Medicine Beyond Medicine

On The Healing Value of Illness

Illness and Identity - The Immune Self and its ‘Defences’

What Doctors Don’t Ask

Self-Diagnosis and Self-Healing

A Case Study in ‘Diagnosis’

From The Way Toward Health - A Seth Book by Jane Roberts

Three Defining Principles of THE NEW MEDICINE

APPENDICES

From Medical Nemesis - The Expropriation of Health  by Ivan Illich

LAWS OF THE PHARMACEUTICAL INDUSTRY

Prescription Drugs:  4^TH Leading Cause of Death

Download all of the above as a single .pdf file

Foundations of the new medicine (PowerPoint presentation)

Healing, Hearing and the Call of the clearing

Heidegger, medicine and 'scientific method'
    The Unheeded Heritage of the Zollikon Seminars

Medicine Beyond Medicine

Today we find all manner of ‘medicines’ on the market - ‘orthodox’ and ‘alternative’ medicine, Western and Chinese medicine, ‘Ayurvedic’ and ‘energy medicine’, ‘integrative’ and ‘holistic medicine’, herbal and homoeopathic medicine etc. Yet despite their apparent diversity, all these forms of medicine share a set of common core assumptions - assumptions which have remained unquestioned for millennia. The New Medicine questions all these core assumptions. That is why it is not simply ‘a’ new form of medicine to add to the list of current ‘medicines’. Instead it is ‘medicine beyond medicine’ or ‘meta-medicine’. The central question at the heart of ‘The Old Medicine’ in all its forms – traditional or modern, orthodox or ‘alternative’,  is what ‘causes’ illness and how best to ‘treat’ or ‘cure’ it. The more fundamental questions addressed by The New Medicine are – ‘What is health?’ and ‘What is illness?’ Herein lies the basis of a whole series of contrasts (see below) between the almost completely unquestioned assumptions of The Old Medicine and the foundational principles of The New Medicine. 

On The Healing Value of Illness

In the medical ‘war’ against disease and the attempt to ‘heal’ illness by whatever means, conventional or unconventional, the potentially healing value of illness is entirely ignored. The New Medicine is founded on an understanding that illness, ill-health, or ‘disease’ can in itself be beneficial and ‘healthy’ in many different ways:

·        Giving somatic expression to a felt ‘dis-ease’ - the way in which a person feels ill-at-ease with themselves, other people or their lives in some way

·        Forcing a person to take ‘time out’ from merely ‘functioning’ in a ‘healthy’ way by developing some diagnosable disorder or ‘dysfunction’.

·        Helping people to feel, focus on and confront painful problems – even if only through the way in which physical pain can focus the mind.

·        Bringing a person to a necessary ‘crisis’ in the root sense of the word – a decisive ‘turning point’ in their lives.

·        Allowing a person to fully express and reveal intense emotional pain by feeling and expressing it as a reaction to intense physical pain – moaning and groaning. 

·        Incapacitating a person in a way that allows them to accept already-existing limits to their capacities – limits they might otherwise have sought (or been put under pressure) to deny and overcome.

·        Letting a person become dependent on others in a socially acceptable way, thereby allowing them to express dependency needs in themselves which they might otherwise have fought or rejected.

·        Enabling a person to indirectly ask for and receive emotional care through care of our bodies and through being taken care of as ‘patients’.

·        Helping a person to give more time and be more patient with themselves and others by becoming ‘a patient’.

·        Providing a temporary respite from life problems through a temporary identity as ‘patient’ or victim of a particular illness.

·        Providing a temporary but coherent organising principle for a person’s life - built around their symptoms or around timetables of rest and treatment.

·        Overcoming isolation and offering a medium of human contact through relationships with physicians or through the social environment of a hospital ward.

·        Putting a person into an altered state of consciousness - one in which they are able to feel themselves or look at their lives and problems in a different way.

·        Stopping a person from living in their heads and minds and making them feel their bodies again – thereby giving them a fuller, more embodied sense of self.

·        Bringing about changes in a person’s ‘body identity’ – allowing them to give birth to a different bodily sense of self and one with a positive effect on their lives and relationships.

·        Giving symbolic expression to a person’s felt dis-ease. For example heart conditions as a metaphorical expression of either ‘loss of heart’ or ‘heartlessness’, ‘cold-heartedness’ or ‘faint-heartedness’ etc.

This last point brings us to the heart of the contrast between the old medicine and the new. The New Medicine understands somatic symptoms and illnesses as ‘body dreams’ (or nightmares) with both a general and a highly personal symbolic meaning. The most basic of the core assumptions of The Old Medicine – namely that illness has no meaning – is comparable to the attitude of materialist science towards dreams and nightmares before Freud. Dreams, like illnesses, were denied any symbolic meaning or beneficial value. Whereas Freud sought scientific methods of interpreting the meaning of dream symbols and events, modern medicine makes no attempt whatsoever to develop methods for the interpretation of somatic symptoms or disorders as body symbols or ‘embodied dreams’.

 Finally, we must not forget the importance of illness as a quite natural way out of this life – as a way of dying. The war that The Old Medicine wages on disease is part of a general war against aging and death – a war that is one of the most unnatural and unhealthy aspects of modern culture and its science. For this is a culture that values quantitative longevity over quality of life, and a science that denies the eternal life of the psyche and its body.

The individual’s felt dis-ease and their felt body is not merely the way they subjectively feel their physical body and its condition. On the contrary, the physical body is but the outer, physical expression of the individual’s psychical body - their subjective or felt body. The essence of the subjective, psychical or felt body is the individual’s bodily sense of self. Illness is first and foremost a discordance or dissonance of the felt self – of body identity. That is why all illness begins with a vague sense of ‘not feeling ourselves’ – and yet can lead us to ‘feeling another self’. 

Illness and Identity
- The Immune Self and its ‘Defences’

Illness is intimately connected with identity. Whenever we ‘do not feel ourselves’, but instead feel out of touch with or just different to ourselves in some way, this can occasion a sense of dis-ease or malaise, one which may in turn find expression in a bodily malady or disease. What feels discomforted or ‘threatened’ by us feeling different is not our ‘immune system’ but our immune self. This is the self that generally does not allow what we feel to affect our sense of who we are – to alter our felt self.  Thus we say ‘I feel good’ or ‘I’m not feeling so good’ as if it were the same ‘I’ in both cases. This is the way the immune self protects us from feeling ourselves – this very ‘I’ in a different way. The so-called ‘immune system’ and its ‘defences’ is but a physical expression of the immune self and its defences. These defences serve primarily to protect a sense of unchanging identity – in particular that unchanging mental or ego identity represented by the unchanging word ‘I’. It is the over-activity of the immune self – the ego - that actually ‘weakens’ our body’s physical immune ‘defences’. Yet this very ‘weakening’ can help us to overcome our identity defences through illness – for through illness our most intimate bodily sense of self is altered in a way the ego cannot deny.

We can feel different in positive as well as negative ways – and feel a different bodily sense of self without experiencing dis-ease or getting ill. Nevertheless, all illness begins with a sense of ‘not feeling ourselves’ – feeling different in a way we find discomforting and are ill-at-ease with. Not feeling ourselves however is a part of a natural process through which we can learn to feel another self. This is a fundamentally healthy and healing process, for by letting ourselves feel other, different selves to the one we normally identify with we quite literally come to feel more of ‘ourselves’. We become more whole by feeling more of our whole self or ‘soul’ in all its sides and aspects. This is what I term the health process. Out of an initial sense of ‘not feeling ourselves’ may come something else however. Instead of feeling another self we may feel ourselves possessed or invaded by some ‘thing’ that is foreign or alien to us - that is ‘other than self’ or ‘not self’. Depending on our culture we then immediately brand this ‘thing’ as bad – whether in the form of an invading ‘spirit’ or infectious virus, blaming it for us feeling bad. This mental branding and blaming is actually a form of auto-suggestive self-diagnosis – for it actually serves to actively materialise the sense of ‘otherness’ through illness. So again, depending on our cultural worldview, we experience actual symptoms of illness, whether in the form of a common malady, a malignant tumour, spiritual malaise or intrusive inner voice. What I call the illness process begins with not feeling ourselves but leads us then to mentally detaching ourselves from and objectifying this sense of difference – feeling something not-self that is ‘getting at us’ or ‘making’ us feel bad or ill. Alternatively the illness process may take us from not feeling ourselves to feeling no self – to completely losing any sense of self and with this, losing our mental bearings in life. Having become completely identified with a part of our whole self or soul – its loss is felt as a loss of identity as such, a loss of our soul.

The difference between health and illness, as between so-called ‘mental’ illness on the one hand and ‘physical’ illness on the other, all comes down to how our immune self responds to the initial sense of ‘not feeling ourselves’ – whether it turns it into a sense of feeling something not-self, or of losing a sense of self. Its ‘defences’ are manifold. It may bring about a weakening of the physical immune system in order for the body to be able to identify something ‘not self’ (for example an infection or tumour) for the body to fight. This in turn helps the individual to forge a new identity as a physically ‘ill’ person. A new identity may also be forged through some form of recognisable ‘mental illness’ – for example through splitting, alternation or fragmentation of identity, and/or through displays of unacceptably ‘different’ or ‘difficult’ behaviour. The individual may become ‘paranoid’ - perceiving threats to the immune self as coming from the world or hallucinated spirits rather than their body. Or they may over-identify with other people – real or imaginary  – to substitute for a basic sense of loss of self. The variations are endless, and highly individual – yet no more so than the endless variety of defences that so-called ‘healthy’ or ‘normal’ people deploy to defend their sense of an unchanging ‘I’ – the immune self. Such defences include both social conformism and rebellious defiance; seeming to lead a normal life on the one hand and indulging in uncontrolled drinking or drug-taking on the other; maintaining a façade of gentleness and decency on the one hand and engaging in acts of violence, abuse or anti-social behaviour on the other. That is why, in a sick world, it would in fact be most unhealthy if medicine made everyone perfectly healthy and people never got sick. We need only recall the seemingly ‘healthy’ and ‘normal’ lives of the Nazi leaders, and of today’s most brutal and cynical executives, politicians and dictators.

What Doctors Don’t Ask

 For most doctors, ‘diagnosis’ is solely about seeking somatic causes for the patient’s symptoms. They focus only on the fleshly ‘text’ of these somatic symptoms - and not at all on the social life context in and from which they emerged. Hence they rarely ask or find out about significant feelings or life events of the sort which lie hidden in the background of the patient’s illness – and which might have led up to it. What doctors schooled in The Old Medicine blithely ignore, those schooled in The New Medicine would immediately seek to explore – by asking key questions such as the following:

When did your symptoms begin?

 What was going on in your life in the days, weeks, months or years preceding the onset of your symptoms?

 What were the most emotionally significant events you experienced in this period?

 What were the most dominant or intense feelings you experienced in this period?

 How did these events or feelings make you feel?

 Where and how did you feel these feelings in your body?

What sort of thoughts did you have around these events and feelings?

What do you tend to think about most when you are most aware of your symptoms?

What feelings accompany these thoughts?

What do you do with those thoughts and feelings when you have them?

At what times or in what situations do your symptoms tend to intensify or re-emerge?

Have you experienced similar symptoms in the past, and if so at what times and in what circumstances?

How do your symptoms, and the thoughts and feelings you have around them, affect your life, work and relationships?

What do your symptoms impel you to do or stop you from doing?

What changes in your life, work and way of relating to others do you feel would most help you to alleviate them?

How do they make YOU feel – in what way do they affect your overall sense of self?

What is the positive side of the new sense of self that your symptoms help you feel?

In what ways could you choose to more fully embody this new sense of self?
 

Self-Diagnosis and Self-Healing

 ‘Diagnosis’ in The New Medicine does not mean seeking a medical label or cause for one’s symptoms. It means getting to know oneself (gnosis) through (dia) one’s symptoms. Symptoms not only ‘affect’ one’s overall mental, emotional or somatic state. They are themselves the expression of an overall self-state  - a way of feeling oneself. Through feeling our dis-ease and its symptoms as symbolic expressions of a self-state we get to understand them and to know ourselves in a deeper way - in a bodily, feeling way. One need only seek to feel the symptoms more fully rather than less – not just as localised physical sensations or as mental-emotional states however, but as self-states, as ways of feeling oneself. That way, any symptoms, if fully felt and followed, can lead automatically to a healing transformation of one self-state, and to a renewed sense of one’s self as a whole. Understood as a way of getting to know ourselves more intimately through our bodies – not clinically but in a direct feeling way – ‘diagnosis’ itself is intrinsically self-healing. It is ‘self-healing’ not because we are ‘curing’ ourselves without treatment, but because it is our very sense of self that we are healing - making more whole. This alone is the basis of any long-term ‘cure’.

Some Simple Guides to Self-Healing:

 ·        Only by maintaining an overall sense of our body as a whole can we maintain a sense of our self as whole. When you feel ill therefore, do not focus solely on your symptoms - on specific localised sensations, thoughts or emotions - but instead seek to maintain a sense of your body and self as whole. 

·        Remember that what you may think of and experience as purely emotional distress or ‘mental’ illness’ is also something that is always accompanied by a particular overall bodily sense of yourself. 

·        Conversely, if you feel yourself as just ‘physically’ ill, attend to the thoughts and emotions that tend to accompany your symptoms – for these will give you the best clue to the underlying life-problem that they symbolise.

 ·        Attend not only to the way your symptoms ‘make you feel’ but to the way they make you feel – the overall sense of self that goes with them. 

 ·        Look for ways of actively embodying this particular sense of self – letting it find expression in every aspect of your body language. For the more directly you body the way you feel the less need your body will have to express and communicate it  indirectly through physical or mental-emotional symptoms.

 ·        Understand that the thoughts, emotions and physical sensations that arise when you are ill are expressions of an overall way of feeling yourself, and use them as symbolic clues to the life problems they might express.

 ·        Your awareness of a sensation, emotion or thought is not a sensation, emotion or thought. To ease your symptoms, remind yourself that you are not your thoughts, emotions or physical sensations, but your very awareness of them.

A Case Study in ‘Diagnosis’

A recently bereaved widow, whose husband Harry died from a heart attack, finds herself suffering disturbing chest pains at night and goes to sees her physician. The physician sees her symptoms only as signs of some possible organic disorder which might be ‘causing’ them. He sends her to a consultant to test for possible heart conditions. The tests proving inconclusive, the consultant ends up diagnosing mild angina, and prescribes tablets. These in turn prove to have little effect on the patient’s symptoms.

 n visiting her physician a second time however, the latter recalls her recent bereavement and, as a result, begins to read the bodily ‘text’ of her symptoms in a different way, understanding them in the life context of her loss and the pain it may be causing her. Rather than seeking a purely clinical diagnosis of the patient’s symptoms he himself listens to his patient in a genuinely patient way. As a result an insight flashes through his mind which he shares with her.  He ‘sees’ that she may be suffering from a doubly broken heart: “the one that killed Harry, and the one you’re left alive with, that hurts when you’re most alone in the middle of the night…the broken heart that gave up and the one that has to carry on painfully.” This heartfelt hearing of the patient and the heart-to-heart talk that ensue are the first time anyone has ever acknowledged the pain of her grief. It gives her the strength of heart to acknowledge and bear it in a new way. Her symptoms disappear.

 his case vignette, cited by Dr David Zigmond in an article on different modes of patient-physician communication, goes to the heart of the contrast between medical diagnosis and fundamental diagnosis. The term ‘diagnosis’ means ‘through knowledge’ (dia-gnosis). The Greek word gnosis derives from the verb gignostikein – to ‘know’ – not in the sense of possessing knowledge of or about something, but rather the sort of direct knowing we refer to when we speak of being familiar with someone, ‘knowing’ them well or intimately, or ‘knowing’ when they are happy or unhappy. The relation that distinguishes this type of knowing is one in which, as Heidegger put it “we ourselves are related and in which the relation vibrates through our basic comportment.” Medical knowledge on the other hand, like other forms of scientific knowledge, including psychology, is not relational knowledge but knowledge of or about some ‘thing’ – an ‘It’. It represents relationships between things and between people as if this were something quite independent of our inner relation to them.  Yet is was precisely a decisive change in the physician’s relationship to his patient in the second consultation that proved crucial in terms of truly ‘knowing’ the patient and the true nature of her ‘condition’.  Rather than simply bringing to bear his standard medical knowledge of the heart as a biological organ he had the patience to bear with his patient in listening silence – to acknowledge her heartbreak and bear it with her in a heartfelt way. As a result she no longer felt herself so painfully alone in bearing her heartache - and was able to find a new bearing towards the loss that occasioned it. The paradox is that despite the inconclusiveness of the medical tests, had the physician himself not embodied a new and different bearing towards his patient she might well have found herself continuing to body and communicate her felt distress through increasingly acute symptoms - using her biological heart as an instrument of what Freud called ‘organ speech’. The physician’s  new bearing was therefore ‘preventative medicine’ in the deepest sense - forestalling a process whereby this patient might well have ended up as a genuine ‘heart case’ requiring medical intervention - or else a ‘heart sink’ case in which tests continued to reveal no conclusive, measurable signs of any organic disorder or heart disease.  When doctors speak of the ‘heart-sink’ patients then, what they are actually referring to is precisely the type of patient that all too clearly needs a deeper more feeling type of diagnosis than that which is normally looked for. ‘Deep diagnosis’ means seeking to hear, sense, feel and respond to the patient’s inwardly felt dis-ease rather than seeking its ‘causes’ in some medically labelled disease or disorder.

The focus of biological medicine is certainly not the patient’s felt body or felt dis-ease but rather on the clinical body. The clinical body is not the body of an individual human being – not my body or yours. Instead it is a body constituted entirely by a generalised body of knowledge - the ‘physical body’ as it is represented in medical textbooks. The diagnostic gaze of the physician derives entirely from their clinical knowledge and is directed only at the clinical body.  It is a purely clinical gaze - one which turns the body into an object of medical-scientific examination and clinical testing. At its heart is a fundamental separation between the human body and the human being - a separation that distances the patient as a human being from their own body and actively encourages them to see their own dis-ease as an impersonal thing, an ‘It’. Medical treatment is seen as identifying and eliminating this “It” – to make “It” go away, or to make “It” better.  The physician’s interest is not in the patient’s felt dis-ease but only its measurable physical signs. The fact is however, that the patient’s dis-ease, distress, discomfort or even pain is not itself anything essentially measurable.  For the very space that it occupies is not itself a biological or physical space but a space of subjective awareness.  Its inwardness is comparable to the inwardness of the word – being an inwardness of meaning or felt sense - and of the felt self of the patient. Like the inwardly felt meaning of a word however, the inwardly felt sense of a patient’s symptoms is not something that what is misleadingly called ‘internal medicine’ can test for or find evidence of it - anymore than it can find measurable evidence of a grief-stricken heart by prizing open their chest in surgery. For as Martin Heidegger points out:

“How does one measure grief? Obviously we cannot measure it at all. Why not? Were we to apply a method of measurement to grief, this would go against the meaning of grief and we would rule out in advance the grief as grief.” Nor can one measure tears, for “when one measure one measures at best a fluid and its drops but not tears.”

More than once Heidegger approvingly cites Aristotle’s remark that “...it is uneducated not to have an eye for when it is necessary to look for a proof and when this is not necessary.” Seeking evidence of organic disorder through clinical testing and physical measurements of one sort or another is one thing - though it tells us nothing of what this disorder reveals as a primordial phenomenon, the dis-ease it embodies and brings to light. Seeking evidence or proof of psychiatric disorders through questionnaires or brain scans is ‘uneducated’ in just the way that Aristotle suggests. For it is rather like needing to prove someone’s unhappiness by asking them how often they cry, by looking for ‘evidence’ in the form tears or tear stains, or worse still, seeking a reliable ‘scientific measure’ of their unhappiness by weighing their teardrops.

The case described by Zigmond is therefore a simple but highly pertinent one in contrasting the diagnostic approach of The Old Medicine (and its dangers) with that of The New Medicine.  It is a case study in the very meaning of ‘diagnosis’ as such, and the way in which different diagnostic approaches or bearings –  themselves different modes of relating to and ‘knowing’ a patient - can come to have a direct bearing on the patient’s medical condition itself.

From The Way Toward Health
- A Seth Book by Jane Roberts

Modern medical science largely considers the human body to be a kind of mechanical model, a sort of vehicle like a car that needs to be checked by a garage every so often. As an automobile is put together at an assembly line, so the body is simply seen as a very efficient machine put together in nature’s ‘factory’. If all the parts are in their proper place, and functioning smoothly, then the machine should give as excellent a service as any well-running automobile – or so it seems.

 The heart is often described as a pump. With the latest developments in medical technology, there are all kinds of heart operations that can be performed, even the use of heart transplants. In many cases, even when hearts are repaired through medical technology, the same trouble reoccurs at a later date, or the patient recovers only to fall prey to a different, nearly fatal or fatal disease. This is not always the case by any means, but when such a person does recover fully, and maintains good health, it is because beliefs, attitudes and feelings have changed for the better, and because the person ‘has a heart again’ … has regained the will to live.

 Many people who have heart trouble feel that they have ‘lost the heart’ for life. They may feel broken-hearted for any of many reasons. They may feel heartless, or imagine themselves to be so cold-hearted that they punish themselves by literally trying to lose their heart. With many people having such difficulties, the addition of love in the environment may work far better than any heart operation. A new pet given to a bereaved individual has saved more people from needing heart operations than any physician. In other words, ‘a love transplant’ in the environment may work far better overall than a heart-transplant operation, or a bypass, or whatever; in such ways the heart is allowed to heal itself.

 If people become ill, it is quite fashionable to say that the immune system has temporarily failed – yet the body itself knows that certain ‘dis-eases’ are healthy reactions. The body does not regard diseases as diseases, in usually understood terms. It regards all activity as experience, as a momentary condition of life, as a balancing situation. But it possesses a sense of wholeness and of overall integrity, for it knows that it continues to exist, though under different conditions, and it realises that this change is as natural and necessary as the change of the seasons ….

 Behind all maladies, in the most basic manner lies the need for expression, and when people feel that their areas for growth are being curtailed, then they instigate actions to clear the road so to speak … Before health problems show up there is almost always a loss of self-respect or expression … Whatever physical changes occur, happen because the will to live is weakened.

 There are people who undergo a series of highly unsatisfactory relationships for example, while another person might experience a series of recurrent diseases instead. In spite of all problems, the life force operates continually in each person’s life, and can bring about at any time the most profound beneficial changes.

Three Defining Principles of
THE NEW MEDICINE 

1.      ‘HEALTH’ is Value Fulfilment - the feeling of our innermost values and their potential for creative expression and vital embodiment in our lives. 

2.      ‘ILLNESS’ is Blocked Action – rigid or contradictory beliefs which inhibit actions which are a source of Value Fulfilment - or prevent us inhibiting actions which act counter to our own Value Fulfilment.  

3.      HEALING is Being Changed. Not seeking to changing your bodily, mental or emotional symptoms and states but letting yourself be changed by them. To truly change does not mean that ‘you’ change this or that aspect of yourself or your life. It means that you change – feeling your very sense of self altered in a way that and frees you to Unblock Actions which provide Value Fulfilment in your life. 

Example: 

Health as Value Fulfilment:

John, a divorced man in a happy relationship but with grown up children living away from home, has been feeling a strong impulse for many weeks to have a holiday with his children – thus allowing him to bask in and enjoy a sense of those values he shares with his children.  

Illness as Blocked Action:

Being about to move house, having many practical and financial matters to face which fray on his nerves, he finds good ‘reasons’ to ignores the holiday impulse, and does not act on it. Result: a growing sense of fatigue and of lack of ‘energy’. In addition he gets painful attacks of facial neuralgia whenever he even thinks about all the things he has to do. It is not that he does not act on the holiday impulse because he lacks or has blocked his own energy. Instead he feels a lack of energy – in all areas of his life - because he has blocked an important action.   

Healing as Being Changed:

He lets his symptoms ‘get to him’ and change him – finding he can ameliorate them by intentionally stopping himself working or obsessing about his work. By actively inhibiting his obsessive ‘will to work’ he has unblocked a ‘negative’ action capacity. Letting his painful facial symptoms change him in this way he begins to feel a self that can, after many decades, painfully begin to ‘face’ a life in which he is no longer wholly identified with his work or dependent on its fruits for a sense of value fulfilment. At a critical turning point in this learning process he ‘turns’ and decides to spend time and money on the holiday -  despite all seemingly ‘rational’ considerations such as his forthcoming move. By by-passing the ‘beliefs’ and ‘reasons’ he used to rationalise his blocked action, his symptoms immediately begin to clear. Yet even after the holiday they persist in a mild way. In this way they continue teaching him to unblock both ‘negative’ action capacities (not getting over-focussed) and positive action impulses (for example acting more quickly on impulses to rest or sleep).

From
Medical Nemesis
- The Expropriation of Health

by Ivan Illich 

The medical establishment has become a major threat to health. The disabling impact of professional control over medicine has reached the proportions of an epidemic. Iatrogenesis, the name for this new epidemic, comes from iatros, the Greek word for ‘physician’, and genesis, meaning ‘origin’. 

A professional and physician-based health-care system that has grown beyond critical bounds is sickening for three reasons: it must produce clinical damage that outweighs its potential benefits; it cannot but enhance even as it obscures the political conditions that render society unhealthy; and it tends to expropriate the power of the individual to heal himself and shape his or her environment. 

More and more people subconsciously know that they are sick and tired of their jobs and of their leisure passivities, but they want to hear the lie that physical illness relieves them of social and political responsibilities. They want their doctor to act as lawyer and priest. As a lawyer, the doctor exempts the patient from his normal duties and enables him to cash in on the insurance fund he was forced to build. As a priest, he becomes the patient’s accomplice in creating the myth that he is an innocent victim of biological mechanisms rather than a lazy, greedy or envious deserter of a social struggle for control over the tools of production. Social life becomes a giving and receiving of therapy: medical, psychiatric, pedagogic or geriatric. 

People who are angered, sickened and impaired by their industrial labour and leisure can escape only into a life under medical supervision and are thereby seduced or disqualified from political struggle for a healthier world. 

Medicine has the authority to label one man’s complaint a legitimate illness, to declare a second man sick though he does not himself complain, and to refuse a third social recognition of his pain, his disability and even his death. It is medicine which stamps some pain as ‘merely subjective’, some impairment as malingering, and some deaths – though not others – as suicide. The judge determines what is legal and who is guilty. The priest declares what is holy and who has broken a taboo. The physician decides what is a symptom and who is sick. 

For rich and poor…life is reduced to a ‘span’, to a statistical phenomenon which, for better or worse, must be institutionally planned and shaped. This life-span is brought into existence with the pre-natal check-up…and it will end with a mark on a chart… 

To be in good health means not only to be successful in coping with reality but also to enjoy the success; it means to be able to feel alive in pleasure and in pain; it means to cherish but also to risk survival, Health and suffering, as experienced sensations are phenomena that distinguish men from beasts. Only storybook lions are said to suffer and only pets to merit compassion when they are in ill-health. 

Medicalisation constitutes a prolific bureaucratic programme based on the denial of each man’s need to deal with pain, sickness and death. The modern medical enterprise represents an endeavour to do for people what their genetic and cultural heritage formerly equipped them to do for themselves. Medical civilization is planned and organized to kill pain, to eliminate sickness, and to abolish the need for an art of suffering and of dying. 

Culture makes pain tolerable by interpreting its necessity; only pain perceived as curable is intolerable. 

A myriad virtues express the different aspects of fortitude that traditionally enabled people to recognize painful sensations as a challenge and to shape their own experience accordingly. Patience, forbearance, courage, resignation, self-control, perseverance, and meekness each express a different colouring of the responses with which pain sensations were accepted, transformed into the experience of suffering and endured. Duty, love, fascination, routines, prayer, and compassion were some of the means that enabled pain to be borne with dignity. 

The pupils of Hipprocrates distinguished many kinds of disharmony, each of which caused its own type of pain….Pain might disappear in the process of healing, but this was certainly not the primary object of the…treatment. The Greeks did not even think about enjoying happiness without taking pain in their stride. Pain was the soul’s experience of evolution….The body had not yet been divorced from the soul, nor had sickness been divorced from pain. All words that indicated bodily pain were equally applicable to the suffering of the soul. 

[The] raised threshold of physiologically mediated experience, which is characteristic of a medicalised society, makes it extremely difficult today to recognize in the capacity for suffering a possible symptom of health. The reminder that suffering is a responsible activity is almost unbearable to consumers, for whom pleasure and dependence on industrial outputs coincide. 

During the 17^th and 18^th centuries, doctors who applied measurements to sick people were liable to be considered quacks by their colleagues. During the French Revolution, English doctors still looked askance at clinical thermometry, Together with the routine taking of the pulse, it became accepted clinical practice only around 1845, nearly thirty years after the stethoscope was first used by Laenne. 

An advanced industrial society is sick-making because it disables people from coping with their environment and, when they break down, it substitutes a ‘clinical’ prosthesis for the broken relationships. 

People would rebel against such an environment if medicine did not explain their biological disorientation as a defect in their health, rather than as a defect in the way of life which is imposed on them or which they impose on themselves. 

The medical diagnosis of substantive disease entities that supposedly take shape in the individual’s body is a surreptitious and amoral way of blaming the victim. The physician, himself a member of the dominating class, judges that the individual does not fit into an environment that has been engineered and is administered by other professionals, instead of accusing his colleagues of creating environments into which the human organism cannot fit. 

Before sickness came to be perceived primarily as an organic or behaviourial abnormality, he who got sick could still find in the eyes of the doctor a reflection of his own anguish and some recognition of the uniqueness of his suffering. Now, what he meets is the gaze of a biological accountant engaged in input/output calculations. His sickness is taken from him and turned into the raw material for an institutional enterprise. His condition is interpreted according to a set of abstract rules in a language he cannot understand. He is taught only about alien entities that the doctor combats, but only just as much as the doctor considers necessary to gain the patient’s cooperation. Language is taken over by the doctors: the sick person is deprived of meaningful words for his anguish, which is thus further increased by linguistic mystification. 

…while the industrial worker refers to his ache as a drab ‘it’ that hurts, his predecessors had many colourful and expressive names for the demons that bit or stung them. 

Through the medicalisaiton of death, health care has become a monolithic world religion… 

Like time-consuming acceleration, stupefying education, self-destructive military defence, disorienting information, or unsettling housing projects, pathogenic medicine is the result of industrial overproduction that paralyses autonomous action. 

The patient is reduced to an object – his body – being repaired; he is no longer a subject being helped to heal. If he is allowed to participate in the repair process, he acts as the lowest apprentice in a hierarchy of repairmen. Often he is not even trusted to take a pill without the supervision of a nurse. 

When people become aware of their dependence on the medical industry, they tend to be trapped in the belief that they are already hopelessly hooked. They fear a life of disease without a doctor much as they would feel immobilized without a car or bus. 

Increasing and irreparable damage accompanies present industrial expansion in all sectors. In medicine this damage appears as iatrogenesis. Iatrogenesis is clinical when pain, sickness and death result from medical care; it is social when health policies reinforce an industrial organization that generates ill-health; it is cultural and symbolic when medically sponsored behaviour and delusions restrict the vital autonomy of people by undermining their competence in growing up, caring for each other, and aging, or when medical intervention cripples personal responses to pain, disability, impairment, anguish and death. 

Man’s consciously lived fragility, individuality, and relatedness make the experience of pain, of sickness, and of death an integral part of his life. The ability to cope with this trio autonomously is fundamental to his health. As he becomes dependent on the management of his intimacy, he renounces his autonomy and his health must decline. The true miracle of modern medicine is diabolical, It consists in making not only individuals but whole populations survive on inhumanly low levels of personal health. Medical nemesis is the negative feedback of a social organization that set out to improve and equalize the opportunity for each man to cope in autonomy and ended by destroying it.

 

 LAWS OF THE PHARMACEUTICAL INDUSTRY

Dr. Rath

The main principles governing the pharmaceutical “business with disease.” It is not in the financial interests of the pharmaceutical industry to prevent common diseases – the maintenance and expansion of diseases is a precondition for the financial growth of this industry.

1

The pharmaceutical industry is an investment industry driven by the profits of its shareholders. Improving human health is not the driving force of this industry.

2

The pharmaceutical investment industry was artificially created and strategically developed over an entire century by the same investment groups that control the global petrochemical and chemical industries.

3

The huge profits of the pharmaceutical industry are based on the patenting of new drugs. These patents essentially allow drug manufacturers to arbitrarily define the profits for their products.

4

The marketplace for the pharmaceutical industry is the human body – but only for as long as the body hosts diseases. Thus, maintaining and expanding diseases is a precondition for the growth of the pharmaceutical industry.

5

A key strategy to accomplish this goal is the development of drugs that merely mask symptoms while avoiding the curing or elimination of diseases. This explains why most prescription drugs marketed today have no proven efficacy and merely target symptoms.

6

To further expand their pharmaceutical market, the drug companies are continuously looking for new applications (indications) for the use of drugs they already market. For example, Bayer’s pain pill Aspirin is now taken by 50 million healthy US citizens under the illusion it will prevent heart attacks.

7

Another key strategy to expand pharmaceutical markets is to cause new diseases with drugs. While merely masking symptoms short term, most of the prescription drugs taken by millions of patients today cause a multitude of new diseases as a result of their known long-term side effects. For example, all cholesterol-lowering drugs currently on the market are known to increase the risk of developing cancer – but only after the patient has been taking the drug for several years.

8

The known deadly side effects of prescription drugs are the fourth leading cause of death in the industrialized world, surpassed only by the number of deaths from heart attacks, cancer and strokes (Journal of the American Medical Association, April 15, 1998). This fact is no surprise either, because drug patents are primarily issued for new synthetic molecules. All synthetic molecules need to be detoxified and eliminated from the body, a system that frequently fails and results in an epidemic of severe and deadly side effects.

9

While the promotion and expansion of diseases increase the market of the pharmaceutical investment industry - prevention and root cause treatment of diseases decrease long-term profitability; therefore, they are avoided or even obstructed by this industry.

10

Worst of all, the eradication of diseases is by its very nature incompatible with and diametrically opposed to the interests of the pharmaceutical investment industry. The eradication of diseases now considered as potential drug markets will destroy billions of investment dollars and eventually will eliminate this entire industry.

11

Vitamins and other effective natural health therapies that optimize cellular metabolism threaten the pharmaceutical “business with disease” because they target the cellular cause of today’s most common diseases - and these natural substances cannot be patented.

12

Throughout the more than one hundred year existence of the pharmaceutical industry, vitamins and other essential nutrients, with defined functions as cofactors in cellular metabolism, have been the fiercest competition and the greatest threat to the long-term success of the pharmaceutical investment business.

13

Vitamins and other effective natural health therapies that effectively prevent diseases are incompatible with the very nature of the pharmaceutical “business with disease.”

14

To protect the strategic development of its investment business against the threat from effective, natural and non-patentable therapies, the pharmaceutical industry has – over an entire century - used the most unscrupulous methods, such as:

(1) Withholding life-saving health information from millions of people. It is simply unacceptable that today so few know that the human body cannot produce vitamin C and lysine, two key molecules for connective tissue stability and disease prevention.

(2) Discrediting natural health therapies. The most common way is through global PR campaigns organized by the Pharma-Cartel that spread lies about the alleged side effects of natural substances – molecules that have been used by Nature for millennia.

(3) Banning by law the dissemination of information about natural health therapies. To that end, the pharmaceutical industry has placed its lobbyists in key political positions in key markets and leading drug export nations.

15

The pharmaceutical “business with disease” is the largest deception and fraud business in human history. The product “health” promised by drug companies is not delivered to millions of patients. Instead, the “products” most often delivered are the opposite: new diseases and frequently, death.

16

The survival of the pharmaceutical industry is dependent on the elimination by any means of effective natural health therapies. These natural and non-patentable therapies have become the treatment of choice for millions of people despite the combined economic, political and media opposition of the world’s largest investment industry.

Prescription Drugs:
4^TH Leading Cause of Death

Extract from: 50 Things You’re Not Supposed to Know by Russ Kick

Published by The Disinformation Company Ltd. 163 Third Avenue, Suite 108,

New York, NY 10003/Tel.: +1.212.691.1605

www.disinfo.com

Getting the wrong drug or the wrong dosage kills hundreds or thousands of people each year, with many times that number getting injured … Even higher than the number of people who die from medication errors is the number of people who die from medication, period. Even when a prescription drug is dispensed properly, there's no guarantee it won't end up killing you. A remarkable study in the Journal of the American Medical Association revealed that prescription drugs kill around 106,000 people in the US every year, which ranks prescription drugs as the fourth leading cause of death. Furthermore, each year sees 2,216,000 serious adverse drug reactions (defined as "those that required hospitalization, were permanently disabling, or resulted in death"). The authors of this 1998 study performed a meta-analysis on 39 previous studies covering 32 years. They factored out such things as medication errors, abuse of prescription drugs, and adverse reactions not considered serious. Plus, the study involved only people who had either been hospitalized due to drug reactions or who experienced reactions while in the hospital. People who died immediately (and, thus, never went to the hospital) and those whose deaths weren't realized to be due to prescription drugs were not included, so the true figure is probably higher. Four years later, another study in the JAMA warned: 

Patient exposure to new drugs with unknown toxic effects may be extensive. Nearly 20 million patients in the United States took at least 1 of the 5 drugs withdrawn from the market between September 1997 and September 1998. Three of these 5 drugs were new, having been on the market for less than 2 years. Seven drugs approved since 1993 and subsequently withdrawn from the market have been reported as possibly contributing to 1002 deaths. 

Examining warnings added to drug labels through the years, the study's authors found that of the new chemical entities approved from 1975 to 1999, 10 percent "acquired a new black box warning or were withdrawn from the market" by 2000. Using some kind of high-falutin' statistical process, they estimate that the "probability of a new drug acquiring black box warnings or being withdrawn from the market over 25 years was 20%." A statement released by one of the study's co-authors, Sidney Wolfe, MD, Director of Public Citizen's Health Studies Group, warned: 

In 1997, 39 new drugs were approved by the FDA. As of now [May 2002], five of them (Rezulin, Posicor, Duract, Raxar and Baycol) have been taken off the market and an additional two (Trovan, an antibiotic and Orgaran, an anticoagulant) have had new box warnings. Thus, seven drugs approved that year (18% of the 39 drugs approved) have already been withdrawn or had a black box warning in just four years after approval. Based on our study, 20% of drugs will be withdrawn or have a black box warning within 25 years of coming on the market. The drugs approved in 1997 have already almost "achieved" this in only four years — with 21 years to go.