By Thomas Dorman, MD
Part 1 of 2 (continued next issue)
What is the Purpose of Doctoring?
The purpose of doctoring is to keep people well. Its secondary function is to improve the situation if the first function fails.
On the face of it, these statements seem self-evident. Note, however, what I have not said. I have not said that the purpose of doctoring is to cure disease. The appearance of disease represents failure of doctoring. From this simple little catechism, you can quite quickly develop a serious criticism of the health care industry.
Bernard Shaw, the great Irish/English novelist of the first half of the 20th century and a prescient socialist, used his dramatic plays to bring out some concepts that have been important in the sociology of the 20th century. In The Doctors’ Dilemma, he points out that when professionals come together they do so in order to find means by which to defraud the public.
Diseases are often merely labels with which to frighten people. In the business of doctoring, the maintenance of disease guarantees continued custom. Accordingly, curing patients is exactly what the doctor should avoid to maximize his income. Mind you, fatal diseases can interfere with the continuous availability of customers; they do warrant a cure. Chronic disease, however, well, that is another matter.
It is stated by the authorities of the bureaucracies in various governments that it is the business of public health to protect us from disease. Perhaps they have been useful in helping with epidemics by quarantine and, just possibly, by certain categories of vaccination, at least against illnesses such as yellow fever.
The Industry of Medicine
If we were to conduct a brief survey of chronic illnesses from our everyday experience in contemporary America, we would observe that the heart disease industry is thriving. The "war on cholesterol" was a misdirected misadventure.
The incidence of coronary angiography, stent placement and, particularly, bypass surgery, increases year by year.
The back pain industry feeds the dividends of the companies who make anti-inflammatory NSAIDs (nonsteroidal anti-inflammatory drugs). It feeds the assessment and rehabilitation industries, and because it is ineffectual, it also feeds the argument industry: the independent medical evaluations, the workers’ compensation bureaucrats and, of course, the lawyers who have specialized in these arguments.
Most hospitals’ operating room schedules are replete with operations on people’s backs, knees and shoulders, which common experience tells us have only a small overall beneficial effect (these operations are wonderful technologically, but frequently misapplied).
Doctoring, as such, does not occur much anymore. The socialists’ takeover of the medical profession has harmed it in a way that socialist takeovers harm all human endeavors and industries. The young bureaucracy, tasked with regulating its target, in this case doctoring and the medical profession in particular, starts out by studying "what is." This creates the basis for keeping everything in line.
Is this approach likely to bring innovation? Of course not. Now, the good reputation innovation has had allows further advances on existing lines, but, of course, true innovations, by their nature, do not follow existing patterns or research fronts. These innovations are precluded. They are not within the standard of care.
The closed loop of research funding, existing academic perspectives, the herd mentality of excluding the new, and, unfortunately, corruption in the medical journal publication industry, all militate against useful advances. They do, of course, maintain the status quo, which is that of treatment of disease. The profession of pathology, started in the 18th century, has yielded a wonderful harvest in recognizing static end-stage disease. This article started with the concept of prevention. For prevention, static disease diagnosis is useless. The paradigm based on care for static or end-stage disease has the same limitation.
The insurance business, which is part of the feedback loop in medicine, has contributed in an important way to the restriction in innovation. A person going to a doctors’ meeting hears only discussion about what is "reimbursable" and what is not. Prevention is not reimbursable.
The Insurance Dragon
From my point of view, I like this state of affairs. Anything the socialist system touches, it damages. Although it is customary to speak of health insurance, in fact, the issue is sickness insurance. The insurance company will reimburse you for corrective measures for disease, not for health maintenance.
If you want an analogy, the homeowners’ insurance policy reimburses you if there is a disaster and your house burns down. It does not reimburse you for paying your taxes, which contribute to the fire department, for keeping fire extinguishers handy, and ensuring that fire in the house is used safely. Why does the public demand reimbursement for health maintenance expenses?
This irrational urge has been foisted on the American public through false advertising by facilitators (provocateurs) and agents of influence. When (probably not if) a critical mass of public opinion shifts to demanding the governments take care of preventive health, Americans will have surrendered the last iota of personal medical independence.
I conclude, therefore, that individuals take responsibility for themselves, those who have ambitions for the good life, and who recognize the inevitable conspiracy professionals have to increase the public’s utilization of their services for a fee.
The Rational Mind
When dealing with mechanical systems it is usual to find that there is an interactive relationship between the components. The automobile requires its fuel injection mechanism, as well as its tires. Locomotion lags when either is faulty. The human (or the animal) can be surveyed the same way, except that the considerations are not only mechanical (orthopedic medicine), but also biochemical.
Another dimension that the Paracelsus Clinic is pursuing vigorously is the physical, electronic and biomagnetic properties of living people.
The spiritual well being of people may be better handled by the priest. However, the unique property of a human is his rational mind, and rationality is definitely improved with a biochemical approach. The best investment a man can make is an investment in his own intellectual capability. It is, after all, the intellect, the rational mind, which creates added value to material things. (Karl Marx claimed that it was only labor which added value. He was wrong.)
A healthy mind lives in a healthy body. The focus should be on maintaining a healthy body and, primarily, on containing a healthy mind. The tests which are discussed below represent a new paradigm in medicine, a paradigm which represents such a great shift, such a completely new way of doctoring, that for very little expense you as an individual can plan your preventative health maintenance in a manner which is more sophisticated than was imagined even a few years ago, and of immense value to each of us.
The personalized quality of this planning severely contradicts the present paradigm of medicine. The present prevalent paradigm makes generalizations. It looks at human beings as homogenous biochemical populations. This fixation on homogeneity contradicts the politically correct language on diversity, but, as is usually the case, politically correct language always means exactly the opposite of what it says.
In spite of the mass hypnosis that is called education and the media, here in America individuality is still highly valued. Individuality, however, is, in a biochemical sense, not a matter of choice. A series of laboratory tests can evaluate a person for his biochemical peculiarities.
Are you a fast oxidizer or a slow oxidizer? Are your cells replete with glutathione or depleted? How about your phase I detoxification? For instance, your ability to detoxify caffeine? Are your sex hormone levels adequate for your needs at your particular phase of life? How heavy a load of toxins have accumulated in your body? Organic compounds? Heavy metals? And, how are your digestive processes? Does your stomach manufacture enough acid for your requirements?
The subculture of naturopathy and alternative medicine has been aware empirically of its ability to sometimes classify people by external manifestations of some of these issues. Standard medicine has rejected these forms of classification because they could not be verified when randomly selected medium-sized groups of people were tested by these measures. A dichotomy between evidence-based medicine on the one hand and quackery on the other was created. We now know that this is a false dichotomy.
The problem with these alternative methods of evaluation is that they have been based on external manifestations of these metabolic and chemical subtypes, (phenotypes) and, as there is an extraordinarily large variation in the population, both in these subtypes and in the manifestations of these subtypes, these intuitively arrived at methods of classification have never been borne out by the quantitative control studies on randomly selected individuals.
The standard of care fixation, which has taken grip of the medical academic and research business complex, is going to face a titanic battle. There have arrived objective ways of measuring peoples’ biochemical individuality by the criteria outlined, modifying the weaknesses, usually with nutritional means, and, finally observing clinical improvement in the chronic illnesses which have gone badly treated so long and so profitably.
[ Continued next issue ]
Lew Rockwell.com November 26, 2002