Are Doctors Tricksters?

If I mention to friends a physical problem, immediately they ask, “Have you been to a doctor?” The doctor mystique: magicians in white coats.

Doctors and so-called “healers” don’t heal anyone and never have. To say a doctor heals someone is just as much a lie as to say a gardener or farmer “grows” plants. The body heals itself. The most a “healer” can do is to help create conditions for this healing to take place, for instance setting a bone so it heals straight and not crooked, or cleaning a wound so it won’t get infected.

I have consulted doctors and dentists a few times in my life, mostly negative experiences. One German dentist enthusiastically drilled my tooth so much that it hurt for a year. Finally the filling fell out and I said “good riddance,” then the tooth fell out. The tooth would have lasted longer without the dentist’s intervention.

One doctor helped me, when at the age of 12 both my forearm bones fractured. He set it properly and put a cast on, and it did heal. Though any medic with a few weeks training probably could have done as well. Hospital, x-ray machine, professional MD with 8 years training – superfluous. People have known how to set bones for thousands of years.

An Indian doctor put a cast on my broken finger, causing it to heal crooked. Standard procedure puts a splint, not a cast, on a broken digit.

As Ardrey Cobb, an old country doctor from Missouri, put it in his homely style: “I’ve found that doctors and dentists fuck you up the ass, and then want you to pay well for it. I don’t really want to be fucked up the ass, but if I were, I would want the fucker to pay me, and not the other way around.”

Doctors figured out a way to convince people that they can’t be healthy without doctors, and must pay them high prices for their services.

In the USA, doctors join an immensely powerful organization, the AMA. Of course, like in all esoteric clubs, new members have to show high motivation, go through ordeals (interns may work 80+ hour weeks with 36 hour shifts), and prove themselves worthy to share in the benefits.

To enhance their mystique, doctors use an antique, little-known language. Many of the names of diseases simply describe symptoms, but in Latin.

Man goes to doctor: “Doctor, I have joint problems.”

Doctor examines him: “Ah, I see, you have arthritis. That will be one hundred dollars please.”

Now if you translate the word “arthritis” into plain English, it means “joint problems.”

But would the man accept and pay well for this “diagnosis?”

Man: “Doctor, I have joint problems.”

Doctor: “Ah, I see. You have joint problems. That will be one hundred dollars please.”

Man: “Are you fucking crazy? I’m not paying you to tell me what I already know.”

Of course they also maintain theatrical settings (paid for with patients’ money): solemn doctor’s offices, grand hospitals, and impressive-looking, expensive equipment, all designed to awe the suffering unwell, just as magnificent cathedrals and luxurious priest’s vestments awed the laity in medieval times.

Note that you have to pay a doctor to tell you if he can serve you – so-called “consultation fees.” If you go to a mechanic, a plumber, or a carpenter, they will not charge you to give an estimate on repairing your car, fixing your plumbing, or installing shelves, but doctors will not even look at you unless you give them money.

And of course, all doctors have “waiting rooms.” Did you ever go to a doctor without having to wait? Why is this? A demonstration of power. The powerless must wait on the more powerful. Why do we call servants in restaurants “waiters?” And why “patients?” You must be patient to wait on the doctor.

Once you go to a dentist, you’re hooked. For instance, to fill a cavity, they drill out existing tooth material to make the hole nice and even. This material they drill out will never grow back, so all they can do is keep making the hole larger as you go back for repeated fillings, until the tooth needs to be replaced, which is even more work for the dentist, to be paid at high prices. They don’t usually advise people how to maintain a proper chemical balance in the body so the teeth won’t decay in the first place.

A friend’s mother took her to a dentist when young to “straighten out” her teeth and make her “more attractive.” He screwed up her teeth so much that at age forty, she had almost none left.

How about optometrists? People return periodically for ever stronger glasses. They think it’s because their eyes get worse as they age, but in fact it’s the glasses that make the eyes worse. See Perfect Sight Without Glasses, By W. H. Bates, M.D. (1920).

Often a doctor will prescribe a medication which then requires another medication for the side effects, an endless cycle. Or he will recommend a surgical procedure which perhaps causes problems needing more surgery – and of course more medications.

The well organized doctors don’t really compete with one another – they know that as a group they will all profit.

Casanova, when young, had some training both in medicine and in law. He stated that he would never go to a doctor when ill or to a lawyer when he had legal problems. Both doctors and lawyers, he said, don’t know what they pretend to know. “Doctors may heal some people, but they probably kill as many as they heal.” Similar with lawyers. “But that was hundreds of years ago,” you may protest, “Things are different now.”

The rather misleadingly titled book, How Not to Die,  by Michael Gregor, M.D. with Gene Stone (2015), has a chapter, “How Not to Die from Iatrogenic Causes, (or, How not to Die from Doctors.)” Worth reading. “Side effects from medications given in hospitals kill an estimated 106,000 Americans every year … an additional 7000 people die every year from receiving the wrong medication by mistake, and 20,000 others die from other hospital errors. … estimated 99,000 deaths each year due to hospital aquired infections. … Many physicians are concerned that should it become widely known how many people doctors inadvertently kill every year, it could ‘undermine public trust.’ … Every year 12,000 Americans die from complications due to surgeries that weren’t even necessary in the first place. … In outpatient settings … prescription drug side effects alone may result in 199,000 additional deaths. … bringing the total annual death count closer to 300,000 … health care comes in as the real third-leading cause of death in America.”

In addition, “… doctors may be causing tens of thousands of cancers every year” by using x-rays to scan people.

So Casanova’s observation in the 18th century describes current medicine as well, despite all the advances in medical science. The REAL third leading cause of death: “health care,” doctors, the medical establishment. This book reflects not the ravings of some ignorant ranter, but the well researched and thought out opinion of a respected M.D.

A friend contracted Malaria in India, a disease nowadays usually curable. A healthy young man in his twenties, he died in Varanassi. Why? The doctors mis-diagnosed him and treated him for Hepatitis instead of Malaria.

Hurrah for medical science! What irks me is those who monopolize the findings of science, using them for their personal profit, pretending, “I understand this and you don’t..” Of course doctors, as in any trade, have specialist tools and instruments and know how to use them and interpret the results. But let doctors admit what they don’t know. For example, no one really knows what cancer is. It’s just a word for a class of symptoms. As one old song put it, “There is no answer, Everything causes cancer…” (Joe Jackson, 1982). The same is true for many diseases.

Magical sounding words reassure people but don’t necessarily indicate knowledge.

Certainly pathology led to some successes, as in the elimination of smallpox – but it has limits. Western medicine (allopathy) is founded on anatomy – cutting apart and studying dead organisms. Over many years it accumulated detailed information about the structure of the body (Gray’s Anatomy). But its understanding of the functioning, living and growing organism lacks fullness.

Even during the Black Death, which killed at least a third of the population of Europe, not everyone caught the disease. Every day, micro-organisms which could cause disease knock on the doors of the body. A “germ” enters the body like a seed falling on the ground. Given the right conditions – water, good soil, sunlight – the seed will grow into a plant. Similarly, a germ will engender a disease with the right conditions. Allopathic medicine, in a society driven by profits, emphasizes treatment of disease and relegates prevention to the back burner.

Allopathic medicine may cut out a cancerous tumor, or destroy it by chemicals or radiation, but without changing the state of the body-mind, the cancer or some other disease will likely return.

I respect and thank medical science, including traditions such as Chinese and Ayurvedic medicine not recognized as “science” by modern civilization. Years ago in the Andaman Islands, India, I contracted a virulent skin infection, spreading day by day. At first I thought to heal it naturally but finally decided that if I didn’t stop it soon, I would lose either my leg or my life. Since this was not a lesson I wanted to learn at that point, I went to a drugstore and bought some tetracycline. I knew this treatment from experience as a sailor on a ship in the tropics. In India such medications were not controlled and you could buy them over the counter. The antibiotic stopped the infection which then took over a month to heal – about 2 square inches of skin had been lost. Note that I neither consulted nor paid a doctor for this.

Health insurance is a huge scam. A friend, for his family of three, pays more only for health insurance, than my total living expenses. And where does that money go? Into the pockets of shareholders, not to mention profits from manufacture of hugely expensive and complicated hospital equipment, mostly unnecessary.

Insurance is a bet, a wager. When you buy health insurance you bet against the insurance company. You bet that you will have health problems requiring doctors, medications, equipment etc; the company bets that you won’t, or at least that, on the average, the cost will be less than what you pay. Since the company has a statistical universe of clients to work with, “the house always wins.”

So subconsciously you “psyche yourself” to have health problems so you can win the bet, or at least “get your money’s worth.”

The medical establishment did not fully accept the Germ Theory of Disease until the late 19th century. And why did it take so long, since Moses, Thucydides, Galen, Lucretius, Avicenna, and other ancients already understood that invisible “seeds” or germs could spread diseases interpersonally, and scientists using microscopes actually observed micro-organisms in the late 17th century?

Probably because doctors maintain their income and respected position in society through their pose of “curing” the sick. Stop disease from spreading? God forbid!

Despite the Hippocratic (hypocritical) Oath, doctors need unhealthy people. If everyone were healthy, doctors would be out of business. Even though they might convince themselves otherwise, doctors’ living and prosperity depends on patients’ ill health and dis-ease. In the aggregate, they have an interest in keeping people unwell so that they can continue to charge them fees and make their, on the average, quite comfortable living.

They strategically foster dependence on and addiction to the medical establishment. Isn’t it strange that an occupant and owner of a human body knows almost nothing about it and must consult an “expert?”

The British system, National Health Service, pays for doctors, hospitals, equipment, from public funds – perhaps the most rational way given modern conditions. Germany, in thrall to the insurance industry, legally requires people to buy health insurance.

In ancient China, so I’ve read, people paid their doctors as long as they remained healthy and stopped paying when they got sick. The doctors’ prosperity depended on the health of their clients. Instead of “curing” them when sick, the doctors advised their clients what to eat, herbs to take, and generally how to live to maintain health.

Nowadays, with information about all subjects so easily available on the internet, people may take more responsibility for their health and healing and reduce their dependence on doctors.

Doctors are not magicians. The human body is a magnificent machine, a synergy of profoundly complex processes refined over billions of years of evolution. The quantity and quality of food, air, impressions, as well as attitudes, emotions, ideas, and random shocks, affect its operation and regulation in an intricate dance. “Know thyself” – good advice, but who really follows it?

Who questions what they have been taught in school and conditioned in family and social situations? Why would the power structure provide free schooling and require it with legal sanctions, except to further their own agenda?

Every child is a natural scientist until “education” beats it out of her. Observe, as a science, the functioning of your own body. Experiment with yourself to learn, which is against the rules – “Don’t touch yourself!” Your body is your own house, your vehicle, your property (borrowed really, as you must return it after your allotted time). Much knowledge exists but you must make the effort to learn it. No matter what anybody says, how many people say it, for how long they have said it, don’t accept anything as true until you have verified it for yourself.