In this post we'll start to give the reason for you not to trust imedicine so blindly, that is, we'll give you the examples of the instution betraying you without you knowing.
We'll start with enumerating all of them, and then, in each of the next posts, I will expand upon them and give you the nasty details. It's a good and exciting reading, at times infuriating, so brace yourself!!
Forget the "We do it for love"/"We do it to preserve life"/"We do it because we care". Some doctors and other members of imedicine might actually feel like this, but when you look at the big picture and at the backstage of the instution, there is unbelievable greed shared by imedicine with another powerful institution, the pharmaceutical industry. That greed, althought heavily and forcefully concealed at all costs, is so big that it sometimes escapes through the cracks of its carefully constructed false image of nobility and generosity. Oftem, those manifestatioms are in the form of high-profile cases of ilegal wrongdoing that has costed to Big Pharma (a fancy short name for the pharmaceutical industry, which regularly co-opts doctors and other imedicine mbers, like health researchers) billions of dollars of fines and serious civil and criminal charges. So much greed should makes us pause for a moment and ponder about what are, actually, the motives for Big Pharma to produce and market such huge amounts of medication. If they engage in illegal behavior (and they do so repeatedly) that, when discovered, costs them billions of dollars, what illegal misconducts are they performing without anybody ever discovering? Furthermore: what else are they willing to do, in order to get money and power?
iMedicine's special practice (let's just call it medical practice, which is basically the set of activities performed by its special practitioners, the doctors; we can expand upon this definition later) has a bad track record. As we've seem in Part 2 of this series, its history goes way back to ancient times, with shamans and other healers. But what we've not seen yet is how varied medical practice has turned out to be across time and across the globe. We'll see that, before its contemporary form, medical practice had not only varied a lot in terms of the activities actually performed, but also, and heavily, regarding its specific conceptual loads. Such a state of conceptual "diversity" (actually, conceptual chaos) is characteristic of medical practice, and still happens, although, as we'll also see, it has nowadays consolidated around a few main specific traditions. Such state of affairs does not fits well the expected truthfullness of medical speech. After all, we expect what a doctor says to be true, which means an assertion contradicting it would be simply false. That is just not how medical practice has worked up to now in reality, and medical practitioners still disagree all the time about pretty crucial points.
On the topic of disagreement, there is huge disagreement on an very fundamental, crucial topic: diagnostics. A person can go to a doctor and receive a diagnostics, only to pursue a second opiniom and find a completely different diagnostics. That situation is called in health research the "diagnostic reliability problem", and it doesn't refer to a diagnostic being correct or incorrect; it refers only to the diagnostic being agreed upon by two or more doctors (often, it is not). The situation is so dire that even MRI examination (magnetic resonance imaging) have cases of gross disagreement, even for conditions that seem to be common and very easy to diagnosticate.
Medical practice today is heavily dependent on statistics (it has become so as a result of lobbying by academics-politicians, as we can show later) . Which is heavily unfortunate, because we can't trust doctors to be fluent in statistics. The stidies that do try to investigate physicians' (a synonym for doctors) fluency im statistics have given us very sad result, with recently graduated doctors miscomprehending even theost basic application of statistics. Furthermore, career statisticians and statistically-inclined doctors regularly blast statistical assertions and statistical research made by doctors, which is not a good sign (more on that later) for medical practice.
To complicate matters even further, statistics is a discipline deeply sunk into conceptual controversy (even internally, with great division and quarreling), and it is simply astonishimg that imedicine's "health" (I'm putting the word into quotes because I'll define it in a later post) researchers even publish statistically-based research as if all was well and fine regarding its conceptual foundations and (and for some, as if no peer controvery existed at all).
This will be a funny point (albeit deeply sad). The fact is, most doctors don't lnowabout the other five points above. And they shouldn't be expected to know. After all, none of them is taught in the medical schools across the globe. Medical curriculum, by the way, is pretty poor and lacking in terms of what matters the most when it comes to giving and receveing medical interventions (including here any kind of professional interaction with a doctor). It's just sad. They don't study properly statistics (not even to be fluent in it, let alone to understand its relation to the real world), they don't study conceptual discussions about medicine, they don't study criminology of imedicine. They dom't study the past and the conceptual discussion of science. They don't even study the history of their own profession! What a sad group of know-nothing professionals!
There is lie in imedicine. Lots of it. Going beyond the first point mentioned above, which was about illegal behavior, I would like to call your attention here to lying behavior. For example, research fraud, where you fabricate findings that you never found. Think about it. In several high-profile cases, "health" researchers have been discovered to have lied about their published research (that is, research that was published... despite being false!). Not good for trusting "health" research, right? (Remember, "health" research is an integral part of imedicine, and produced the "justification" for so much of its medical practice.) Also, we all know the stories of doctors who got caught after misleading patients to get medical protheses (in order to get more money) or after falsifying their attendance to workplaces (in order to "work" in multiples workplaces at once and, again... get more money!). We also all know doctors that turned into politicians and we also can be very sure that some of them lie to get money and power. None of these cases is good for trusting imedicine.
Even within imedicine, we have the concept of "medical error" (and even a discipline to study it, "iatrology"). Some research points to a huge impact of "medical error" on medical clients's lives. And there are astonishing news about doctors performing even surgery on the wrong limb of their patients. Talk about messing up because of a minor detail!!
Bonus point: even if you do trust doctors applying statistics to wellbeing matters, you have good readon to pause and ponder. After all, some of the most peer-recognized doctors of the world assert that what statistically-based research "actually" implies is that many medical treatments are useless or untrustworthy. That is a serious indictmemt against imedicine, and in its own terms.
iMedicine members (in this case, doctors and "health" researchers) have what's called (by themselves) "conflicts of interests": they work or worked for companies that are part of the greedy pharmaceutical industry. AND many of them don't disclose their conflicts of interest, not even in their published research (let alone to their poor patients).
I'm actually feeling a little tired about enumerating even more points, but what can I do? iMedicine is simply a mess. It's not my fault I know so much about it. The tenth point of imedicine's betrayal against you is a grave one: commerce of influence and "conflicts of interest" in the regulatory agencies. That's right: the watchdogs that should be supervising wrongdoing and harm in imedicine and in the pharmaceutical industry are themselves financially tied to big money and to interests other than the public good.
You might think that medical law (law regulating medical practice) would at least mandate that doctors obey to trustworthy standards of practice, right? (For most people in the West, this would mean "science-based", whatever that means. Most people have no idaa how "Science" works anyway.) But no. In order to satisfy "medical freedom" requirements and "diversity of thought", medical law actually gives physicians a lot of conceptual leeway (that is, they can reason pretty much however they want and use such reasoning to justify a huge heterogeneous set of medical interventions.
Medical examination can actually lead to collateral damage and suffering. There are cases when medical intervention (remember: diagnostics, examination, conversation, recommendations and so on) actually cause a lot of unwellness (and of course financial costs) , without leading to any benefit.
Doctors usually don't acknowledge that their treatment (specially drugs, and specially psychiatrists) might cause you to have a worse experience than you would have without them. And when they do acknowledge that their treatments may be causing side effects, they use more treatment to treat the collateral damages they themselves inflicted upon you!
This one is readily knowable by everybody, but it is still an imbalance in your relationship with imedicine members that should make you pause and reflect whether you should trust imedicine. Doctors don't have to care about the impact of their treatment (or their lifestyle recommendations) on you: in their life context, you're really just one more clients who consults them. Whatever the negative impact you are going to experience coming from their interventions, it's not them who are going to have problems with it. Remember: despite judicialization in some countries, doctors can get away with pretty much any interventions they do to you, because medical law is very lax.
Big Pharma and "health" researchers don't actually research properly the collateral effects of interventions. Patients, though, denounce what they see as the result of these imedical interventions, and the reports are in big numbers. (Did you even know this?) Of course their voice is overwhelmed by imedical propaganda.
Sometimes, doctors are there just for the money, and the're forthright about it, telling it in private, for example, to their medical colleagues.
Sometimes, doctors use diagnostics for purposes that have nothing to do with truth, for example for social-admnistrative intentions. And they might not disclose it clearly to their clients.
Doctors usually take an oath (The Hippocratic Oath) that some people might take as an evidence that they are really invested into "patients"'s wellbeing. That is just a misunderstanding; in fact, in some parts the Oath is not realistic, and in others is not aimed at the wellbeing of the client.
A really obvious non-obvious observation: doctors call you a "patient" (that's why I write it in quotes: I don't agree with the use of this term) and imedicine calls you a layperson, even though, as we saw (and we'll see in detail in later posts in the series), imedicine members are throughly ignorant about their own work. The "patient" label enables a paternalistic relationship where the doctor has power over you, your well-being and your decisions. By the way, and this is something you should pay very close attention: imedicine has not shied away of attaining technocratic power, as it shows via its extremely powerful "public health" branch, and particularlly as it has shamelessly manifested during the 2020-2022 (the effects of these years are still seen and felt and believed).
Last, but not least, imedicine is backed up by huge amounts of propaganda. That alone tells much about its greed (for money and for power), about its money (which has to be a lot, to pay for all the propaganda!) and about its overwhelming influence on society.
Trusting an institution is trusting a monolith. Medical practice, though, is no monolith. It's actually a miscellanea of different practices, each with differents pasts, rationales and so on, which only recently have been "unified" institutionally under imedicine.
For now, that will be enough. There is more to say about reasons no to trust imedicine, about cases of betrayal of our explicitly agreed or implicitly held expectations, and you'll learn about them in post series about other institutions (for example, "Science") in our beautiful, crazy world. Keep reading!
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