My Dad, born in 1922, was the first in his Norwegian immigrant family to attend college. After four years in medical school and three in residency, he set up his own practice as the local doctor in a small Wisconsin town.
I remember going on house calls with him and waiting in the car while he grabbed his black leather bag and headed for the house and his patients.
Those were the days when doctors truly followed the Hippocratic oath they took when receiving their degree:
Hippocrates had another famous dictum:
A physician is a noble calling. At least it used to be before, early in the 20th century, oil magnate John D. Rockefeller hired Abraham Flexner (not a physician) to visit and assess all the hospitals and medical schools in the United States. The result was an infamous turning point in “modern medicine”: the Flexner Report, which eventually made these Hippocratic ideals virtually impossible.
My father had no way of knowing what had happened only a decade before he was born. Nor could he imagine, when he headed off for medical school, the far-reaching and disastrous results of this report, which reduced the number of hospitals in the U.S. from 155 to 30 – ostensibly for violations in certain medical “standards” compiled by Rockefeller and Flexner, which turned out to be the elimination of institutions and doctors with methods of healing that included herbs, homeopathy, and nutrition rather than pharmaceutical drugs.
A fascinating documentary on how this happened can be found here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1wSbBGOUJ5g&t=58s. There are many other such documentaries. The history is shocking. Here’s another: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NtcfSgwMgI0&t=1141s.
My father didn’t know anything about what Rockefeller had done, but over the course of practicing medicine in the U.S. during the 1950s, 60s and 70s, first as an M.D. and then as a psychiatrist, he would come to realize, sadly, what was happening.
One startling revelation came in the 1960s during the evolution of birth control drugs such as Enovid. Suddenly his office was swamped with women suffering depression and anxiety. What could be causing this? He asked each of the women if they’d recently begun taking a new pharmaceutical drug, and overwhelmingly they pointed to Enovid, the current “gold standard” for birth control. After asking them to stop taking the drug, he found that after a week or two the majority of these women’s depression and anxiety was gone.
Fascinated by what he had discovered, he naively supposed that not only the medical establishment but the general public would want to know about these findings. Since he’d recently published an article in Ladies Home Journal about the early signs of suicidal depression, he contacted his editor there – let’s say his name is Bill – and received an enthusiastic go-ahead to write another article. Once he’d finished, he mailed it to Bill but didn’t hear back. After weeks had passed, he called Ladies Home Journal. “I’m sorry,” an operator said. “Bill no longer works here.” Where was he? “I’m afraid we’re not at liberty to say.”
At first Dad thought it was just his bad luck. Later he wondered: was Bill fired, or did he leave, because they wouldn’t allow him to do a piece that would lose money for the makers of Enovid?
I once had a similar situation as a reporter for The Daily Record in New Jersey. I’d recently been cured of recurring headaches after seeing a homeopathic doctor in New York, and my editor encouraged me to write a piece about this. It was published, because my editor had senior status and was well respected, but afterwards he received a stern warning from the higher-ups not to have any of his writers do pieces again on “quack” science.
There was one evening toward the end of my father’s long medical career that remains in my mind. After having dinner with my parents, my father pushed back his chair, sighed, and said, sadly, “I wanted to help people, but I’ve just become a drug pusher.”
Some years later, when pharmaceutical medicine could do nothing to ameliorate my mother’s painful arthritis, he agreed that she should see my homeopath in New York who, thankfully, was able to help her.
Both of my parents, however, were still mainly listening to the advice of their doctors, and at the end of their lives each were taking numerous drugs for various conditions – some, I think, to offset the side effects of the others.
Finally, when my father was dying of a botched operation (I didn’t sue – he always felt that insurance companies and lawsuits had contributed to ruining the practice of medicine), his doctors said there was nothing more they could do and that it would be best to take him off all medications and the feeding tube that had been keeping him alive.
This was one of the saddest moments of my life. Not only was my father dying, but after taking him off all medications, the dementia he’d been suffering from disappeared: he came back to himself. He remembered. He was Dad again – even for a few lingering days.
There are so many stories like this, from so many people. And yet, through Rockefeller’s successful efforts to increase his own wealth and those of his friends, the medical establishment and pharmaceutical industry have not only locked arms over these last many decades but tightened them in a strangle hold that still, tragically, binds our nation’s healthcare system.
