Introduction of a book <<Confessions of a medical heretic>>

Approximately 2.4 million operations performed every year are unnecessary and cost about 12,000 lives.

In six New York hospitals, 43 percent of performed hysterectomies reviewed were found to be unjustified.

Historically, when doctors have gone on strike, the mortality rate has dropped.

“There are just a few of the shocking facts presented by Dr. Robert Mendelohn in his <<Confessions of a Medical Heretic>>. This new release of the critically acclaimed bestseller gives readers the information needed to help make their own medical decisions. Dr. Mendelsohn, world-famous physician and patient advocate, was a pioneer in the movement toward truth in the medical profession. Here he explains why Modern Medicine’s methods are often more dangerous than the diseases they are designed to diagnose and treat. This provocative book covers issues from unnecessary surgery and prescribed drugs to preventive medicine and home birth. At a time when Americans are more concerned than ever with total health and how to achieve it, this is a book you can’t afford to ignore. ”

Non Credo

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 percent of all low birth weight infants. A few miles away, in a large, less “advanced” hospital, the incidence of this condition – retrolental fibroplasias – was less than ten percent. 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 fibroplasias 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 looked that it made every 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 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 on 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 moon, the greatest danger to your health is the doctor who practices Modern Medicine.

I belied that Modern Medicine’s treatments fro disease are seldom effective, and that they’re often more dangerous than the diseases they’re designated to treat.

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

I believe that more than ninety percent 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 Marvelous Medical Factory,” boasted of the Cleveland Clinic’s accomplishments last year: 2980 open-heart operations, 1.3 million laboratory tests, 73,302 electrocardiograms, 7,770 full-body x-ray scans, 210,378 other radiologic studies, 24,348 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 are 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 are sold on intravenous fluid bags, fetal monitors, a host of drugs, the totally unnecessary episiotomy, and – the 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 is 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 patient’s cigarette smoke, or the doctor’s presence could raise your blood pressure enough so that you won’t go home empty-handed. 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 are 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 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 do not 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 differences. 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 percent or 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 heals 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 lesion 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 literate yourself from Modern Medicine – and it doesn’t mean you’ll have to take chances 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 the 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.

Believe or not, you can get this book at www.books.mcgraw-hill.com

Citation from the book.

More than twenty years ago a survey revealed that the reports of expert EKG (electrocardiogram) interpreters varied by twenty percent among individuals and by another twenty percent when the same individuals re-read the same tracing at another time. (p3).

In one test the EKG delivered a positive finding in only twenty-five percent of cases of proven myocardial infarction, an equivalent finding in half, and a totally negative finding in the rest. And in another test, more than half of the readings taken of healthy people were grossly abnormal. (p3)

About twenty percent of people with clinically established convulsive disorders never have an abnormal EEG (electroencephalogram)! Yet fifteen to twenty percent of perfectly normal people have abnormal EEG. To demonstrate the questionable reliability of the EEG as a measure of brain activity, one researcher connected one in the standard manner to a mannequin’s head filled with lime jello and got a reading indicating “life”. (p4)

By far, the most pervasive and dangerous diagnostic tool in the doctor’s office is the x-ray machine. Unfortunately, because of its great religious significance, the x-ray machine will be the hardest for doctors to give up. They know that people are awed by the doctor’s power to see right through their flesh, to gaze firsthand at what is afflicting them, to see where they cannot. Doctors literally got drunk on this power and started using x-ray on everthing from acne to settling the mysteries of the developing fetus. Many obstetricians still insist on x-rays if they don’t quite trust their skill in determining fetal position by palpation – despite the fact that childhood leukemia has a well-documented link with prenatal radiation exposure.

Thyroid lesions, many of them cancerous, are now turning up by the thousands in people who were exposed to head, neck, and upper chest radiation twenty to thirty years ago. Thyroid cancer can develop after an amount of radiation that is less than produced by ten bite-wing dental ex-rays. Scientists testifying before Congress have emphasized the hazards of low level radiation to both the present generation and to future generations in the form of genetic damage. They have implicated ex-rays in the development of diabetes, cardiovascular disease, stroke, high blood pressure, and cataracts – all associated with aging. Other studies have matched radiation to cancer, blood disorders, and tumors of the central nervous system. (p5).

A survey more than thirty years ago showed that as many as twenty-four percent of radiologists differed with each other interpreting the same chest film, even in cases of extensive disease. Thirty-one percent of them even disagreed with themselves when re-reading the same film! Another study in 1955 showed that thirty-two percent of chest x-rays showing definite abnormalities in the lungs were misdiagnosed as negative. In 1959, thirty percent of the experts disagreed with other experts on radiographic readings, and twenty percent disagreed with themselves when re-reading the same films. A 1970 Harvard study showed that the going rate of disagreement among radiologists was still at least twenty percent. (p6).

Yet x-rays are still sacred in most doctor’s and dentist’s offices. Hundreds of thousands of women are still lining up every year for breast x-ray, despite the well published scientific evidence that the mammography itself will cause more breast cancer than it will detect!

Lab tests are another part of the diagnostic procedure that do more than harm than good. …. Overall, erroneous results were obtained in more than a quarter of all the lab tests. In another nationwide survey, fifty percent of the “high standard” labs licensed for Medicare work failed to pass. A large scale retesting of 25,000 analysis made by 225 New Jersey labs revealed that only twenty percent of them produced acceptable results more than ninety percent of the time. (In other study,) thirty-one percent of a group of labs test group incorrectly identified infectious mononucleosis at least one third of the time. And from five to twelve percent could be counted on to find something wrong with specimens which were healthy! My favorite study is on in which 197 out of 200 people were “cured” of their abnormalities simply by repeating their lab tests. (p7).

If you think these tests are shocking, keep in mind that the Center for Disease Control monitors and regulates fewer than ten percent of the country’s labs. So these tests indicate the best work of the best labs. With the rest, you pay your money and you take your chances. And you will pay more and more, because doctors practicing “just in case medicine” are ordering more and more laboratory tests.

One of the common dangers of going in for an exam is that you’ll be used for purposes other than your own. Years ago, after becoming director of an outpatient clinic I found out that one of the routine questions asked of mothers was “Is your child toilet trained?” everyone who was not toilet trained by the age of four was separated out and referred for a urological workup, which included, among other things, a cytoscopy. All these four-year-old kids were being cytoscoped! I immediately eliminated the question about toilet training. It didn’t take long before I got a call from the chairman of the urology department, who happened to be a friend of mine. He was very angry. First he told me I had done the wrong thing eliminating the question and , thereby, the urological workup. He said it was important to do this kind of examination in order to find the rare cases in which there might be something organically wrong. Well, of course that was nonsense, because all the rare cases can be identified by measures that are less dangerous than a cytoscopy.

Then he told me more about what was going on. The real problem was that I was destroying his residency program because in order for a residency to be approved by the accrediting authorities, the residents have to perform a certain number of cytoscopies every year. In this case it was around 150. I was taking away his source of cytoscopies, and I got into trouble over it.

This is true for other specialities, too. In order to have a cardiology residency approved, the resident must perform a minimum number – 150, 200, 500, whatever it is – of catherizations evey year. This is a great tendency to take people off the street and identify them as needing a cardiac catheterization!

….

Naturally, the most sinister and dangerous ulterior purpose you expose yourself to is the doctor’s need to recruit patients. Without the ritual of the checkup, internists would have trouble paying the office rent! How else can the doctor ensure a steady supply of sacrificial victims for the Church’s other sacraments without the examination? The Gospel said many were called and few were chosen, but the Church of Modern Medicine has gone that one better: All are called and most are chosen. (p10).

Annual physicals were once recommended for such high-risk groups as industrial workers and prostitutes. However, today many doctors recommend that everybody have at least one a year. In the last fifty years of regular checkups, however, not a shred of evidence has emerged to show that those who faithfully submit live any longer or are any healthier than those who avoid doctors.

In no uncertain terms, you’re at the doctor’s mercy. The fact that you’re there in the first place means you don’t know how you are or what is going on with you and that you want the doctor to tell you. So you’re ready to give up a precious liberty, that of self identification. If he says you’re sick, you’re sick. If he says you’re well, you’re well. The doctor sets the limits of what’s normal and abnormal, what’s good and what’s bad.

If you could rely on the doctor’s conception of normal and abnormal, sick or well, submitting to him would be scary enough. But you can’t rely on it. Most doctors are unable to recognize wellness, simply because they’re not trained in wellness but in disease. (p11).

As long as the doctor is in control, he can define or manipulate the limits of health and disease any way he choose, narrowly or broadly – depending on his intention and interests. In this way, he can manipulate the amount of disease. For example, he can define high blood pressure as anything above or within the high range of normal. And he can treat it accordingly – often with very powerful drugs. Disease can thus be defined to encompass small or large numbers of the population. If he measures 100 children’s height, he can state that any child standing at either extreme—in the lowest and highest one, two, or five percent—is “abnormal” and requires further testing. He can set his outer limits of normal blood or urine values or electrocardiogram readings, so that a certain percentage of each population is labeled possibly abnormal, requires further investigation.

If he were selling laxatives, he would tend to define constipation in such a way as to include the great majority of Americans, by saying that if a person doesn’t have a good bowel movement once a day, he or she is constipated. On the other hand, if he’s interested in the truth, he would say that if a person has normally formed bowel movements, it doesn’t make a difference if they have them once or twice a week. That puts almost nobody in the “sick” category. (p12)  

The doctor can define sickness even where no sickness exists. After all, among those 100 children measured for height, among those blood, urine, and electrocardiogram measurements, someone has to be at the extreme high and low ends of the scales. And there are very few people in whom a battery of thirty or forty tests will not reveal at least one “statistical abnormality” which can then lead to an entire series of potentially damaging and disabling medical events.

You have to consider—and beware of – the doctor’s self interest. Doctors almost always get more reward and recognition for intervening than for not intervening. They’re trained to intervene and do something rather than observe, wait, and take the chance the patient will get better all by himself or go to another doctor. Ass a matter of fact, one of my key pieces of subversive advice to medical students is this: To pass an exam, get through medical school, and retain your sanity, always choose the most interventionist answer on a multiple choice test and you're more likely to be right. For example, suppose somebody says to you that the patient has a pimple on his nose, and asks what should you do? If the first answer is watchful expectancy, wait and see what happens for a few days, that’s wrong reject that. But if one of the answers is cut off his head and hook him up to a heart lung machine, then resew all the arteries and give him twenty different antibiotics and steroids, that answer is right. This piece of advice has carried more of my students through various crucial examinations, including national boards and speciality exams, than any other lesion. (p12).