Modern Medicine:

Modern Medicine:
A Snare and
a Delusion

 

Futile but otherwise harmless medical care is the least important of the damages a proliferating medical enterprise inflicts on contemporary society. However, the pain, dysfunction, disability, and anguish resulting from techical medical intervention now rival the morbidity due to traffic and industrial accidents and even war-related activities, and make the impact of medicine one of the most rapidly spreading epidemics of our time.

   Ivan Illich, Medical Nemesis (1976)

I believe my generation of doctors will be remembered for two things: the miracles that turned to mayhem, such as penicillin and cortisone, and for the millions of mutilations which are ceremoniously (and totally unnecessarily) carried out every year in operating rooms.

   Robert A. Mendelsohn, MD,
   Confessions of a Medical Heretic (1979)

 

   'Health care' is a modern term used by community leaders and doctors to describe a system which is the very opposite of health care, and which demonstrates mankind's greatest illusion: the belief you can make a sick person well by giving them medicine of some kind. The 'quality' of health care is measured by our civic leaders in dollars--dollars--to pay for drugs, to develop new and better drugs, to pay the doctors who administer the drugs and to pay for hospitals in which the 'care' can be administered. Money can buy care all right, but it is not health care.

   An example of medical thinking is the recent report from the Australian Government Economic Planning Advisory Committee, which revealed that poor people on the average die ten years earlier than high income earners, are four times more likely to get respiratory diseases and other illnesses, and that they were twice as likely to die of cancer. The inference of this report was that poor people would not suffer so much if they had enough money to afford better health care. Of course you could just as easily conclude that germs get more fun out of seeking out and attacking poor people, but is it not more likely that a lot of poor people get sick, not because they are poor but because the same lack of capacity that keeps them poor keeps them also in total dietary ignorance?

   A great deal of ingenuity goes into modern medicine, but not a great deal of intelligence. It takes a lot of ingenuity to devise the intricate procedures for a coronary bypass or transplant or reaming out blocked arteries, but why not tell the patient of the possibility of clearing blocked arteries by natural means--by strict diet? Why allow a recovering heart patient to eat a high-fat, high-cholesterol meal while still in coronary care?

   Why are researchers looking for the 'defective gene' which they say causes diabetes when it has been known at least as far back as 1936 that the prime cause of diabetes is a diet high in fat and protein, and that most diabetics produce all the insulin they need except that the insulin cannot work properly in a toxic bloodstream? And that on a proper diet most diabetics can be free of medical treatment in just a few weeks?

   Why do some doctors state that arthritis and multiple sclerosis are auto-immune diseases that happen when white cells go mad and attack their own domicile, while others blame retro-viruses and work to devise ways of thwarting their destructive 'attacks'? These opinions are only supposition. Why don't doctors know that if you clear a patient's bloodstream of toxemia their white cells return to normal, that arthritis goes away, that MS goes 'into remission', that blood pressure diminishes, ulcers heal, gallstones dissolve, migraines cease and so on?

   The reason doctors do not know these simple facts is that standard medical training is based still on the medieval belief that diseases are 'things' with evil intent that attack innocent people and that these things have to be counterattacked and driven out. Such beliefs are unacceptable to an intelligent observer and it is no wonder the 'practice' of medicine is such a confused and fragmented affair.

   It has been reported that from the ranks of doctors come the highest rates of suicides and drug dependency of all the occupations in society. Does this mean that doctors are more likely than others to become disillusioned and unhappy, that the career which once promised so much satisfaction at the start turns sour when the promise is not fulfilled? How many doctors, after working so hard to gain their qualifications, come to realize they have become little more than licensed drug pushers for the international drug cartels?

   Many such doctors have reacted positively to set things right but usually they are considered eccentrics who are out to spoil a good set-up, and their complaints are ignored. Rejected and derided by their peers, a lot of them write books to get their message out of the barricade surrounding the medical profession, direct to the public. As books like these are written with great dedication and are based on direct observations made through the course of long medical careers, they make the best reading a medical student could get, but of course none are to be found in medical libraries anywhere.

   A hundred years ago Dr Emmet Densmore and his wife, also a medical doctor, collaborated to write a book called How Nature Cures. In this book the fallacies surrounding orthodox medicine were exposed, and to support his opinions Dr Densmore quoted some of the prominent physicians of the time who, like the Densmores, had awakened to the fact that orthodox medicine for the treatment of common diseases was a waste of effort bordering on the farcical. A few of the quotations [Densmore used in How Nature Cures ]were: Professor Alonzo Clark, New York College of Physicians and Surgeons:

   'In their zeal to do good, physicians have done much harm. They have hurried thousands to the grave who would have recovered if left to Nature.'

   John Mason Good, MD FRS:

   'The efforts of medicine on the human system are in the highest degree uncertain, except indeed, that they have destroyed more lives than war, pestilence and famine combined.'

   Dr Eliphalet Kimball:

   'There is doctorcraft as well as priestcraft . . . Physicians have slain more than war. An instrument of death in their hands, bleeding, calomel, and other medicines have done more than powder and ball. The public would be infinitely better off without professed physicians. In weak constitutions Nature can be assisted. Good nursing is necessary, and sometimes roots and herbs do good. In strong constitutions medicine is seldom needed in sickness. To a man with a good constitution, and guided by reason in his course of living, sickness would be impossible.'

   Professor Alexander H. Stevens, New York College of Physicians and Surgeons:

   'The older physicians grow, the more skeptical they become of the virtues of medicine, and the more they are disposed to trust to the powers of Nature.'

   Sir John Forbes:

   'Some patients get well with the aid of medicines, some without, and still more in spite of it.'

   There were a great many other such quotations, the most descriptive of the situation being the one from the great physician and physiologist Professor Francois Magendie, President of the French Academy of Science:

   'Let us no longer wonder at the lamentable want of success which marks our practise, when there is scarcely a sound physiological principle among us. I hesitate not to declare, no matter how sorely I should wound our vanity, that so gross is our ignorance of the real nature of the physiological disorder called disease, that it would perhaps be better to do nothing, and resign the complaint into the hands of Nature, than to act as we are frequently compelled to do, without knowing the why and wherefore of our conduct, at the obvious risk of hastening the end of the patient.

   Gentlemen, medicine is a great humbug. I know it is called a science. Science indeed! It is nothing like science. Doctors are merely empirics when they are not charlatans. We are as ignorant as men can be. Who knows anything in the world about medicine? Gentlemen, you have done me a great honor to come here to attend my lectures, and I must tell you frankly now, in the beginning, that I know nothing in the world about medicine, and I don't know anybody who does know anything about it . . . I repeat, nobody knows anything about medicine . . .

   We are collecting facts in the right spirit, and I dare say, in a century or so, the accumulation of facts may enable our successors to form a medical science. Who can tell me how to cure the headache, or the gout, or disease of the heart? Nobody. Oh, you tell me the doctors cure people. I grant you people are cured, but how are they cured?

   Gentlemen, Nature does a great deal, imagination a great deal; doctors--devilishly little when they don't do any harm.'

   Frank statements, made a hundred years ago. Since then, it is claimed, medicine has indeed become a science--or has it? If Doctor Magendie were alive today and were to inquire 'Who can tell me how to cure the headache , or the gout, or the disease of the heart?' he would be forced again to conclude--nobody. Doctors can drug the symptoms of headache, gout, heart disease and most other complaints, but the patients are not cured, and many of them die prematurely as a result of the drugs.

   The fact of the matter is there is not, and cannot ever be, such a thing as a medical 'cure' for anything. Only Nature can heal, but in their ignorance of this fact doctors still continue to hopefully pour into their patients the drugs recommended to them by the real controllers of the big medical show, the drug companies.

   In 1973, doctors in Israel went on strike and reduced their total daily patient contacts from 65,000 to only 7000. The strike lasted a month and during that time the death rate, according to the Jerusalem Burial Society, dropped fifty per cent. In 1976 in Bogota, Columbia, doctors refused to treat all except emergency cases for a period of fifty-two days, and in that time the death rate fell by thirty-five per cent. In the same year, during a 'slow-down' by doctors in Los Angeles, the death rate there dropped eighteen per cent. Obviously, Dr Densmore's opinions are still valid today.

   Headaches, gout, heart disease, cancer, hypertension, diabetes, arthritis, MS, osteoporosis, premenstrual tension, asthma, the common cold, herpes, AIDS--the list goes on--all incurable still regardless of the claims and promises of 'medical science'. Transplanting hearts, kidneys and livers cannot be called curing; pumping insulin into diabetics who are diabetic only because of their high-protein, high-fat diet is not a cure either, nor is cutting out a tumor and hoping like hell another will not take its place. Despite 20th-Century technology and the admirable advances in lifesaving surgery and 'crisis' medicine, for the most part modern medicine has advanced hardly at all in the last one hundred years in regard to solving the problem of common diseases. In fact there are more common diseases today than there ever were, and the list is growing.

   Medicine is in a rut pointing the wrong way. The medical profession, like any other profession, contains only a few outstanding individuals out of a great multitude, all doing the best they can according to the way they have been trained. For some doctors medicine is a labor of love, while to others it is merely a lucrative and prestigious career. One way or another, in the status quo of society doctors have secured a highly favored niche, and like others so favored are not likely to welcome any form of change. Thus medicine is an extremely conservative profession, and not being answerable to higher authority it can cover up its shortcomings and run as a protected monopoly, virtually a law unto itself.

   Doctors, over the past hundred years and despite their constant failures, have contrived to create the impression their services are of indispensable value; they have become so highly organized and influential that they have further contrived government legislation which protects them from competition under the pretext that they are protecting the public from charlatans. These achievements have been gained by the various medical associations which are the most powerful unions in the world and which, knowingly or unknowingly, have allowed the practice of medicine to become the drug-oriented pawn of the drug companies.

   Mesmerised by the continuous flow of propaganda from the multibillion dollar drug companies, the ordinary hard-working doctor, knowing almost nothing about the etiology of disease, has become an innocent drug pusher in danger of getting writer's cramp from scribbling out prescriptions.

   To what extent the average doctor realizes how farcical the situation really is in relation to treating disease would be difficult to ascertain, but one way or another the public deception is maintained. Medicine men, both primitive and modern, maintain with varying degrees of success an air of competence and mystique which sets them apart from ordinary people and disguises the fact they are quite ordinary people too, with human shortcomings and inner doubts. How is this gigantic deception maintained? It is maintained mainly by virtue of the fact that the healing power of Nature is so powerful. People actually recover in most cases in spite of the medical treatment they receive, and the chronically sick struggle to stay alive despite the drugs pumped into them. The illusion is that whatever good has eventuated has been achieved by the medicine, and of course when someone in pain is relieved of the pain by medicine at least some credit must be paid to drugs even if their side effects are damaging. But as Dr Ronald Glasser says in his book The Body is the Hero, the real healing is achieved by the body itself, while the doctor gets the credit.

   Books like Dr Glasser's put the true perspective on modern medicine. There are many others on the topic that would put the fear of death in you, perhaps the most informative one on the subject being Confessions of a Medical Heretic by Doctor Robert S. Mendelsohn of Chicago (Contemporary Books, Chicago, 1979).

   Dr Mendelsohn was in medical practice for over thirty-five years; he was Chairman of the Medical Licensing Committee of the State of Illinois and the recipient of numerous awards for excellence in medicine and medical instruction. At the time of writing his book he was the Associate Professor of Preventive Medicine at the University of Illinois, and in the introduction to his book he had this to say:

   'I do not believe in Modern Medicine, I am a medical heretic. My aim in this book is to persuade you to become a heretic, too.

   I haven't always been a medical heretic. I once believed in Modern Medicine.

   In medical school, I failed to look deeply into a study that was going on around me, of the effects of the hormone DES--because I believed. Who could have suspected that twenty years later we would discover that DES causes vaginal cancer and genital abnormalities in children born to women receiving the drug during pregnancy?

   I confess that I failed to be suspicious of oxygen therapy for premature infants, even though the best equipped and most advanced premature nurseries had an incidence of partial or total blindness of around ninety per cent of all low birth weight infants. A few miles away, in a large, less 'advanced' hospital, the incidence of this condition--retrolental fibroplasia--was less than ten per cent. I asked my professors in medical school to explain the difference. And I believed them when they said the doctors in the poorer hospital just didn't know how to make the correct diagnosis.

   A year or two later it was proved that the cause of retrolental fibroplasia was the high concentrations of oxygen administered to the premies. The affluent medical centers had higher rates of blinding simply because they could afford the very best nursery equipment: the most expensive and modern plastic incubators which guaranteed that all the oxygen pumped in reached the infant. At the poorer nurseries, however, old-fashioned incubators were used. They looked like bathtubs with very loose metal lids. They were so leaky that it made very little difference how much oxygen was pumped in: not enough reached the infant to blind it.

   I still believed when I took part in a scientific paper on the use of the antibiotic Terramycin in treating respiratory conditions in premature babies. We claimed there were no side-effects. Of course there weren't. We didn't wait long enough to find out that not only didn't Terramycin--or any other antibiotic--do much good for these infections, but that it--and other tetracycline antibiotics--left thousands of children with yellow-green teeth and tetracycline deposits in their bones.

   And I confess that I believed in the irradiation of tonsils, lymph nodes, and the thymus gland. I believed my professors when they said that of course radiation was dangerous, but that the doses we were using were absolutely harmless.

   Years later--around the time we found out that the 'absolutely harmless' radiation sown a decade or two before was now reaping a harvest of thyroid tumors--I couldn't help wondering when some of my former patients came back with nodules of their thyroids: Why are you coming back to me? To me, who did this to you in the first place?

   But I no longer believe in Modern Medicine.

   I believe that despite all the super technology and elite bedside manner that's supposed to make you feel about as well cared for as an astronaut on the way to the moon, the greatest danger to your health is the doctor who practices Modern Medicine.

   I believe that Modern Medicine's treatments for disease are seldom effective, and that they're often more dangerous than the diseases they're designed to treat.

   I believe the dangers are compounded by the widespread use of dangerous procedures for non-diseases.

   I believe that more than ninety per cent 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.

   I believe that Modern Medicine has gone too far, by using in everyday situations extreme treatments designed for critical conditions.

   Every minute of every day Modern Medicine goes too far, because Modern Medicine prides itself on going too far. A recent article, 'Cleveland's Marvellous Medical Factory', boasted of the Cleveland Clinic's 'accomplishments' last year: 2,980 open-heart operations, 1.3 million laboratory tests, 73,320 electrocardiograms, 7,770 full-body x-ray scans, 210,378 other radiologic studies, 24,368 surgical procedures.

   Not one of these procedures has been proved to have the least little bit to do with maintaining or restoring health. And the article, which was published in the Cleveland Clinic's own magazine, fails to boast or even mention that any people were helped by any of this expensive extravagance. That's because the product of this factory is not health at all.

   So when you go to the doctor, you're seen not as a person who needs help with his or her health, but as a potential market for the medical factory's products.

   If you're pregnant, you go to the doctor and he treats you as if you're sick. Childbirth is a nine-month disease which must be treated, so you're sold on intravenous fluid bags, fetal monitors, a host of drugs, the totally unnecessary episiotomy, andthe top of the line product--the Caesarean delivery!

   If you make the mistake of going to the doctor with a cold or the flu, he's liable to give you antibiotics, which are not only powerless against colds and flu but which leave you more likely to come down with worse problems.

   If your child is a little too peppy for his teacher to handle, your doctor may go too far and turn him into a drug dependent.

   If your new baby goes off his or her feed for a day and doesn't gain weight as fast as the doctor's manual says, he might barrage your breastfeeding with drugs to halt the natural process and make room in the baby's tummy for man-made formula, which is dangerous.

   If you're foolish enough to make that yearly visit for a routine examination, the receptionist's petulance, the other patients' cigarette smoke, or the doctor's very presence could raise your blood pressure enough so that you won't go home emptyhanded. Another life 'saved' by antihypertensive drugs. Another sex life down the drain since more impotence is caused by drug therapy than by psychological problems.

   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.

   No wonder children are afraid of-doctors. They know! Their instincts for real danger are uncorrupted. Fear seldom actually disappears. Adults are afraid, too. But they can't admit it, even to themselves. What happens is we become afraid of something else. We learn to fear not the doctor but what brings us to the doctor in the first place: our body and its natural processes.

   When you fear something, you avoid it. You ignore it. You shy away from it. You pretend it doesn't exist. You let someone else worry about it. This is how the doctor takes over. We let him. We say: I don't want to have anything to do with this, my body and its problems, doc. You take care of it, doc. Do what you have to do.

   So the doctor does.

   When doctors are criticized for not telling their patients about the side effects of the drugs they prescribe, they defend themselves on the grounds that the doctor-patient relationship would suffer from such honesty. That defense implies that the doctor-patient relationship is based on something other than knowledge. It's based on faith.

   We don't say we know our doctors are good, we say we have faith in them. We trust them.

   Don't think doctors aren't aware of the difference. And don't believe for a minute that they don't play it for all it's worth. Because what's at stake is the whole ball game, the whole ninety per cent of more of Modern Medicine that we don't need, that, as a matter of fact, is out to kill us.

   Modern Medicine can't survive without our faith, because Modern Medicine is neither an art nor a science. It's a religion.

   One definition of religion identifies it as any organized effort to deal with puzzling or mysterious things we see going on in and around us. The Church of Modern Medicine deals with the most puzzling phenomena: birth, death, and all the tricks our bodies play on us-and we on them-in between. In The Golden Bough, religion is defined as the attempt to gain the favor of 'powers superior to man, which are believed to direct and control the course of nature and of human life.'

   If people don't spend billions of dollars on the Church of Modern Medicine in order to gain favor with the powers that direct and control human life, what do they spend it on?

   Common to all religions is the claim that reality is not limited to or dependent upon what can be seen, heard, felt, tasted or smelled. You can easily test modern medical religion on this characteristic by simply asking your doctor why? enough times. Why are you prescribing this drug? Why is this operation -going to do me any good? Why do I have to do that? Why do you have to do that to me? just ask why? enough times and sooner or later you'll reach the Chasm of Faith. Your doctor will retreat into the fact that you have no way of knowing or understanding all the wonders he has at his command. Just trust me.

   You've just had your first lesson in medical heresy. Lesson Number Two is that if a doctor ever wants to do something to you that you're afraid of and you ask why? enough times until he says just Trust Me, what you're to do is turn around and put as much distance between you and him as you can, as fast as your condition will allow.

   Unfortunately, very few people do that. They submit. They allow their fear of the witch doctor's mask, the unknown spirit behind it, and the mystery of what is happening and of what will happen, to change into respectful awe of the whole show.

   But you don't have to let the witch doctor have his way. You can liberate yourself from Modern Medicine-and it doesn't mean you'll have to take chances with your health. In fact, you'll be taking less of a chance with your health, because 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.

   The first tool you must have is knowledge of the enemy. Once you understand Modern Medicine as a religion, you can fight it and defend yourself much more effectively than when you think you're fighting an art or a science. Of course, the Church of Modern Medicine never calls itself a church. You'll never see a medical building dedicated to the religion of medicine, always to medical arts or medical science.

   Modern Medicine relies on faith to survive. All religions do. So heavily does the Church of Modern Medicine rely on faith that if everyone somehow simply forgot to believe in it for just one day, the whole system would collapse. For how else could any institution get people to do the things Modern Medicine gets people to do, without inducing a profound suspension of doubt? Would people allow themselves to be artificially put to sleep and then cut to pieces in a process they couldn't have the slightest notion about--if they didn't have faith? Would people swallow the thousands of tons of pills every year--again without the slightest knowledge of what these chemicals are going to do--if they didn't have faith?

   If Modern Medicine had to validate its procedures objectively, this book wouldn't be necessary. That's why I'm going to demonstrate how Modern Medicine is not a church you want to have faith in.

   Some doctors are worried about scaring their patients. While you're reading this book, you are, in a sense, my patient. I think you should be scared. You're supposed to be scared when your well-being and freedom are threatened. And you are, right now, being threatened.

   If you're ready to learn some of the shocking things your doctor knows but won't tell you; if you're ready to find out if your doctor is dangerous; if you're ready to learn how to protect yourself from your doctor; you should keep reading, because that's what this book is about.

   And that's just the beginning of Dr Mendelsohn's book.

   There are many other similar books written by dedicated doctors like Dr Mendelsohn; a more recent one by Dr Stuart M. Berger called What Your Doctor Didn't Learn in Medical School (Bantam, 1988) describes frightening reports of doctor-induced illness among hospital patients (thirty-six per cent of patients in one hospital), among which illnesses was serious kidney damage caused by antibiotics. He said it was estimated that as many as four million hospital-induced infections may occur each year in the US, meaning that '108,000 Americans will die--either entirely or in part due to the infections they acquired courtesy of the medical machine'. Dr Berger said:

   'I recall one day in medical school, shortly after I began making rounds on the wards, having a sinking revelation: that hospitals, just like any other human enterprise, are just a vast interlocking constellation of human foibles, frailties and failings. People make mistakes, confusion abounds, politics fester, neglect occurs, greed persists. Things are, in short, no different than in a corporation, a neighborhood, or a Boy Scout troop. The stakes are just higher.'

   That the practice of medicine is in fact on the whole counterproductive to its professed purpose is a situation that makes the Watergate Scandal look like a kids' party, but who can demolish an institution that is more ingrained in human culture than organized crime and high level corruption? People believe in medicine, they want medicine--it promises so much for so little (your life in exchange for your life's savings)--so while they continue being hooked on savory food and other indulgences, the majority will continue to accept the diseases ingrained in our culture and take their medicine until they are cured to death.

The Future of Medicine

   There are signs that a gradual awareness of the importance of nutrition is dawning within the medical profession, an awareness forced upon it by persevering people like Nathan Pritikin. In 1982 a comprehensive report called Diet, Nutrition and Cancer was issued by the US National Research Council. The report was prepared by a committee of people from the National Academy of Science, the National Academy of Engineering and the Institute of Medicine. Although the report revealed a lamentable lack of comprehension of the subject, it did in fact demonstrate that nutrition was a significant factor in the origins of cancer. Note that the report emanated from outside the medical profession, as has a recently released book in Australia called Diet, Health and Disease in Australia, written by a number of doctors and produced by the Australian Academy of Science.

   The research for both of these books obviously did not extend far outside conventional circles. In relation to cancer the lack of knowledge was lamentable, as was the lack of knowledge of diabetes and other disease problems described in the Australian book.

   Inadequate as these books may be, it is gratifying that they have appeared at all; it shows that some doctors are at last breaking free of their mental shackles.

   In his book Man The Unknown, the great physician and philosopher Alexis Carrel said: 'Unless the doctors of today become the dieticians of tomorrow then the dieticians of today will become the doctors of tomorrow.' Maybe this is starting to happen. Evolution is a slow process, and bearing in mind that it took hundreds of years for people to accept that the world was round, I suppose we should not complain too much.

In Defense of Doctors

   In criticising others one must always put oneself in their position and remember: 'There but for the grace of God go I.' And so in defense of doctors with all their ignorance of the 'outside world', this chapter concludes with an explanation by Dr G. T. Wrench of England contained in the introduction to his book The Wheel of Health, published in 1938:

   It should be clearly understood that a doctor is one so saturated with people's illnesses and ailments that, if thoughtful, he is almost forced to look upon life as something heavily burdened by these defects.

   I shall myself carry with me the profound impression of the first months I spent in the hospital wards and out-patient departments many years ago. I had come from the vigorous and exuberant life of an English public school, where everything that really absorbed one's boyish interests was based on a glowing vitality and responsive health. After the penance of school hours there was plenty of time to let the muscles go--games, sports, ragging, bathing, or running and walking over untilled fields. All these things were in sunlight and wind or the raw cold, which made the blood snap round its course.

   Something of this life accompanies the early years of the medical student, but there is always about one the lure of the hospital work to draw one to its consuming interests. One is caught in the meshes of the problems of disease, from which one will not be able to free the mind for the rest of one's life. For impressions of youth are those that remain. They color all one's thoughts and experience, they largely select that thought and experience. And the impression of the quantity of diseases and the suffering due to them is a tremendous one. I used sometimes to walk about London with my eyes down and with the question 'Why?' upon my lips until I saw pictures of the many maleficent objects of pathology upon the pavements, so vivid was the impression which the microscope and the post-mortem room made upon me.

   The effect was not one of depression; that is not the effect upon healthy youth. It was one which stimulated one like a stouter opponent than oneself at boxing. Here was truly a prodigious opponent, the problem of disease, why man is so affected.

   After debating the question--Why disease? Why not health?--again and again with my fellow students, I slowly, before I qualified, came to a further question--Why was it that as students we were always presented with sick or convalescent people for our teaching and never with the ultrahealthy? Why were we only taught disease? Why was it presumed that we knew all about health in its fullness? The teaching was wholly one-sided. Moreover, the basis of our teaching upon disease was pathology, namely, the appearance of that which is dead from disease.

   We started from our knowledge of the dead, from which we interpreted the manifestations, slight or severe, of threatened death, which is disease. Through these various manifestations, which fattened our text-books, we approached health. By the time, however, we reached real health, like that of the keen times of public school, the studies were dropped. Their human representatives, the patients, were now well, and neither we nor our educators were any longer concerned with them. We made no studies of the healthy--only the sick.

   Disease was the reason for our specialized existences. There was also a great abundance of it. Between its abundance and its need to ourselves its inevitability was taken for granted. Gradually, however, a question forced itself upon me more and more insistently. Had not some of this 'inevitability' attached to disease come about by our profession only viewing disease from within? What would happen if we reversed the process and started by learning all we could about the healthiest people and animals whom we could discover? This question pursued me with considerable constancy, but unfortunately I was not provided with that will which is a part of which I reverence so much--the genius of discovery. Those who possess it grip an idea and never let it go. They are as passionate for it to get on in the world as the mother is for her offspring; daring, as even weak animals do, to challenge hopeless odds on its behalf. After achieving a small local repute in research, all I did was to apply for scholarships, and in my applications I placed a subject of my own choice, to study the health of the healthiest people I could discover.

   I did not, of course, succeed. My proposal was probably looked upon as ridiculous. To research in health was a complete reversal of the accustomed outlook, which was confined by the nature of the profession to different aspects of disease. For to the profession disease is the base and substance of its structure and health just the top of the pyramid, where it itself comes to an end. To propose reversing this was like asking one to stand on one's head to get the right point of view.

   At any rate my applications came to nothing, though I was offered work upon the accepted lines. In this I had not the necessary faith, so I gave up research and went into practice. I remained interested in very healthy people and read what I could about them, but the work imposed by the war and by practice in the following years withheld me from anything more than an academic interest in the old question--Health; why not?

   It was not until two years ago, when I had more leisure, that a vivid sentence in the writings of Sir Robert McCarrison thawed my frozen hope. The sentence was: 'These people are unsurpassed by any Indian race in perfection of physique; they are long lived, vigorous in youth and age, capable of great endurance and enjoy a remarkable freedom from disease in general.' Further study of his writings was very encouraging. Here was a research worker who researched in health and healthy people; in fact he presented to himself health as a problem, and produced answers to it, in some such words as the following: 'Here is a people of unsurpassed health and physique, and here are researches into the reasons thereof.'

   In this way it will be seen we come as researchers straight to health without intervention, and to health in the full dictionary sense of the word of wholeness, namely, sound physique of every organ of the body without exceptions and freedom from disease. This is the knowledge which we all want to know. We want to know what is full health, whether the tremendous part illness and ailments play in modern civilized countries is really necessary and, if not, upon what primarily does health depend. We can ourselves attain to health--or at least with our modern skill in investigation we should be able to do so--if this full health exists in any part of our Empire today. We shall at least learn more about how to be healthy ourselves and how to bring healthy children into the world by studying successful human examples than we can by any other way.

   By studying the wings of birds in flight we have made our machines carry us through the air. By studying one of the healthiest peoples of the world we might so improve our methods of health as to become a really healthy people ourselves. A research in health is really promising. Well, here is one. Let us see if the promise is fulfilled.'

   Having presented Dr Wrench's point of view, it should be noted that this chapter, which so severely criticizes the modern practice of medicine, is composed entirely from the observations and opinions of doctors and scientists. It concludes the same way, with the statements of four of the most distinguished physicians of the 20th Century.

   Dr William Roe (retired) of Nelson, New Zealand, the author of Science in Medical Practise (1984) in which he strongly criticises modern medicine, said this:

   'By starting from a false premise, a superstructure has been created which is, to a not inconsiderable degree, an iatrogenic* fantasy. The primary function of medicine has been transformed from a service to patients to a vocation and avocation for medical and paramedical personnel; iatrogenic disease has become a major problem and medicine has become big business. An urgent need exists to correct this imbalance, to restore the art of medicine to its former status.'

*Iatric: relating to medicine or physicians. Iatrogenic: induced by medical treatment.

   Dr Maynard Murray, B.Sc MD, Fort Myers Florida, from his book Sea Energy Agriculture (1976):

   'Are we kidding ourselves with longevity statistics and 'war against disease' statistics? You bet we are!

   Our medical statistics equate the increasing in the average lifespan with good health. This kind of reasoning makes appealing newscopy, but it reminds me of the statistician who drowned in a river with an average depth of one foot. Such propaganda is deathly deceiving. This specious reasoning can lull us into a feeling of unwarranted wellbeing.

   I promise not to belabor this negative approach much longer, but it seems we Americans, collectively, are a lot like the Mexican burro that requires a smack between the eyes with a two by four plank before attention is focussed . . .'

   Dr Kasper Blond, of England (referring specifically to cancer):

   'The problem of cancer must be considered as an insoluble medical problem because it is essentially a nutritional and social problem;* in other words, a problem of prevention.

   Such a problem cannot be solved by animal experiments, vaccines and drugs. Statisticians, pathologists, biochemists and doctors cannot solve social problems.'

*As are all the rest.

   And finally to repeat the great Dr Alexis Carrel:

   'Unless the doctors of today become the dieticians of tomorrow, then the dieticians of today will become the doctors of tomorrow.'

   The time that elapses between the introduction of an innovative idea and its general acceptance in society is called 'the culture gap', and varies enormously with the amount of publicity the new idea receives. If a lot of money hinges on the outcome, powerful financial forces, motivated by either the promise of gain or the fear of loss, can either promote the idea or forcefully suppress it. Thus the culture gap in women's fashions may be only a few weeks, and in medicine perhaps a hundred years. But the latter gap nevertheless is closing as the following report indicates:

   The report went on to say that 'a wealth of studies' have linked meatless, low-fat, low-cholesterol, high-fiber diets with low rates of cancer, heart disease and other life-shortening conditions, but that it may take several decades before the American public embraces a meatless diet. Dr Neal Barnard, President of the Physicians' Committee concluded: 'But only twenty years ago, eating steak was an enviable sign of affluence. Now when people eat red meat, it's with a guilty conscience because they know it's bad for you.'

   Note: The diet recommended by the Physicians' Committee contains large quantities of grains and legumes and very little fruit, much the same as the Pritikin diet, and is therefore not recommended because of the adverse effects of too much emphasis on grains and legumes.

   Nevertheless, the Physicians' Committee for Responsible Medicine is to be commended for their breakaway from old, worn-out ideas and their adoption of a fresh new attitude. Alexis Carrel would be pleased.

Postscript on Modern Medicine

   If what you have already read about the poisoning effects of medical drugs, vaccinations, etc has not made you question which are the most dangerous--pharmaceutical drugs or germs--perhaps the following true story will.

   The story is recounted from a recent edition of The Australian Weekend Magazine and is entitled 'Ben's Story'. It is the story of a twenty-two-year-old Queensland University 1st Class honours student awarded a $20,000 scholarship for research work in biometrics. To gain experience before commencing his doctorate he, with two other young male companions, embarked on a backpacking tour of Nepal, Thailand and Malaysia, a trip which was to end in disaster.

   Lean and good-looking, Ben must have been very fit, having not long before this tour trekked around Tasmania and other parts of Australia as well as powering a pedicab around Brisbane all year showing tourists about in order to supplement his limited means. As his sister said:

   'Thorough as always, he packed only two changes of clothes in order to make room for a comprehensive medical kit containing antiseptic, dressings, antibiotics, burn cream and insect repellent.

   Malaria was just one of his many health concerns, and along with being immunized against typhoid, cholera, hepatitis B, polio and tetanus through the University of Queensland Health Service, he obtained prescriptions for Malofrim and Chloroquine, the recommended anti-malarial drugs. '

   According to one of his companions: 'Ben was the one always on the ball with the drugs', nagging his friends to take theirs. 'He was meticulous.'

   After about four weeks in Nepal and about five days in Ko Chang, a Thai island, the boys split up and Ben went by bus to Singapore. Seven days after leaving Ko Chang, Ben started getting alternating fevers and chills, which he put down to a flu-like virus he could not shake, and he arrived a few days later in Singapore after an all-night bus journey. Staying with friends, he slept most of the day of his arrival, and on the following day, complaining of 'dark urine' and sore kidneys, he visited a doctor who diagnosed a possible kidney infection.

   Later the same day he was admitted to Singapore General Hospital and soon afterwards his friends were alarmed by a phone call from the hospital informing them Ben was comatose with failed kidneys and suspected septicemia, a liver tumor or malaria. The following day he suffered cardiac arrest and was revived, only to pass away the following morning.

   The medical verdict, based on the blood tests earlier done, was malaria,* because the malarial microbe Plasmodium falciparum was found. Over the same period of time, the companion who had shared a hut with Ben in Ko Chang had also come down with malaria and had spent two weeks in hospital in Penang before recovering well enough to travel home. Although Ben's friend could not recall being bitten by a mosquito in Ko Chang, it was natural enough to assume that they both had been, and suffered malaria as a result. That, you might agree, is a reasonable assumption.

*Medical authorities state that among Australian military personnel serving in New Guinea, the expected incidence of malaria is one person in five. Worldwide, the fatality rate was estimated to be 1.5 per cent of people contracting the disease.

   The symptoms of severe anemia and dark-colored urine, sometimes called blackwater fever, and associated usually with the falciparum microbe, seldom occurred in people who had been in the malarial region for less than six months and who had not already suffered at least four previous attacks.

   If this is the case, once again arises the question: does the pathological factor reside in the microbe or in the host?

   Once upon a time the writer certainly would have agreed, but that was before I learned enough to write this book. That was before I watched my son die, having displayed in hospital dark urine, fever and comatose after weeks of heavy 'scientific' drug therapy.

   When you consider a single course of penicillin and terramycin, designed to protect orphan children against infections, was sufficient to cause them pneumocystis carinii pneumonia (Chapter 8), and when you consider how supposedly harmless vaccinations for supposed protection against diptheria, whooping cough, tetanus, etc, can cause, within six weeks, symptoms of tuberculosis, chills, fever, meningitis and gastroenteritis with the concurrent presence of tubercule bacilli,* one is powerfully inclined to agree with Professor Oliver Wendell Holmes when he said: 'If all the drugs were cast into the sea, it would be so much better for man, and so much the worse for the fishes.'

*The Hazards of Immunization (Sir Graham Wilson, MD, London, 1967).

   When Ben felt his first symptoms of fever, etc commence, did he use his carefully prepared kit of antibiotics to try and allay them? That was the very purpose he carried the kit with him, so it is reasonable to assume he did.

   The author, from the age of twenty-one through to fifty-three, travelled continually through New Guinea, the Pacific Isles, the Far East, Thailand, India, Pakistan, Egypt and the Middle East, in the days before hygiene and Hilton Hotels, never took any medicine and was bitten by many mosquitoes. I had a sore throat in Rome in 1958 and a touch of food poisoning in Singapore once in 1962. I didn't believe in medicine then, and I sure as hell don't now.

   It is three years now since I lost my youngest son and I still feel the pain of grief, although of course it lessens with time. So I know how it feels and can sympathize with Ben's family.

   May the loss of Mike and Ben help us to understand how better to protect ourselves, bearing in mind that in order to understand one must never blithely accept answers without first asking a lost of questions.