This article was originally published by Rhoda Wilson at The Expose.
The medical establishment suppresses original thinking and initiative, with dissent being officially stifled, Dr. Vernon Coleman writes.
The medical establishment’s suppression of original thought has been exacerbated by its ties to the pharmaceutical industry, leading to the protection of ineffective and dangerous therapies and the silencing of critics who question established practices.
The system is designed to produce “unquestioning prescription signing zombies” who follow party lines and worship the pharmaceutical industry, rather than encouraging good doctors with insight, imagination, and intuition to make diagnostic leaps and challenge established beliefs.
Note: The essay below is taken from Vernon Coleman’s book `Why and How Doctors Kill More People than Cancer’.
There’s no room for initiative and originality in modern medicine. On the contrary, both are actively suppressed. Dissent is officially stifled. Medicine today has become rigid, like other forms of science, and original thinking is as unacceptable today as it was in the days when Semmelweiss was vilified. Most people who work in medicine today don’t actually think anymore. Oh, they think about what shirt or blouse to wear, and they think about what new car to buy, and they think about the money they can make, but they don’t really think about basic, fundamental, important stuff. They don’t think about what they are doing with their lives, or why they are doing it or whether it is what they dreamt of doing when they joined the healing profession.
The medical establishment has never been enthusiastic about new ideas. After all, the medical establishment stoutly rejected anaesthesia and the principles of antisepsis, and the brave physicians who promoted such ideas had to cope with rejection, cynicism, and oppression.
Over the centuries, just about every major advance in medicine has come as a result of the work of eccentric, passionate, determined unclubbables who have fought the establishment and who would today almost certainly fail the newly introduced registration, licensing and revalidation procedures designed to ensure that only doctors who obey every rule of the establishment are allowed to practice medicine.
It is a fact of life that advantageous changes to society happen only through the determined work of unreasonable men. Great things happen only when enough unreasonable men care and are brave enough to be unreasonable in public. Just about all great discoveries in history have been made by people who weren’t recognised by their peers before they made their discoveries, and often weren’t recognised for years afterwards either. When I was writing my book ‘The 100 Greatest Englishmen and Englishwomen’, I was initially astonished at the number of great people who spent at least part of their lives in prison. The explanation, of course, is that many great men and women and almost all original thinkers are, by their very nature, intrinsically rebellious and therefore especially likely to get into trouble with the authorities. And, after all, no one ever did great things by agreeing with the establishment; no one ever changed things for the better without having original ideas. And original ideas are always, almost by definition, an anathema to the establishment. All great innovations, inventions, ideas, and developments come from crazy, neurotic people. They may be a little bit or a hell of a lot crazy, but they are all crazy. They may be neurotic or psychotic, but they certainly aren’t boring, sensible, or entirely stable. All original and creative people live outside society (and only rarely, and usually towards the end of their careers, do they become members of the establishment); they are, by nature, outsiders. Great advances are never made by people who would be voted into office, made head girl or put in charge of the milk.
There has been woefully little really original thinking in medicine in recent years. This is partly because medical education discourages original thinking, the medical press suppresses original writing and the medical establishment outlaws original thinkers. All real progress is made as a result of observation and deduction but these skills are not valued today. It is, therefore, hardly surprising that there have been very few medical breakthroughs and hardly any bright ideas. Controversy is suppressed and obvious truths ignored for fear of upsetting politicians or some government-protected industry. It is hardly surprising that for years every surgeon “knew” that the best treatment for breast cancer was radical mastectomy, even though there was never any evidence to prove that this was the case. (There are still thousands of surgeons performing radical mastectomies and countless thousands of women having their breasts sawn off unnecessarily.) Worthless, barbaric, dangerous treatments are often followed with great enthusiasm for decades after they have been shown to be utterly wrong-headed. Back in the 19th century, surgeons made fortunes by chopping out bits of bowel. Today, surgeons “treat” obesity by stapling stomachs, wiring up jaws, and chopping out lengths of bowel.
The doctors who have made the greatest contributions to health care have invariably been attacked, scorned, and imprisoned. And today things are worse than they have ever been. Anyone who dares to question today’s medical establishment will be suppressed rather than just ignored. History shows that great and useful medical discoveries are invariably made by outsiders; doctors and scientists operating outside the cosy world dominated and controlled by back-scratching establishment flunkeys. But in the past, such outsiders did at least have a chance to make their contributions. They were reviled and ignored and shut out from polite society, but (with surprisingly few exceptions) they were not silenced in the way that original thinkers are silenced today.
Our problem is that the medical establishment was bought by the drug industry decades ago. Today, there is no room for initiative and originality, and both are actively suppressed. Dissent is officially stifled. The great men of medicine, Snow, Semmelweiss, Lister, and so on, would not have survived in today’s environment. Anyone who studies medical history can see that the significant developments always come from free thinkers outside the system. Today, more than ever, the free thinkers outside the system are silenced. They will doubtless be defrocked when the new rules of revalidation are introduced to protect the establishment and the pharmaceutical industry.
Traditionally, the medical establishment has quite a record of supporting the wrong view. Over the centuries, if the medical establishment has agreed on something, then it has probably been wrong. Today, the power of the establishment to suppress original thought makes things a thousand times worse. Existing therapies, which are dangerous, ineffective, and even lethal, are protected. Tranquilizers and antibiotics are wildly overprescribed, but nothing is done to stop the overprescribing. Patients are routinely dispatched to profitable screening clinics, which do far more harm than good. Vaccines are injected by the lorry load, and children are paralysed and killed by the classroom. Animals are slaughtered in laboratories, which are used to preserve the profitability of the drug industry at the expense of patients. Critics are silenced. Eyes are closed to the dangers of genetic engineering and the deteriorating quality of our food supplies. The potential advantages of alternative remedies are dismissed out of hand simply because they might threaten the profitability of the industry, which now owns what used to be a profession.
As I explained in my book ‘How To Stop Your Doctor Killing You’ it has been proven without doubt that most heart surgery is unnecessary. A sensible regime of diet, exercise and stress reduction can reverse the problems now regarded as indications for surgery. But the establishment continues to promote surgery because it is enormously profitable.
New, innovative, safe, and effective ways of dealing with diabetes are ignored, suppressed, or even suppressed because they threaten corporate and professional profitability.
Doctors don’t bother looking at scientific evidence anymore. It tends to get in the way of profits. The dangers of electricity, mobile telephones, and prescription drug contaminated drinking water are all ignored because these threats may prove a financial embarrassment to other parts of the establishment. Powerful evidence proving that all these are real health problems, responsible for many thousands of deaths a year, is suppressed without hesitation.
Iconoclasts are never popular. The people who own and worship the icons don’t much care for them being smashed. And these days, the icon owners have all the power and most of the money. They control the politicians, the legislature, and the media.
Even the media have been bought and are now controlled by the self-serving, self-protecting establishment. It is not, I suspect, widely known, but the experts who appear on television and radio, offering apparently independent advice, are usually (nearly always) paid for or subsidised by an industry, and their testimony and advice are, therefore, neither reliable nor consequential. This is as true of medical experts as it is of experts in almost all other fields. The rent-a-quote experts are popular with the media because, since they are already being paid by their sponsors, they do not ask to be paid for their broadcast appearances. In the days when I was not banned from radio and television, I remember contributing to a programme about genetic engineering. Halfway through the programme, I asked the other participants, one by one, if they were connected with the genetic engineering industry. Every single one of them admitted that they were being paid by the industry. “Everyone with an interest in this subject is employed in the industry,” argued one defiant and defensive expert.”
The same thing has been prevalent in print media for decades. Much of what is published in the press is placed there by public relations spokesmen and corporate lobbyists. Newspapers and magazines love this material because it comes to them entirely free of charge. Years ago, I used to write a weekly, syndicated column which was published in scores of local newspapers. The column was popular with readers (who often wrote and told me that they appreciated my honesty) but not popular with drug companies or the medical establishment (the two are pretty well indistinguishable) and as the months and years went by I was sacked by one newspaper after another and replaced by a variety of doctors (employed either by one of the large drug companies or by the Government) whose sole advantage was that they were all prepared to work for no fee. I remember once asking my agent why we could not compete. “I can cut your fee,” he said. “But we’re competing with people who work for nothing, and it’s difficult to make a living when your fee is nothing.”
Over the last few years, it has become increasingly clear that bankers, lawyers, and politicians have all betrayed us. Despite my best efforts, the public has not yet realised that doctors have betrayed us too. And it will, perhaps, be some time before people realise that whereas politicians, lawyers and bankers have merely impoverished us, doctors have killed our relatives, our friends and our neighbours, have enriched themselves through their legalised slaughter and will most probably kill us too – largely through their determined support of high technology medicine and the pharmaceutical industry.
My theories of bodypower (described in my book ‘Bodypower’ and, to the annoyance of the medical establishment, now proven to be accurate, sensible, and economical) have been attacked and suppressed simply because they are accurate, sensible, and economical. How can medical professionals make money out of a system that relies upon allowing the human body to heal itself? (Just the other day, I read about a woman who had a baby who refused to take milk from her right breast. The baby would only take milk from the woman’s left breast. The woman went to see her doctor, who found a lump in the right breast. That’s a beautiful example of bodypower. But how can medical professionals make money out of accepting the wisdom of the human body?)
The solutions modern doctors come up with, and the research results they produce, are rarely original or creative or effective. They simply follow the party lines. The majority of today’s researchers are unimaginative and incompetent, and know that if they want to receive the best grants, they must never question the effectiveness of the medical establishment. Most important of all, they must always worship at the shrine dedicated to the pharmaceutical industry.
The Government (encouraged by the fascist arch-enemy of all goodness, the European Union) spends vast amounts of our money creating illness and causing profitable epidemics. The politicians use public money to encourage meat eating, even though they know that meat is now the biggest cause of cancer in the Western world. (Politicians who talk about “climate change” and “global warming” but who promote meat eating are Olympic-class hypocrites, but that is another story.) Politicians prevent people from finding out the truth about the food they buy. They allow advertising that is as manipulative as it is dishonest. And then they throw up their hands in astonishment as the incidence of heart disease, cancer, and obesity all rocket. Our present system actively encourages ill health.
In every country where healthcare is controlled or regulated by the Government, politicians constantly tinker with the administration of healthcare, but what we really need is a reform of our entire approach to life and health. We need a physical revolution, a mental revolution, and a spiritual revolution. None of these is likely to come from the medical establishment.
In fact, the modern medical establishment has made enormous and hugely devastating errors in recent years. The medical establishment was dangerously (and now provably) wrong about AIDS. The medical establishment was dangerously (and now provably) complacent about the dangers of overprescribing tranquillisers. For years, the establishment ignored the link between tobacco and cancer. For years, I was vilified whenever I argued that there was a link between stress and high blood pressure.
The medical establishment, which long ago sold out to any industry prepared to pay a decent price, always goes along with whatever is convenient and profitable and always opposes evidence that threatens the commercial status quo. Money may not be able to buy you love but it can buy you a whole damned profession. Today’s medical profession has oodles of cash but no principles.
These days, doctors only get to read and hear what the drug industry wants them to read and hear. Anything controversial, anything questioning the status quo, must be suppressed.
And the drug industry and the medical profession are, today, inseparable. Today’s medical schools teach half-truths; they never teach students how to think or criticise the system. (What system is going to teach people to question itself?) Students are educated by rote; taught in the way that dogs are taught tricks. Wisdom is a disadvantage. Common sense is eradicated. Young doctors are incapable of making informed decisions, and that suits the pharmaceutical industry just fine. If you don’t question perceived notions, then how do you ever learn? How does a profession ever progress? Young doctors are never exposed to the truth or to the questioning of “accepted” beliefs or to proper debate (e.g. with people like me). So, medical schools churn out platoons of unquestioning prescription-signing zombies. Originality is a dirty word.
Good doctors need insight, imagination, and intuition, and the capacity to make diagnostic leaps, sideways if necessary. Good doctors need to be able to observe, and they need to be able to think. Great discoveries are invariably made by outsiders and mavericks. Such skills are not simply not encouraged; they are now not allowed. As a result, the medical profession is packed with drudges, unthinking, too frightened of losing their jobs to show any spirit.
Doctors do not have the courage to question the establishment or to have original ideas because they are employed and, like all other employees, they are frightened of losing their jobs. Moreover, NHS doctors are employed by the Government; they are civil servants. Today’s doctors are bought, body, mind, and soul, and do not have the courage to stand up for whatever principles they might have. They do not dare disagree with their administrative bosses because they are hired hands. They do not dare stick up for their patients because they live in fear of bureaucratic censure. And so they vaccinate, and they perform unnecessary operations, and they prescribe drugs that they should know are unsafe. Tonsils and lengths of intestine are ripped out by surgeons who don’t seem to have the foggiest notion of the harm they are doing. Healthy breasts are slashed off unnecessarily.
Doctors do not have the courage to stand up for their patients because they have lost their independence; they are simply civil servants; they have sold their souls for a fat salary, short working hours, and a wonderful pension. They are so beholden to their employers that they dare not even stand up to bullying, they dare not even speak out when they see things happening which they know, in their hearts, are wrong. Their spirits have curdled.
The modern medical establishment elevates its official beliefs into an orthodoxy, always suggesting that they are right because they are, well, right, and that the absence of evidence is not to be allowed to interfere with the acceptance of their conclusions. This is tabloid science.
For example, the supporters of vaccination deal with opposition not by debate but by denouncing anyone who disagrees. It’s the same approach as is used by climate change advocates. Critics are demonised as flat-earthers or holocaust deniers or accused of being in the pay of someone. The only debate allowed is about how big a problem we have created – we are never allowed to discuss whether climate change is man-made because that is “fact.” Anyone who disagrees is a dangerous heretic – to be excluded from all debates, condemned, and isolated.
Back in the 1980s, I dared to question the argument that AIDS would kill us all. The medical establishment announced gravely that by the year 2000, we would all be touched by AIDS. I was roundly attacked by the profession, the politicians, and the media by questioning the logic of these claims and by daring to introduce fact-based arguments into the arena.
Science has been hijacked by politically correct lobbyists. Dissenters, daring to question the new orthodoxy of the group-think obsessionals, are guilty of thought crime and are to be vilified and suppressed. Groupthink unoriginality oppresses and suppresses.
Now, new regulatory licensing schemes for doctors in the UK mean that practising doctors will in the future have to be revalidated by a senior doctor who will make recommendations about their fitness to practice. It seems to me likely that this will mean that any doctor who does not stick to the rules will be refused a licence and prevented from practising.
Just about every significant doctor in history, from Semmelweiss to Snow, would have failed the licensing scheme as planned and I have absolutely no doubt that, for example, the new system will ensure that any doctor who opposes, questions or in any way criticises vaccination will be removed from the medical register before you can say “scientific bigotry.”
The chances of anyone questioning the medical establishment in the future will be close to non-existent. It is today more dangerous for a doctor to be ahead of his time (which is to say, critical of well-established but ill-advised and dangerously nonsensical medical practices) than it is for him to be behind his time. The doctor who dares to criticise the acknowledged mainstream is still a dangerous heretic who must be crushed.
Over the last six decades, I have made many forecasts about medical hazards. Most have already been proved entirely accurate. But accuracy is no defence against ridicule, abuse, scorn, and scepticism; indeed, since being correct makes the authoritarians fearful, the ridicule, abuse, scorn, and scepticism are enhanced.
Note: The essay above is taken from Vernon Coleman’s book `Why and how doctors kill more people than cancer’, which is available via the bookshop on his website or CLICK HERE.
About the Author
Vernon Coleman, MB ChB DSc, practised medicine for ten years. He has been a full-time professional author for over 30 years. He is a novelist and campaigning writer and has written many non-fiction books. He has written over 100 books, which have been translated into 22 languages. On his website, HERE, there are hundreds of articles which are free to read.
There are no ads, no fees, and no requests for donations on Dr. Coleman’s website or videos. He pays for everything through book sales. If you want to help finance his work, please just buy a book – there are over 100 books by Vernon Coleman in print on Amazon.
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