In the words of my good buddy, Robert Scott Bell, the medical industry is nothing short of a “Church of Biological Mysticism” with medical doctors the equivalent of “high priests.” I like that phrase and comparison, and will be elaborating and expanding upon it. Despite the fact that M.D.s repeatedly practice “voodoo” medicine and quack science, modern medicine often calls itself “conventional medicine” while pejoratively referring to other systems of medicine as “alternative.”
But modern medicine has only been around a little over 100 years, while traditional medical systems (such as Chinese and Ayurvedic medicine) have been around over 3,000 years. Homeopathy has been around 200 years, chiropractic and naturopathic medicine have been around over 100 years, and of course, people have been using herbs and dietary remedies since the beginning of recorded history.
The reality is that the M.D. “emperors” are buck naked. I know, I know, right now they may be marching down the street with an entourage of “sheeple” following them who are delusional and pretending that they are actually wearing purple silk robes and golden-threaded paraphernalia. But the day is coming when the entire world will be asking the question: “Why are the M.D. ‘emperors’ naked?”
I’ll tell you why. The “emperors” of modern medicine (aka the M.D.s) have driven the “bus” of medicine over a hazardous cliff, down the mountain, into a perilous swamp, right in the middle of the alligators that haven’t eaten in a long, long time. Why do I say this? In order to understand the current state of affairs of medical practice in the USA, it’s vital to understand exactly how we got here. So, let’s put on our history caps, jump into the time capsule, and go all the way back over 100 years to the turn of the 20th century.
When Dr. George H. Simmons began in 1899 what became a twenty-five year reign as head of the American Medical Association (AMA), it was a weak organization with little money and little respect from the general public. The advertising revenue from its medical journal, the Journal of the American Medical Association (JAMA), was a paltry $34,000 per year. The AMA realized that competition was causing physicians’ incomes to dwindle, as the number of medical schools had increased from around 90 (in 1880) to over 150 (in 1903).
Chiropractic had just been introduced into the mainstream, homeopathy was thriving, herbalists were flourishing, all the while regular doctors were unable to profit from their medical practices. With the state governments reluctant to create laws restricting the various healing arts, Simmons hired Joseph McCormack (the secretary of the Kentucky State Board of Health) to “rouse the profession to lobby.” With McCormack leading the charge, the AMA began to bolster their ranks, preaching ethics (like not competing with other physicians or publishing your prices) and decrying “quackery” (anything that competed with regular medicine).
Simmons was shrewd enough to have the AMA establish a Council on Medical Education in 1904. This council’s stated mission was to “upgrade medical education” – a noble goal. However, the Council on Medical Education had actually devised a plan to rank medical schools throughout the country, but their guidelines were dubious, to say the least. For instance, just having the word “homeopathic” in the name of a medical school reduced their ranking because the AMA asserted that such schools taught “an exclusive dogma.”
However, by 1910, the AMA was out of money and didn’t have the funds to complete the project. The Rockefellers had joined forces with the Carnegie foundation to create an education fund, and they were approached by N. P. Colwell (secretary of the Council on Medical Education) to finish the job they had started, but could no longer fund. Rockefeller and Carnegie agreed. Simon Flexner, who was on the Board of Directors for the Rockefeller Institute, proposed that his brother, Abraham, who knew nothing about medicine, be hired for the project. On a side note, although their names are not very well known, the Flexner brothers have probably influenced the lives of more people and in a more profound way than any other brothers in the last century, with the possible exception of Wilbur and Orville Wright. After going bankrupt attempting to run a boarding school, Abraham Flexner was hired by the Carnegie Foundation for the Advancement of Teaching. The Rockefellers and Carnegies had traditionally worked together in the furtherance of their mutual goals, and this certainly was no exception. The Flexner brothers represented the lens that brought both the Rockefeller and the Carnegie fortunes into sharp focus on the medical profession.
Their plan was to “restructure” the AMA and “certify” medical schools based solely upon Flexner’s recommendations. The AMA’s head of the Council on Medical Education traveled with Flexner as they evaluated medical schools. Eventually, Flexner submitted a report to The Carnegie Foundation entitled “Medical Education in the United States and Canada,” which is also known as the “Flexner Report.” Not surprisingly, the gist of the report was that it was far too easy to start a medical school and that most medical schools were not teaching “sound medicine.”
The medical sociologist Paul Starr wrote in his Pulitzer Prize-winning book (The Social Transformation of American Medicine): “The AMA Council became a national accrediting agency for medical schools, as an increasing number of states adopted its judgments of unacceptable institutions.” Further, he noted: “Even though no legislative body ever set up … the AMA Council on Medical Education, their decisions came to have the force of law.” With the AMA grading the various medical colleges, it became predictable that the homeopathic colleges, even the large and respected ones, would eventually be forced to stop teaching homeopathy or die. And that’s exactly what happened.
Published in 1910, the Flexner Report (quite correctly) pointed out the inadequacies of medical education at the time. No one could take exception with that. It also proposed a wide range of sweeping changes, most of which were entirely sound. No one could take exception with those, either. However, Flexner’s recommendations emphatically included the strengthening of courses in pharmacology and the addition of research departments at all “qualified” medical schools.
It is what followed in the wake of the Flexner Report that reveals its true purpose in the total plan. With public backing secured by the publication of the Flexner Report, Carnegie and Rockefeller commenced a major upgrade in medical education by financing only those medical schools that taught what they wanted taught. In other words, they began to immediately shower hundreds of millions of dollars on those medical schools that were teaching “drug intensive” medicine.
Predictably, those schools that had the financing churned out the better doctors. In return for the financing, the schools were required to continue teaching course material that was exclusively drug oriented, with no emphasis put on natural medicine. The end result of the Flexner Report was that all accredited medical schools became heavily oriented toward drugs and drug research. In 1913, Simmons and the AMA went on the offensive even more strongly by their establishment of the “Propaganda Department,” which was dedicated to attacking any and all unconventional medical treatments and anyone (M.D. or not) who practiced them.
The purpose was to dominate the oil and chemical (which eventually became the “pharmaceutical”) markets, and the Flexner Report gave both of these tycoons the “ammunition” they needed to achieve that goal. In the end, the Rockefeller/Carnegie plan was a smashing success. Those medical schools that did not conform were denied the funds and the prestige that came with those funds, and were forced out of business.
By 1925, over 10,000 herbalists were out of business. By 1940, over 1500 chiropractors would be prosecuted for practicing “quackery.” The 22 homeopathic medical schools that flourished in 1900 dwindled to just 2 in 1923. By 1950, all schools teaching homeopathy were closed. In the end, if a physician did not graduate from a Flexner approved medical school and receive an M.D. degree; he or she couldn’t find a job.
The Flexner Report was the commencement of a conspiracy to limit and eventually eliminate competition from natural, non-pharmaceutical, non-patentable treatments for disease. This is why today M.D.s are so heavily biased toward synthetic drug therapy and know little about nutrition. They don’t even study health; they study disease. Modern doctors are taught virtually nothing about nutrition, wellness or disease prevention.
Expecting a medical doctor to guide you on health issues is sort of like expecting your CPA to pilot a jet airliner. It’s simply not an area in which they have been trained. That’s not to say M.D.s aren’t intelligent people. Most of them have high IQs. But even a genius can’t teach you something they know nothing about. And, yes, doctors can be fooled, “snookered” and “bamboozled” too, just like the rest of us.
Case in point: Back in the 1920s, the public was becoming increasingly worried about the deleterious health consequences of cigarette smoking. Cigarettes were called “coffin nails” and people started talking about “smoker’s hack.” Executives for “Big Tobacco” were worried, so they began to use doctors (actors of course) in their advertisements to reassure folks that cigarettes were nothing to be concerned about.
During the 1920s, Lucky Strike was the dominant cigarette brand. This brand, made by American Tobacco Company, was the first to use the image of a physician in its advertisements. “20,679 physicians say ‘Luckies are less irritating,’” the deceiving ads proclaimed.
The advertising firm that promoted Lucky Strikes had sent physicians free cartons of the cigarettes and asked them whether Lucky Strikes were less irritating to “sensitive and tender” throats. The slogan at the bottom of the ads read, “Your throat protection against irritation and cough.” The ad appeared in The Magazine of Wall Street for July 26, 1930. In smaller print it says “The figures quoted have been checked and certified to by Lybrand, Ross Bros. & Montgomery, Accountants & Auditors.”
By the mid-1930s, Lucky Strike had some competition. A new advertising campaign for Philip Morris referred to research conducted by physicians. One ad actually claimed that after prescribing Philip Morris brand cigarettes to patients with irritated throats, “every case of irritation cleared completely or definitely improved.” There was an interesting paradox in the cigarette ads. For instance, in one ad a company would make the claim that cigarettes aren’t harmful and then in another ad they would say something like “our cigarettes are less harmful than the other brands.”
But, hey, the ads were working. People were smoking like chimneys and Big Tobacco was blissful. Business was booming! Something that made them even happier was when the JAMA published its first cigarette advertisement in 1933, stating that it had done so only “after careful consideration of the extent to which cigarettes were used by physicians in practice.” Remember the paradox that I just mentioned? It wasn’t confined to cigarette companies. The JAMA also participated in the strange brew of “double think” because at the same time it was running cigarette ads, it also published the first major study to causally link smoking to lung cancer. What to believe? Who knows? Doctors promoted cigarettes in JAMA ads, while JAMA research indicated a lung cancer link. Are you confused yet? I suppose in the land of unicorns and pixie dust, this actually might make sense, but not in the land of reality. Anyway, as I previously mentioned, although the doctors in these advertisements were always actors and not real doctors, the image of the doctor continued to permeate cigarette ads for several decades.
Along comes RJ Reynolds Tobacco Company! In medical journals and in the mainstream media, one of the most infamous cigarette advertising slogans was associated with RJR’s Camel cigarettes: “More doctors smoke Camels than any other cigarette.” These ads pictured doctors in labs, sitting back at their desk or speaking with patients. The campaign began in 1946 and ran for almost a decade in magazines and on the radio.
The Camel ads included this message: “Family physicians, surgeons, diagnosticians, nose and throat specialists, doctors in every branch of medicine… a total of 113,597 doctors… were asked the question: ‘What cigarette do you smoke?’ And more of them named Camel as their smoke than any other cigarette! Three independent research groups found this to be a fact. You see, doctors too smoke for pleasure. That full Camel flavor is just as appealing to a doctor’s taste as to yours… that marvelous Camel mildness means just as much to his throat as to yours.”
The first research to make a statistical correlation between cancer and smoking was published in 1930 in Cologne, Germany. In 1938, Dr. Raymond Pearl of Johns Hopkins University reported that smokers do not live as long as non-smokers. The tobacco industry dismissed these early findings as “anecdotal” while at the same time recruiting doctors to endorse cigarettes.
Did doctors really believe that smoking was good for you? You betcha. They were mesmerized and brainwashed just like everybody else. It was almost like they were on a bad “acid trip” or had smoked too much crack! There were big cigarette ad campaigns in medical journals. For example, there is an ad showing a physician writing on a prescription pad which states, “For your patients with sore throats and cough, Phillip Morris cigarettes.”
But remember…every myth eventually gets busted! On Jan. 11, 1964, Surgeon General Luther Terry announced the findings of the Surgeon General’s Advisory Committee on Smoking and Health. The report, Smoking and Health: Report of the Advisory Committee to the Surgeon General of the United States, concluded that there was a link between lung cancer and chronic bronchitis and cigarette smoking. In a press conference, Terry said, “It is the judgment of the committee that cigarette smoking contributes substantially to mortality from certain specific diseases and to the overall death rate.” By the end of 1965, the tobacco industry was required to put warning labels on its products and advertisements to warn the public of the health risks associated with smoking.
After a couple hundred years of tobacco use, tobacco companies would lose several more major battles throughout the next few decades, including the ban on television ads in 1970 when President Nixon signed the Public Health Cigarette Smoking Act. Despite all this, over 50 million Americans still smoke and almost half a million die prematurely as a result of tobacco products.
In his book, The Cigarette Century: The Rise, Fall and Deadly Persistence of the Product that Defined America, Allan M. Brandt (Harvard medical historian) documented the role that medical “research” played in the cigarette debate. After studying research, court transcripts, and formerly restricted Big Tobacco memoranda, he summed up the misleading nature of “expert” medical testimony in tobacco litigation: “I was appalled by what the tobacco expert witnesses had written. By asking narrow questions and responding to them with narrow research, they provided precisely the cover the industry sought.”
It is important to understand this little history lesson in order to understand better how the field of medicine has come to be what it is now, and to debunk the myth that M.D.s are demi-gods and they should be worshiped as omniscient in their field. In essence, due in large part to the Flexner Report, we have a clandestine medical dictatorship.
In this medical dictatorship, what we constantly find is a series of myths, cons, and frauds perpetrated against “we the people,” masterminded by profit-seeking medical groups conspiring with multinational corporations (like Big Pharma, Big Agra, and Big Tobacco) to maximize profits at the expense of public health. Although the myths have changed (i.e. the AMA isn’t pushing cigarettes anymore), thanks to the Flexner Report, the Medical Mafia is still pushing deadly drugs that will one day be regarded to be just as absurd as smoking.
Let’s get real here, folks. Drug intensive therapy is miserably outdated, ineffective, and downright dangerous. Nobody with half a brain actually believes that drugs help people heal. Drugs harm. Drugs kill. Drugs cause addiction. I predict that in the near future (or maybe, like “Star Wars,” in a distant galaxy far, far away), scientists will look back on medicine today with astonishment at how an industry with such malicious and greedy intentions could have gained so much influence. In the words of Dr. Richard Shulze, ND, “We’re going to look back at this century and we’re going to laugh eventually, but we’ll cry first. This is one of the most barbaric periods. It’s going to be called the ‘Dark Ages’ of Medicine.”
In summary, the Flexner Report coupled with the enigmatic veil of secrecy and mystery which is associated with a “medical degree” and the bizarre propensity for most folks to defer to anyone in an apparent position of authority (regardless of whether or not it is merited) has resulted in a recipe for disaster. The bottom line is that M.D.s are in the “driver’s seat of modern medicine’s Maserati” only because of financial coalitions that were organized at the turn of the 20th century. Or, an easier way to say it: M.D.s owe their pre-eminent medical and social status to drug money.
According to my friend, Dr. Robert J. Rowen, M.D., in his Second Opinion Newsletter, “In my humble opinion, the best way to improve the health of the nation is to cease visiting conventional doctors for ANYTHING at all except emergency conditions. Statins are a scam. Treating for blood pressure when systolic is less than 160 has no significant benefit. Most vaccines are a total sham and highly toxic. You can replace most pain pills with natural substances avoiding burning a hole in your gut with NSAID chemicals. And adult diabetes is totally curable with diet and exercise. Back surgery has a 50% ‘make-you-worse’ rate, most knee arthroscopy is worthless in the long run, and cancer-screening treatment is a total catastrophe. … It’s vital we show everyone that this Emperor (conventional medicine) has no clothes.”
Excerpt from Monumental Myths Of The Modern Medical Mafia