Violence in Modern Medicine

MANU L. KOTHARI & LOPA A. MEHTA

(Its a 29 page article. The first three pages of this illuminating article is published here for our readers to get a perspective of this aspect. The remaining part may be read from Prof Kothari's archive: http://www.cancerfundamentaltruth.com/archives.htm )

I. A paradox?

The popular image of a doctor is of an angel in a white coat. Few are able or willing to perceive the reality behind the image and the violence which today is inseparable from modern medical science. This violence is not limited to human beings; it extends to the environment, to animals, to the fiscal fortunes of a person or a society.

Violence as a Term

The root of the words 'violence' and 'violate' is the Latin vim, which is related to the Sanskrit vyas (he goes). The term implies interference that smacks of righteousness, thoughtlessness or willed ignorance. But violence is also transgression of what Einstein called self-evident truth. The perception of such truth does not seem to be a function of 'development', as the tragic experience of the last 200 years shows. Learnedness, industrialization and modern media - indeed, the more we have of these 'achievements', the less we perceive the self-evident truth that 'progress' and violence go hand in hand. With 'progress', more and more leaves are suffocated with grime, deforestation spreads, more fish die and more whales get harpooned, and the balance, the regenerative capacity of nature, is irreparably damaged.

Psychodynamics of Medical Violence

Medical violence is a curious product of the physician's arrogance, trappings of technique, and the laity's love of the fanciful coupled with an undying hope that, given enough money, there is no physical or mental problem that some Cooley or Barnard cannot solve. The ethos has been piquantly summed up by Burnet:

One might justly summarize American medicine (and all those who reverently follow the American lead) as being based on the maxim that what can cure a disease condition (assumed, simulated or natural) in a mouse or a dog can with the right expenditure of money, effort and intelligence, be applied to human medicine.

The quote exposes the man-centred temper of modern medical science. It strives to achieve something for man, against man's disease and man's death. The outcome is that the USA, the UK and India increase their spending to the point of bankruptcy and get less and less of health. The Rockefeller Foundation summarized the current predicament in a book titled Doing Better and Feeling Worse - Health in USA. In the midst of the ever-widening gulf between medicine's promise and performance, most people - including doctors and patients - have lost sight of a  self-evident fact, namely that the way to iatrogenic (doctor-made) hell is paved with professedly good therapeutic intentions. The only way out of this mess is, as Ivan Illich suggests, for the laity, the patient, to wake up to the realities effectively kept away from them by the medical profession.

L. Dossey, himself a physician, has bemoaned 'the philosophic backwardness in contemporary medicine', even though any allusion to the word 'philosophy' in the context of modern medicine is a red rag to the medical bull. Medical men dismiss philosophy as incompatible with scientific medicine. Thus, thirteen years ago, a book on cancer, scientifically documented and annotated, was condemned as mere philosophy. During these thirteen years, the only comment the book has elicited from the cancerology establishment, both local and global, is that the book is 'philosophical'. The data in the book have not been questioned; the reasoning has not been found faulty. For establishment cancerologists, the book is philosophy and therefore not worth serious consideration. 'Philosophy', evidently, is not used in the lexicographical sense; it is a pejorative term tagged on to anything the establishment disapproves of - even dissent within the community itself.

Cancerology's obsessive resistance to philosophy has made the discipline, in the words of biologist J. B. Watson, 'scientifically bankrupt, therapeutically ineffective and wasteful'. A panel appointed by the national Cancer Advisory Board, USA, has found that highly reputed scientists could deviate from accepted standards of integrity when tempted to bolster their theorems and prejudices with huge sums of the public's money, and an American scientist has advised other scientists: 'Stay out of cancer research because it's full of money and just about out of science.'

The heartlessness of modern medicine can be directly traced to its calculated myopia. 'I am absolutely convinced', says Victor Frankl, 'that the gas chambers of Auschwitz, Treblinka, and Maidanek were ultimately prepared not in some Ministry or other in Berlin, but rather in the lecture halls of nihilistic scientists.' Hence the mythology reflected in movies like Coma; hence, the recurrent reality in India where surgeons merrily transplant kidneys from the desperately poor into paying patients. It is not uncommon in such transplants for the donor to get Rs 30,000 while the agent makes Rs 50,000 When we questioned the anaesthetist of a kidney transplant team about this, his reply was scientific: 'We are happy if the donor has been clinically and psychiatrically investigated, and rendered ready by the agent.' A recent review of kidney transplants in the The New England Journal of Medicine concluded that the ease with which a kidney transplant was done lacked any scientific basis, and medicine did not have answers to the problems the transplant created for its new host. We must thank providence that Christian Barnard failed in his much publicized brain transplant and that a heart transplant is not yet available commercially.

Solzhenitsyn has shown in Cancer Ward that the best way of dehumanizing a doctor is to look up to him as scientific. In the west, the popular and the professional media persist in portraying all diseases in paranoic terms - 'This disease is killer number one', 'that disease is killer number n' - while claiming in the same breath tremendous advances made by medical science in its battle against all medical problems. The result is that the doctor sees neither the disease nor the patient. All he sees is some enemy that must be destroyed at all costs. And since no killer disease - cancer, heart attack, hypertension, diabetes - has yet yielded to their ministrations, all that happens is that the frustrated physician wrecks his vengeance on disease and death, with the patient as the battlefield.

Some surveys of the medical scene in the 1980s give a fair idea of what modern medicine is, and will be, all about. To quote D. Horrobin,

Lay organizations, whether charities or governments, do not fund medical research for the sake of culture. They believe that practical benefits will follow. It is gradually dawning on the donors that for the past 20 years practical benefits have not followed. During that time there have been no substantial improvements in morbidity or mortality from major diseases that can be attributed to public funding of medical research.

A. Relman, editor of The New England Journal of Medicine, comments: 'We have learned how to keep alive very old, sick, and feeble - even brain-dead - people as well as infants born terribly deformed.'¹⁰And a journalist has recently echoed Relman. 'I do know', he says, 'that the miracles of modern medicine can prolong life far beyond the point at which it has meaning.'

Science in this respect has let down modern medicine. Apparently their continuing partnership is a marriage that has soured. Yet the purveyors of modern medicine have a vested interest in the partnership, for it endows them with an invincible halo of propriety and philanthropy. It has allowed the modern medical student, teacher, practitioner, and researcher to completely ignore the fact that most human diseases and death are not only beyond science but also beyond technique - extant, evolving or envisaged.

The mindless craze for gadgets and chemicals leads medical men to create a modern medical police state where symptoms are suppressed and signs are erased. When a child has upper respiratory infection, the body enters into a dialogue with the microbes under an optimal thermal state. But this is deemed as 'fever' by the doctor. Drugs are given to bring down the fever, and antibiotics are administered to knock the microbes out. A peace talk is thus aborted, the child acquires lifelong immuno-deficiency and his natural growing-up is thwarted. Commenting on this common scenario, the English microbiologist J. A. Raeburn has prophesied, 'In years to come, the story of antibiotics may rank as Nature's most malicious trick.'

A healthy adult is sent for a 'regular medical check-up', considered a business venture in medical circles, and walks out a depressed, harried patient. The reason may be that the doctor has detected a sign as yet nowhere defined but called high blood pressure. What had not bothered the patient ever must now be annihilated to ease the scientific conscience of the doctor. There is no field of medicine in which this police-state approach does not pose a physical, mental, and fiscal hazard for the patient.

The patchwork nature of such doctoring, and the hazards it poses, can be guessed from a recent medical tragedy. In an editorial in The Lancet of 29 January 1983, the story of the benoxaprofen (Opren) was reviewed in the wake of allegations in the media that approximately 60 avoidable deaths had occurred in Britain as a result of an 'unscrupulous pharmaceutical firm, feeble watchdogs and gullible doctors'. The firm had promoted benoxaprofen with the willing collaboration of the media that later turned critical of the drug. The verdict was updated by The Lancet in 1984 under the heading 'The Seven Pillars of Foolishness', describing how the practice of medicine had caused the death of patients worldwide, thanks to seven suppressive 'cousins' called anti-arthritic drugs, promoted through collusion between doctors, media, government bodies, bribery and corruption. Such tragedies will continue to occur till mankind wakes up to the realization that modern medicine has not and cannot live up to its claims.