disappears every year when the hospital's regular pediatric nurses leave for the summer!"

183: Hehehe: "I have long advised mothers to send their non-toilet trained children to nursery school after lying to the school and saying the child is trained. Many children do, quite mysteriously, become toilet trained on the first day of school. In the case of the others, the teacher usually calls the mother after a week of frustration and says, 'I thought you told me the child was toilet trained!' The mother's reply should be: 'What have you done to my child?'"

184: "Don't enforce the hospital's rules for them." Good points here, worth remembering: "Sometimes in dealing with doctors, nurses, and other professionals, you have to be downright indomitable. Or immovable, as the case may be when a nurse tries to remove you from the bedside of a hospitalized relative. First of all, terminally ill relatives should be allowed to die at home. Hospitals don't own people at either end of life. If a relative is in the intensive care unit you have to buck the ten minute rule to remain with him or her. Your first move should be simply to stand still. Don't enforce the hospital's rules for them. When the nurse asks you to leave, ask why. If she says your presence is too much of a strain on the patient, tell her that you are a better judge of whether your relative is strained by your presence. Then challenge the nurse to produce evidence. She may then retreat to a new position: the rules say you have to leave. Ask for a copy of the rules in writing. Her next move will be to summon the doctor. Ask him the same questions. How do you know my presence here causes a strain on my relative? How do you know that the presence of hospital staff is automatically good and the presence of family members automatically bad for the patient?"

Chapter 6 Doctor Death

185:  "Modern Medicine is an idolatrous religion, for what it holds sacred are not living things, but mechanical processes." 

186ff: "..a new word was recently coined by Dr. Quentin Young to describe one activity of Modern Medicine: iatrogenocide."

* issuing baby formula to developing countries

* 52 day doctor's strike in Colombia during which deaths went DOWN (!!)

* 18% drop in death rate in LA County during a 1976 doctor strike, and 60% fewer operations were performed. The death rate went back to normal when the strike ended. (!!!)

* Similar results during a one month strike in Israel

"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." [Note the takeaway here, also from Nassim Taleb's Antifragile, that you want to use medicine for what it's good at, which is emergency medicine, when you're injured for example, and you want to avoid medicine for all other interventions because of potential iatrogenic harms.]

189: "...the Church [of Medicine] exaggerates its encouragement of non-life activities while it exaggerates its contempt for life."

191ff: [Interesting ideas here where the author is quite critical of counseling acceptance of death, of "thanatologists" etc. It's interesting because this lack of acceptance of death is actually a big part of what's wrong with modern medicine, isn't it? This part of the book doesn't (yet) compute for me.] 

195: On "First Do No Harm" as an example of doth protest too much or compensation, as evidence of what medicine *doesn't* do, sort of like writing "In God We Trust" on US money...

195: On language as mechanism of control: "population explosion" and "euthanasia" or "death with dignity"... hiding reality with vocabulary.

198:  "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."

Chapter 7 The Devil's Priests

201: "I always laugh when someone from the American Medical Association or some other doctors' organization claims that doctors have no special powers over people. After I finish laughing, I always ask how many people can tell you to take off your clothes and you'll do it." 

201ff: "Doctors are only human--in the worst ways... When I meet a doctor, I generally figure I'm meeting a person who is narrow-minded, prejudiced, and fairly incapable of reasoning and deliberation." [This is an interesting heuristic you can use to protect yourself from the 007s out there.] 

204: "Fraud in scientific research is commonplace enough to keep it off the front pages. The Food and Drug Administration has uncovered such niceties as overdosing and underdosing of patients, fabrication of records, and drug dumping when they investigate experimental drug trials. Of course, in these instances, doctors working for drug companies have as their goal producing results that will convince the FDA to approve the drug." [One on level, duh, of course this is their goal, but the nuance here is one of a central agency problem. See also the many examples of faked data and study fraud to follow here. Little has changed...] 

205: "Dr. Richard W. Roberts, director of the National Bureau of Standards, said that 'half or more of the numerical data published by scientists in their journal articles is unusable because there is no evidence that the researcher accurately measured what he thought he was measuring or no evidence that possible sources of error were eliminated or accounted for.'"

206: " Dr. Leroy Wolins, a psychologist at Iowa State University, had a student write to thirty-seven authors of scientific reports asking for the raw data on which they based their conclusions. Of the thirty-two who replied, twenty-one said their data either had been lost or accidentally destroyed. Dr. Wolins analyzed seven sets of data that did come in and found errors in three significant enough to invalidate what had been passed off as scientific fact."

206: (!!!!) "There is even evidence that Gregor Mendel, father of the gene theory of heredity, may have doctored the results of his peabreeding experiments to make them conform more perfectly to his theory. Mendel's conclusions were correct but a statistical analysis of his published data shows that the odds were 10,000 to one against their having been obtained through experiments such as Mendel performed."

207: "Perhaps the most telling characteristic of the profession that is supposed to deliver health care is that doctors, as a group, appear to be sicker than the rest of society." Examples given here include higher (perhaps much higher) rates of psych disturbances, alcoholism, drug use, suicide. 

209: On the particular viciousness of medical politics: "Medical politics, for example, is a cutthroat power game of the most primitive sort. I much prefer political politics, because there you have the art of the possible, which means you have to compromise. Medical politics is the art of sheer power. There is no compromise: you go right for the jugular vein before your own is torn out. There is no room for compromise because churches never compromise on canon law... Historically, doctors who have dared to change things significantly have been ostracized and have had to sacrifice their careers in order to hold to their ideas. Few doctors are willing to do either."

210: "Of course, doctors do see their patients. But they don't see them as people. The doctor-patient relationship is more like that between the master and the slave, since the doctor depends on the complete submission of the patient. In this kind of climate, ideas can hardly be interchanged with any hope of the doctor's being affected."

211ff: [Interesting here to see the author's perspective of docs then as rich, wealthy and white elites in which "the doctor's lifestyle and professional behavior encourage autocratic thinking" and for us to compare to what they increasingly are like today: not white, not rich, loaded down with debt, etc... the power structure and the nature of the medical career has changed perhaps.]

211: When asked where doctors learn these bad habits, I used to reply that doctors learned them in medical school. Now I realize they learn them much earlier than that. By the time they get to premedical training, they've picked up the cheating, the competition, the vying for position--all the tricks they know they need if they want to get into medical school."

212: "The admissions tests and policies of medical schools virtually guarantee that the students who get in will make poor doctors. The quantitative tests, the Medical College Admission Test, and the reliance on grade point averages funnel through a certain type of personality who is unable and unwilling to communicate with people. Those who are chosen are the ones most subject to the authoritarian influences of the priests of Modern Medicine. They have the compulsion to succeed, but not the will or the integrity to rebel." [Interesting psych profile of the education "funnel" that ultimately produces docs.]

217: "...doctors are extremely reluctant to report incompetent work or behavior on the part of their colleagues. If a hospital, for example, discovers malpractice by one of its doctors, the most that will happen is the doctor will be asked to resign. He won't be reported to state medical authorities. When he seeks employment elsewhere, the hospital will most likely give him a shining recommendation." [On some level this is logical: they want him to leave, so they need to quietly offload him to another hospital!]

218: "Another favorite example of doctors allowing their colleagues to commit mayhem on unsuspecting patients occurred in New Mexico. A surgeon tied off the wrong duct in a gall bladder operation and the patient dies. Although the error was discovered at autopsy, the doctor was not disciplined. Apparently. he wasn't taught the right way to do the operation, because a few months later he performed it again, wrong--and another patient died. Again, no punishment and no surgery lesson. Only after the doctor performed the operation a third time and killed another person was there an investigation resulting in the loss of his license."

221-2: "The doctor never loses, though he plays both sides against the middle and takes bigger risks than necessary. That's because he has succeeded in identifying his rituals as sacred and potent regardless of their real efficacy. He uses his holiest implements to raise the ante and make the game more ominous than it really needs to be. If a mother comes into the hospital with her baby in the breech position and the fetal monitor says the baby is in distress, the doctor loses no time in declaring it a life and death situation--which, indeed, it becomes once he starts to perform a Caesarean-section delivery. Biologically, the doctor knows the C-section is dangerous. But the game is no longer being played by biological rules. It's a religious game, a ceremony, and the priest calls the shots. If mother and child survive, the priest is a hero. If they die, well... it was a life and-death situation anyway. The doctor never loses: only the patients lose. The adage that a doctor buries his mistakes still applies." 

223: On medical jargon as a lever of power and control: "If you could understand everything your doctor was saying to you and to other doctors, his power over you would be diminished."

225: "As I've already said, you have to protect yourself. To do that, you need to remember the two major attributes of doctors: fear and arrogance. What you have to do is learn how to work on his fears without challenging his arrogance until you have the winning hand."

227: Useful metaphor here: "What does a Catholic do when he decides that his priests are no good? Sometimes he directly challenges them, but very seldom. He just leaves the Church."

Chapter 8 If This is Preventive Medicine, I'll Take My Chances with Disease

229: "We've already seen what a disaster curative medicine has become, but so-called preventive medicine is just as dangerous."

232ff: [This guy was very early in recognizing the risks and tradeoffs of certain childhood vaxxes: Diphtheria, Pertussis/whooping cough, mumps, rubella/German measles, others. I can't imagine what he might think about today's consensus accepted vaxxes like HPV, varicella/shingles, etc., to say nothing of the novel mRNA biotherapies!]

235: "The mad vehemence of Modern Medicine is nowhere more evident than in the yearly influenza vaccine farce." Ouch. 

235: [Note also this nugget, which corroborates much of what I've been reading lately about swine flu in the 70s, and also note that this book was published in 1979]: "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.'"

239: "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."

239: More helpful metaphors: "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 sins 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."

249: More excellent rhetoric: "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."

250: "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."

251: On dialectic power and control: "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."

252: "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?"

Chapter 9 The New Medicine

255: "Up to now I've been telling you why and how you should protect yourself from Modern Medicine. I've told you how to deceive the doctor, how to find out if his advice is good, how to check up on him, how to scare him, how to confront him, and how to maintain your health despite his dangerous practices."

258: [Excellent thinking here for multiple domains]: "Every person needs a system of value, an ethical structure to assist in fundamental decisions. A person who claims to get along without making value judgments is still abiding by a system--of making no value judgments. There's no way to escape it, and that's what religion is all about. Religion defines a hierarchy of values and gives a prescription for action so that people can determine which way to go when alternatives are set before them."

259: Viewing "Modern Medicine" through a lens of violence, it does violence to you, represents danger to you, vs New Medicine which we view through a lens of respecting life and avoiding violence and danger. 

260: "...the New Doctor's goal is to work himself or herself right out of business, so your dependence on the professional should diminish every day."

264: "...when it comes to caring for children, one grandmother is worth two pediatricians." ..."Experts' opinions should be considered worthless until proved otherwise by the strongest possible evidence."

265: "When a family member has to be hospitalized, there's always a crew of relatives available to ride shotgun."

265: "Death is another one of those unavoidable life experiences that brings the family together. Just as births, birthdays, marriages, and other family events take precedence over career and other activities, the death of a family member requires attendance. No family member dies alone or with only the staff of the intensive care ward to note his or her passing. Life should end where it begins, in the home."

266: "Our community is a collection of families relating to one another as families. Now this may seem remarkably 'old-fashioned' but remember, the family is the unit of health, the individual's primary resource."

268: "We don't note birthdays, marriages, and other milestones by sucking blood or demanding an offering." (!!!!)

269: "Our New Medicine offers the perfect antidote to the major disease afflicting American society today: depression. Depression is a slice of death, and our commitment to life and joy denies us that morsel of despair. The recipe for depression is isolation, abandonment, frustration, and alienation. Our sacraments simply don't let those situations develop. It's very difficult to feel afraid, alone, and unloved when you've got somebody's birthday or baby or marriage or new job or ... whatever to celebrate. When we say that our New Medicine is a community of celebrants, we mean it."

270: "This book has, in a way, been my answer to my friends who have said these things to me. I have written this book precisely to scare and to radicalize people before they are hurt. Let this book be your radicalizing experience. Remember what I've said the next time you go to the doctor."

271: "When you go to lunch or dinner, start discussing health with people--not with the intention of arguing, but to find people who agree with you. As soon as you find these people, get to know them better. Start your community."

Epilogue: In Search of the New Doctor

275: "Health neither begins nor ends with the doctor. The doctor's role is somewhere in the middle. And still crucial. If doctors weren't important, the Church of Modern Medicine could never have gained the power it has."

281: [This is very well put:] "'The art of medicine,' according to a colleague and good friend of mine, Leo I. Jacobs, M.D., Medical Director of Forest Hospital, Des Plaines, Illinois, 'flows from the physician's ability to be introspective and to understand the patient as a human being with certain feelings, thoughts, attitudes, interpersonal relationships, aspirations, and expectations rather than a mere symptom carrier. Such a physician tends to see the patient, and not himself, as the primary person responsible for maintaining health, by leading a meaningful life in which proper nutrition, exercise, and stress management combine with an appropriate balance of love, play, and work within a harmonious family. Such a physician will resort to drugs or surgery only after his understanding of the patient's predicament has ruled out non-invasive or educational, psychological, or social approaches.'"

282: "The New Doctor is a lifeguard. He or she stands by ready to intervene in life-threatening situations. At the beginning of life he lets the mother deliver the baby and stands by for the tiny percentage of cases in which he is needed. As soon as we assign the role of lifeguard to the doctor, we define what he does and does not do throughout his career. He or she does not play the central role. The central roles are played by the individual, the family, and the community."

283: "The one rule I give to all my medical students is that I don't care what you do to the patient as long as he or she feels better when leaving the office than when coming in. The New Doctor heals with himself. If the doctor has enthusiasm and hope, and can communicate this to the patient then the patient is going to feel better. A healer is a healer no matter what techniques he uses. Conscious of this, the New Doctor prescribes 'himself' in generous doses, meaning he or she uses whatever resources of personality and human caring possible."

286: "The New Doctor will be skeptical of the promised benefits of drugs and surgery. One of his or her major areas of responsibility is to protect people against the excesses of surgeons and drug companies in foisting off their wares. Nevertheless, the New Doctor does not abandon useful technology, but rather discriminates between useful machinery and machinery-for-the-sake-of-machinery... Most of all, the New Doctor doesn't rely on machinery unless absolutely necessary. He's aware of the dangers of letting technology rule over common sense and instinct."

287: " The entire field of orthodox oncology will disappear as chemotherapy, surgery, and radiation for cancer are revealed as fundamentally irrational and scientifically unsupportable."

288: "The New Doctor must be prepared for courageous behavior, which means doing what has to be done even though it means giving up the wealth, power, and status associated with being a conventional physician. I don't think we'll have any trouble instilling courage in New Doctors. The ones I've met--as both doctors and doctors-to-be--seem to come equipped with both courage and the cunning to defend themselves. I met a young doctor recently who had quit his formal medical education as soon as he was eligible for a license--immediately after his internship. I asked him where he was licensed, and he told me in five states. He said he anticipated having trouble with the medical establishment, so he's prepared if they start taking his license away. Smartest fellow I've met in a long time." [Sounds like Dr. Peter McCullough!!]

294: Note also the footnote, referring back to page 242, describing Modern Medicine as a type of inquisition, with imposing itself by force, as selling indulgences, etc. "As its spiritual authority has diminished Modern Medicine has grown more oppressive and violent. What was once the option of a free people is becoming an enforced obligation."

Indulgences in the form of rapidly rising health insurance premiums, basically you are buying "future blessings" from medicine (!)

"This ideology, stripped of its mystifying symbols, is a simple triadic credo: 1. The basic problem is you. 2. The resolution of your problem is my professional control. 3. My control is your help."

To Read: 

Ivan Illich: Medical Nemesis 

Leonard Tushnet, MD: The Medicine Men

Edward C. Lambert, MD: Modern Medical Mistakes

Authur Koestler: The Case of the Midwife Toad

Finally, I strongly recommend the medical blog/substack A Midwestern Doctor for a range of thoughtful and highly insightful essays on the flaws and blindspots of modern healthcare.