How much has Western medicine been corporatized?

I went to a doctor’s office for a routine check-up. I like getting the blood tests and EKG, as each gives a baseline and useful information as to the current state of my health. After waiting in line for an excruciatingly long time, as though my time doesn’t matter at all and only the doctor’s does, I am escorted into a rather sterile-looking room. My “vitals” are taken (yes, I’m still alive, my blood is flowing, I have blood pressure, and yes, I am a certain height and weight), and then I am instructed to wait again. Eventually, a rather affable, intelligent fellow comes in, shakes my hand, and asks what he can do for me.

Well, I’m not exactly sure what to say. This must be the doctor (yes, first visit).

A dialogue ensues:

“Do you have any symptoms?"

“No. I’m just here for a routine check-up.”

“What meds are you taking?”

“None.”

A look of surprise, possibly shock, with a slight hue of disappointment. “Oh, really? You’re what age? How unusual. You must take good care of yourself.”

“Fairly good care, yes. I basically bounce around like I did in my youth. I probably can’t run as fast, but I exercise, ride my bike as my main means of transportation around the city, play tennis, play paddle tennis, laugh a lot, love a lot, love life, eat a balanced diet, take no drugs or alcohol, sleep well, and do what others call ‘work’ about 14 hours each day.”

“Well, has anything gotten worse in the last year? If so, we can put you on this medication or that one. One has fewer side effects but is not as effective. And if anything you suffer from gets worse, we can always do surgery. Drugs and surgery are what we do here.”

“Do you mean cut something out of the body that my parents, God, and nature gave me because modern medicine hasn’t yet figured out how to heal it?” I think I’ll opt to keep my various parts, but thank you! Any other options?”

So goes a somewhat fictitious, yet “truer than life” dialogue. I am reminded of a wonderful scene in Monty Python’s The Meaning of Life, when British authorities come to remove the protagonist’s liver because, stated clearly on his driver’s license, he agreed to donate it, but he urgently reminds them ¹ “Dear Sirs, I’m still using it!”

It may be that the doctor is at least amused because I refuse every medication offer he makes, and I ask him repeatedly if there’s something I can do to truly heal rather than to maintain until, God forbid, something goes awry. Kind as he is, he simply doesn’t have a rational answer.

I have many more answers because I’ve been leading a pretty healthy lifestyle and studying how to improve health, not to mention reverse biological aging. I also happen to be a holistic psychotherapist, acupuncturist, and stress management consultant. I don’t let on much; I mainly listen. I have learned about the limits of medical training and what I would more honestly call, disturbing as it may sound, indoctrination.

What is medical school and training, and what is it not?

In medical school, students are taught about pathology and histology. The lens is pathology, disease, and what drugs can do, not to cure, but to temporarily alleviate pain and suffering.

Goldman-Sachs² has weighed in on healthcare economics and recommends maintenance of chronic conditions for the greatest return on investment.

Doctors get most of their education from very pretty or handsome pharmaceutical salespeople who come by the office with catered lunches, lots of samples, and sometimes tickets to the hottest shows on Broadway. And more. Of course, you think I’m kidding, and I wish that I were. Not only is this widely documented, but I am good friends with a photographer who was hired to go on golf vacations with doctors paid for by Big Pharma to photograph the “conferences.”

He’d have a ball at them and laugh with me at the obvious buy-off of the luxuriating doctors. These trips were not infrequent. My friend loved traveling, so for him it was a great gig. Back in formal medical school, students were given only the most superficial exposure to nutrition. There is no training in prevention or in helping someone actualize their optimal state of health.

They are not exposed to traditional methods of Chinese or Vedic medicine, even though these have been predominant medicines for millions of people throughout Asia. They weren’t exposed to traditional European herbalism, homeopathy, naturopathy, or chiropractic, even those which were the predominant medicines of Europe and the U.S. until, well, “the change,” when medicine was “bought.”

These are concepts that had virtually no place in medical school for most, if not all, of the 20th and now 21st centuries. There is no exposure to integrative or complementary medicine at all. Rather, they were regarded as non-scientific quackery.

How psychiatry squeaked through³ and Dr. Thomas Szasz’⁴ perspective is its own interesting story!

The concept of optimum health is simply not part of a conventional medical agenda or what is very loosely and glibly called “healthcare.” Instead, illness is its centerpiece. If you’re not ill, you’re out of luck. If you are ill, you’re probably also out of luck and possibly soon to be in medical debt.

The medical industry has attempted to co-opt the term “wellness.” Anyone who knows anything about it knows that the hospital and medical complex wholly misuses this word—it is a feeble attempt to appear interested in a person’s wellness, but what they are really interested in is getting someone on a steady diet of medication.

Remember that iatrogenic illness⁵ is the 3rd leading cause of death in the U.S. That should be alarming. It should not be sugar-coated. It is fascinating how and who we pardon in our society for heinous crimes and whom we prosecute—it is its own worthy study that many have conducted with disturbing results.

Information & studies on natural and traditional healing approaches abound!

Even though the information on health, nutrition, exercise, fasting, meditation, Chi-Kung, mind-over-body, hypnotherapy, mental imagery, healing music, and energy medicine at this time in the 21st century is everywhere,⁶ most doctors don’t take the time to look into these even cursorily.

This information⁷ is so abundantly available everywhere you’d have to try to avoid it! Studies, research, and trials of these preventative, wellness-building practices are also widely available in the doctor’s own medical journals, including PubMed. Unless a doctor has a particular passion or interest in the idea of prevention, natural medicines, healthy longevity, or possibly biological age reversal themselves, it’s as though these don’t exist.

Just a quirk of the trade, I guess. Doctors tend to be smart because there’s a lot of science to learn and lots of information to memorize. The training is rigorous, but what exactly is its basis—is it to truly heal, which etymologically means “make whole,” or is it to sell more meds and surgeries?

Is it healing-based as per the Hippocratic Oath, or has it become profit-based, skewing medical decisions in the direction of favoring costly lab tests, medications, and procedures that may not be necessary or the best choice for a patient's best health outcome? To be a doctor, according to its etymological Latin origins, meant to teach, to educate others. But that’s not what doctors are taught. How are they going to teach us what they themselves don’t know?

They are taught about diagnosing and treating pathology. That’s it. What are they going to do in our 10 minutes with them, give us a class in pathology? The medical profession has become a corporate-owned industry. It is no longer what it has been for hundreds and thousands of years. It has stood on its head in service to money, with the patient’s health being deprioritized and jeopardized. Of course there are many exceptions to this, but the exception should be the rule.

There are two profoundly sad aspects to what has emerged as 21st-century medicine. The first is that people who choose to be doctors because they feel called to serve humanity in this way, a beautiful, most often heartfelt calling, are virtually forced to conform to policies and protocols which often have little to do with caring for a patient but have most everything to do with maximizing returns by running numerous tests and performing numerous procedures which may or may not be relevant to the case at hand.

This is nothing short of tragic. The caring doctor is, by definition, intrinsically and horribly compromised.

The second (not in rank order!) is that patients don’t get the care that they need. They don’t get the education required to help them live at a higher, healthier level. They are typically given drugs and then more drugs to counteract the side effects of the first drugs. I often feel that I’m in the Marx Brothers film Duck Soup reading the contract.⁸

Doctors are doing their best

The large majority of individual doctors remain committed to patients’ well-being, though the medical system-as-corporation bends and twists them in every way to conform to protocols that are not first and foremost to serve the patient but to serve the hospital corporation’s bottom line.

Doctors are frequently seriously compromised in their ability to render the services they feel are most appropriate. I have spoken to many doctors over the years who feel this way. They are good people seeking to use their knowledge, their thoughtfulness, and their caring for their patients in a context that is largely about money, so between hospital systems, insurance companies as middlemen, and the ever-rising specter of litigation, under these circumstances, it’s remarkable that they perform as well as they do.

There was a historical moment in which “medicine changed” from prioritizing patients to prioritizing money, from prioritizing proven, naturally based treatments to petroleum-based medications. As I said before, I always find the moment interesting when the nurse asks about what meds I’m taking, and I say none. I am scrutinized, looked at a little sideways like there’s something wrong with me! How could it be? He got away! I slipped through the cracks.

But while I think it’s important to honestly assess what we have as “the state of medicine” today in the U.S., because, next to what it has been and what it is in comparison to that of the rest of the world, we have reason to cry. I have been in different parts of the world and have seen how different types of medicine work, usually together as an integrated whole.

Thailand is famous for hospitals that look like beautiful 5-star hotels, and one is cared for from beginning to end, escorted from room to room for one test or another. Thailand means “Land of Smiles,” and indeed, these lovely women are smiling as they take your arm and escort you around at a fraction of the cost we pay here in the U.S. for far better service.

Honoring Western medicine—no baby is going out with the bathwater!

It is true that emergency medicine in this country is often high-level. In a crisis, emergency medicine doctors, PAs, and nurses are miracle workers, and they deserve to be acknowledged and deeply thanked for this incredibly difficult, challenging work. I have personally been in situations in which someone I dearly loved had a severe allergic attack and couldn’t breathe. A quick cab ride to Bellevue, and she was saved. Truly life-and-death. The same with another friend who had an asthma attack in the early hours of the morning. We got her to an ambulance, and in minutes, they saved her life.

I have great respect and appreciation for the work performed by the doctors who specialize in emergency medicine. To me, they are heroes. It’s also true to say that there have been breakthroughs in medical technology, such as the ultrasound, based on frequency, which is remarkable. Transplants, prosthetic limbs, robotic surgery⁹, the use of AI in some contexts are accruing formidable results.

Other than that, how did so much go wrong? How did so much get bought off and into the hands of private equity firms that seem to care about nothing but big digits on a spreadsheet?

It begs the question of how this happened?

It is foolish to imagine that there wouldn’t be an evolution to medicine as there is in every field. But to lose track of the perennial healing found in nature and in her own, non-synthetic pharmacopeia would be a loss of one of the greatest traditions on Earth. Criticizing differing approaches that we likely don’t understand or know much about isn’t constructive, but finding the strengths of each and integrating them into a whole is very constructive. Integrative, sometimes called complementary medicine, does exactly that.

Distinguishing between medical breakthroughs and healthcare accounting

There is much to be said and appreciated about some of the medical-technological breakthroughs in testing, diagnostics, and treatment that have emerged over the past 50 years. Treating burn victims, accidents, injuries of all sorts with plastic surgery and the like is truly remarkable. While the traditional doctor/healer, personal and intimate approach is very helpful on so many levels, we should all be open and rational enough to appreciate how medical technology has advanced and has saved many lives.

Advances are, of course, embraced; this is not the problem, but the financial accounting is. With private equity companies dominating medical decision-making, we’re finished. The problem is profit in what has become a “medical industrial complex,” just as Eisenhower talked about a military industrial complex. Accountants making life-and-death medical decisions?

Maybe standard capitalism and medicine don’t mix. Maybe we need a new form of capitalism, like compassionate capitalism, moderate-profit capitalism, homeostatic capitalism, or capped capitalism. All these are variations on a theme that emerge from a more balanced mind, heart, and human.

I suggest this kind of state of being is the basis of all of our economic, political, and social interactions. It’s not so much the system but how we use the system.

How did medicine go from healing to banking?

Anyone who has looked into how this transformation occurred will bring up the Flexner Report¹⁰. This is where we see the “turn” from what was largely traditional, nature-based practice of the art of medicine to what was thought of as “scientific medicine.” But this was a ruse.

One of the main reasons for “the turn” had to do with the use of petroleum residue from the “Rockefeller oil fields” to create revenue in the “pharmaceutical oil fields.” It’s the same old, archetypal story of power, control, and profit, no matter what or at whose expense.

Medicine went from a compassionate art in high service to sentient beings to yet another “business” whose purpose was to extract profit, and to hell with being of service to humanity. Sounds harsh and brutal? It is, and this is what in the 21st century we have become accustomed to in the field of medicine and what is ironically called “healthcare.” As a system, there’s no health and there’s no care. No insurance card, no medical help.

Medicine has fallen into the hands of the corporations and is still sick

When I was a wee lad, the doctor would come to the house, black bag and stethoscope in hand. He sat by the bedside, was cordial, warm, and soothing in tone, gathered information, and made recommendations for recovery. I grew up thinking that this was the way doctors and medicine worked. It was helpful.

At a certain point, I began to notice that going to some doctors’ offices was a bit more like walking into a bank. There was nothing healing about it. They just wanted my insurance information to be billed. The secretaries were more interested in tending to their nails than in the patient in front of them. What happened?

The monetization of medicine and the medicalization of the human population

There has been a shift in our cultural consciousness toward greater commercialism over the past 100 years or so, overall, that has corrupted the normal, ethical values embraced by most people traditionally from Europe and the U.S. Perhaps the most painful example of this is what happened in medicine. Medicine is a field where saving lives and building human health are considered sacred. For medicine and religion, of all things, to become so commercialized, they both should call us to reflect on what is happening in our society.

It should have us re-evaluate first our own minds and how these are expressed through our managing our economic systems, which are wholly out of balance with life itself. The vast disproportion of wealth across the world expresses the inherent pathology faster than anything.

The hunger for money has wreaked havoc on the very human, admirable impulse for people to help each other in general and in the professional capacity of being a physician in particular. There isn’t a problem that money is part of the transaction in some capacity—that isn’t it—but now money runs the operation, literally, and people are dying or being denied treatment and operations when they’re actually needed.

The ‘‘war on drugs’’ has led to a drugged society

The seriousness of the problem cannot be overstated. What may have started as a wish to reduce the trafficking of drugs deemed illegal has become an epidemic of drugs that are legal.

The opioid epidemic is but one example of rampant drug trafficking conducted by Big Pharma, a suited-and-tied drug cartel, publicly traded companies in which millions of Americans have a piece of the action. Mutual funds, ETFs, and pension funds own a part of legal drug trafficking in America, addicting everyday Americans, the boy and girl next door, to opioids, in this context, called “painkillers.” The Sackler¹¹ family exemplifies this horror. This was a civil lawsuit, not criminal, yet thousands of innocent Americans have died.

How different is this from the drug cartels in Colombia selling heroin in the streets? They aren’t publicly traded, and they aren’t the condoned pedigree; the packaging and branding are different, and who prospers is different, but their effect on the population is virtually the same.

The language we use when speaking of Big Pharma and the federal agencies that oversee drug use and approvals is different. It’s “medical.” When we speak of cartels from other countries, we speak of “drug lords” and “pushers,” and users are no longer patients but “addicts.”

Addiction is addiction. What is different here is who is getting paid, what color skin they have, and who is profiting. The crime of helping addicted people and extracting their money is the same.

As a result, we are now a drugged society. The number of people who are on drugs of one sort or another is staggering. Many are on numerous drugs at once; sometimes one is counteracting the side effects of another. You would think you were in a bad B movie because nobody could believe that some people are taking a dozen or more different medications per day, and all this for health?

TV advertising completes the dirty deed

In case you managed to get through your day without a drug, and if you decide to catch a few minutes of the nightly news, you’ve inadvertently walked into their maw. Each 3-5 minutes of “news” is cushioned with 5-8 minutes of drug commercials, bouncing from one to another, telling the viewer of all the wonderful effects of the drug until, that is, they get to the side effects. Half the commercial is the lengthy list of side effects, not infrequently including potential fatality, by taking what is supposed to make you better!

Any sane person listening to this would turn off the TV or to report to 911 that someone is trying to drug a TV audience with “legal” drugs which can kill. The only way to listen to the litany is to not take it seriously because it’s too painful to believe that adults would seek to push this kind of potentially fatal drug on another.

The commercials are crafted cleverly. They give the impression that people are leading joyous lives because of the drug, when sometimes the drug brings on exactly the condition it’s supposed to be alleviating. In short, we’ve been medicalized. As a society, we’ve been led to believe that there is a drug for every ill, a drug to mollify any undesired emotion or state of mind.

This is all intentional, just as the tobacco industry did a few decades ago. They actually paid doctors to go on TV to promote smoking. They deliberately denied the danger of their drug and got away with it. Those who criticized them were hanged in the square of public opinion. As happens with vaccines and other drugs right up until today. You would think that we were dealing with religious sacraments. We’re messing around with beliefs, and that, we all know, is dangerous territory.

By and large, the American population has become so accustomed to this sickness paraded before us on TV and all media, in our doctors’ offices, that we hardly recognize how biased it is. (Well, some of us do!)

This is how conditioning and programming work. When I went to the doctor’s office and I answered the nurse’s question, “What medications am I on?” and I answered, “None,” I was looked at oddly and askance. This is a problem.

What is the real sickness?

I’m going to say again that the real sickness beneath all of this is a psychological and emotional one. It is our own inner sense, largely subconscious, of our own lack of value. Our image of ourselves, mainly our captains of industry and in politics, is low, and we seek to compensate for this. We do this by overvaluing money and power, subordinating all the things in life that are so much more important. We skew our own dignity and integrity by prioritizing money over everything else.

We poison our children and everyone to save a few pennies per serving of a cereal, or by spraying fields with the known carcinogen glyphosate, or poisoning our water. These are considered “normal” business practices. They’re not normal, though they’ve become the norm. Millions are now blowing the whistle on how sick this idea of “normal” is. We have lost our trajectory, our deeper reason for living. We have lost our soul. In the field of medicine, this is particularly painful because it is the field that is most about helping people to live and thrive.

Iatrogenic fatalities are the 3rd largest cause of death in the U.S., as said. What does this tell us?

What can we do about it?

Good question! We can take really good care of ourselves. We can stay out of hospitals unless we have no choice. We can make healthy choices about self-care, what we eat and drink, how much we sleep, how we manage our stress, how much joy we experience in our lives, how much love we allow ourselves to feel, receive, give, and express, and how much purpose and meaning we may be driven by. Stand up for what you recognize as true.

These areas are within our control, and when we exercise that control, ah, we are empowered! Think deeply, think critically, and spend a lot of time strolling and dancing in nature with loved ones, and life will reveal its healthy, delicious richness.

Last, let us remember, honor, and enjoy the rich tradition of indigenous medicine and plant medicine all over the world, the gift of Mother Nature and her stewards, and continue to bring this into our lives.