Death By Medicine

“Don’t automatically accept everything a doctor tells you,” says Dr. Robert Mendelsohn, associate professor of preventive medicine at the University of Illinois. In the following no-holds-barred interview with Forum. Dr. Mendelsohn states “if 95% of the doctoring now going on were stopped – not just the surgery – we’d be much better off.”

by Nick Bosco

Dr. Robert Mendelsohn has been labeled a medical heretic by many members of his profession. He embraces this epithet as a badge of honor. It is Mendelsohn’s contention that doctors may be more lethal than the diseases they claim to be fighting.

His professional credentials are impressive. He is presently a pediatrician and family practitioner; he was formerly the senior consulting pediatrician for the Department of Mental Health of the State of Illinois; he has served as chairman of the Medical Licensure Committee for the State of Illinois and as national director of the Medical Consulting Service for Project Head Start. He is currently an associate professor in the department of preventive medicine at the University of Illinois. Dr. Mendelsohn also writes a nationally syndicated newspaper column titled “The People’s Doctor,” and is the author of Confessions of a Medical Heretic, now available from Contemporary Books, Chicago, Illinois.

Forum: Why do you call yourself a medical heretic?

Dr. Mendelsohn: Actually, I was first called a heretic by other people, although it’s been so long I don’t remember who was the first to do so.

But I don’t mind the term. In fact, I kind of like it. I am a medical heretic because modern medicine is a church, a religion I no longer believe in.

Forum: Why do you refer to modern medicine as a religion?

Dr. Mendelsohn: For one thing, very few of modern medicine’s procedures can be proved either scientifically or logically. Doctors use their own subjective brand of logic to “prove” things they want proved and disprove things they want to challenge. For example, if you tell your doctor you’d like to try laetrile, he’ll tell you that there are no scientific studies that prove its effectiveness. If you tell him that many people who have taken laetrile report a real benefit, he’ll say that’s subjective evidence and not worthy of his attention.

But then, if your doctor wants you to have a coronary bypass operation, and if you object on the grounds that some scientific studies have shown no real benefit from the operation, he’ll tell you that all his patients who have had the operation felt better. You can’t win, so you’re better off not playing the game.

Only in a religion are you required to believe things without proof, to take things on faith. Most modern medical procedures are treated as sacraments – rituals that are supposed to impart some good to the participants.

The high priests of this religion, of course, are doctors. They wear sacred vestments, speak an elite language, and operate with highly specialized tools. And modern medicine has its temples, too: hospitals. Hospitals, by the way, are just about the most dangerous places in the world.

Forum: What do you mean?

Dr. Mendelsohn: Hospitals are dangerous in more ways than I can even mention. I like to compare them to combat zones: You stay out as long as possible, but if you have to go in, you get out as fast as you can. That’s the only way.

For one thing, there are more different germs in hospitals than you can find in any single place anywhere else. Then you have to consider all the drugs that are used in hospitals. The average is about a dozen per patient and mix-ups are common, not rare. Not only do drugs get mixed up, but hospital personnel confuse the identities of patients as well. Babies are mixed up, people are lost. Patients have been found dead in out-of-the-way places in hospitals.

Then, since hospitals are the temples of modern medicine, they are the places where the “sacred rituals” are most highly concentrated. That’s dangerous, too. People don’t generally let themselves believe it, but doctors have quota systems for various diagnostic and surgical procedures. So once you get in the hospital, the doctor has you on his turf and is obliged to use as many of the rituals available to him as he can. Not only are drugs and diagnostic procedures overused, but the ritual mutilation of surgery is frequently performed needlessly as well.

Forum: Ritual mutilation?

Dr. Mendelsohn: That’s right. Conservative estimates put the amount of needless surgery at around 10 to 25%. I’d say the number is closer to 90%. That means there would not be any loss of life or health if 90% of the surgery now going on was simply not performed. As proof, whenever there is a doctors’ strike in which only emergency procedures are carried out, the death rate always goes down. That happened in Los Angeles, in Israel, in South America wherever there’s a strike.

Then, when the strike is over and the doctors go back to work on everybody, the death rate goes back up. So actually, if 90 or even 95% of the doctoring now going on were to stop – not just the surgery – we’d be much better off.

Forum: There probably aren’t too many doctors who’d agree with you.

Dr. Mendelsohn: There probably aren’t too many insurance agents who’d agree that we have too much insurance, or generals who’d admit that we need fewer guns, or publishers who’d agree that we need fewer books and magazines than we have.

Let me point out one example that I’m especially fond of: obstetrical surgery. This is a line of surgery that we could eliminate almost entirely. Unnecessary obstetrical surgery runs even higher than 95%; it’s more like 99.9%. When obstetricians took over from midwives, an immediate consequence was a rise in maternal death rates. This is because the doctors were going straight from the autopsy rooms of hospitals into the delivery rooms – without washing their hands.

Years after this error was discovered, years after the man who had pointed it out was driven into an insane asylum by his colleagues’ blind denial of the truth, doctors finally started washing their hands before delivering babies. And the death rate went down. Doctors then congratulated themselves, typically.

Nowadays, doctors frighten perfectly healthy women into having their babies in the hospital. They scare them with stories of what might go wrong if they don’t have their babies in the hospital. The truth is, is that hospital births are a lot more dangerous than home births, provided an experienced home birth doctor or midwife is present and has been consulted all along. Hospital births have six times more distress, an eight times higher incidence of the baby getting caught in the birth canal, four times more babies needing resuscitation, four times more infection, and a thirty times higher risk of permanent injury.

It’s not hard to understand these shocking statistics when you take a look at the hospital birth setting: an operating room. With all that equipment around, the obstetrician feels like he’s not doing his job if he doesn’t use some of it. So we have the episiotomy, which is a surgical slicing of the perineum to “enlarge” the birth canal. Actually, it’s usually used to make up for the doctor’s lack of skill in coaching the birth. If the mother isn’t knocked out with anesthesia, she can slow down the birth herself so the chances of tearing are lessened. But of course, from the doctor’s point of view, if the mother’s awake the doctor is no longer in total control.

Doctors don’t limit themselves to unnecessary episiotomies, though. They hook up a fetal monitor to the baby’s scalp and at the first sign of distress they want to perform a Cesarean delivery. When I was just starting out in medicine, if a hospital’s Cesarean section rate went over 3 or 4%, there was an investigation. Now the average rate in most hospitals is 15% and in some hospitals it’s pushing 50%! Yet there are no investigations.

Forum: And this is dangerous?

Dr. Mendelsohn: Sure it’s dangerous! The maternal death rate is about twenty-six times higher for Cesarean sections than for normal births.

Forum: Do you think doctors are really out to mutilate people?

Dr. Mendelsohn: Not exactly. Doctors believe in surgery. Families of doctors have more surgery than anybody else. But that doesn’t make surgery any safer or more necessary. The blind faith of doctors in surgery is just a symptom of our technological pride: What can be done must be done. Nobody bothers to question whether it should be done. Another example: close to a million women have their uterus removed every year. I am convinced that no more than a small fraction of those women really need that operation. My guess is that if those were testes coming out, you’d never see a million operations every year. In fact, you don’t see very many testes removed, do you?

Forum: Are you suggesting that the medical establishment is sexist?

Dr. Mendelsohn: I’m more than suggesting, I’m stating it as a fact. Doctors are taught in medical school to mistrust and compete with their peers, and to be deceitful when competing with others. They learn contempt for all groups of people who are inferior to them in social position and power.

This contempt comes out in very interesting ways. You see a lot of female sexual organs removed surgically, like breasts and uteruses, but very few male organs. Women are robbed of much of their dignity in the hospital. Not only are they demeaned in childbirth, but they have to practically get a lawyer in order to be “allowed” to care for their own baby immediately after its birth.

You may think a woman’s right to an abortion is important, but her right to care for her child the way she sees fit is more important and in greater danger. Convincing women that bottle-feeding was just as good as breastfeeding – which it isn’t – robbed women of their birthright, took away from them the use of their bodies in a way that is not only natural but very pleasurable.

Forum: In what other ways is modern medicine dangerous?

Dr. Mendelsohn: Doctors dispense drugs like priests give out blessings. Of course, the drugs cost a lot more – and they’re deadly, as well. More people die from the effects of legally-prescribed Valium than from illegal heroin. Doctors sometimes don’t even follow the instructions given by the drug companies themselves. They neglect to carry out recommended tests or investigate the possibilities of drug interactions.

Doctors are dangerous even before they prescribe drugs or surgery, however. Just going in for an exam is hazardous. I tell everybody to stay away from doctors if they have no symptoms. And even if you do have some problems, you should think twice.

Forum: How can a simple exam be dangerous?

Dr. Mendelsohn: There’s no such thing as a simple exam anymore. Doctors assume you feel cheated if they don’t use at least a hundred thousand dollars worth of equipment on you. Not that they need all that hardware, though; even a $20 stethoscope can be dangerous. I’m thinking of all the mothers who become hysterical when the doctor tells them their child has a “functional heart murmur” after using a stethoscope. Even if he tells them it’s harmless and the child will grow out of it, many parents still treat the kid like a cripple for years afterwards.

X-ray machines are highly dangerous and should be used about one-tenth as much as they are presently used. Yet trying to avoid x-rays is difficult to do, and getting harder. The same goes for electrocardiograms and electroencephalograms. These two tests are dangerous because of the arbitrary nature of the interpretation. Even heart specialists disagree on the interpretation of these tests, so what can you expect from a general practitioner who’s been trained in a week or two to read the results?

Another pitfall of exams is that the doctor assumes you’re “guilty” until proven innocent. And it’s not easy to prove you’re healthy. Doctors aren’t trained to acknowledge health, only find and treat disease.

Forum: So what’s the solution? How does a person protect himself?

Dr. Mendelsohn: Become a heretic. Stop believing in the Church of Modern Medicine.

Forum: Does that mean you stop going to doctors?

Dr. Mendelsohn: Not necessarily. You simply become more selective and aggressive. Don’t automatically accept everything a doctor tells you. The first thing you have to learn to do is ask the question Why? If you ask Why? Enough times, one of two things will happen: Either the doctor will answer your questions and satisfy you, or he’ll sooner or later tell you “Just trust me.”

If that happens, you should put as much distance between him and yourself as possible. Never trust your doctor unless absolutely necessary, which means unless it’s a true emergency.

However, even if your doctor answers your questions, you should still do your homework. You should know more about your disease and treatment than he does. And with the state of medical education being what it is, that isn’t too hard to do.

In general, try to avoid doctors as much as possible. That means staying as healthy as possible. Of course, that’s heresy right there, since doctors think they are the only ones who can keep you healthy.

Just like any religion, modern medicine wants to maintain a monopoly on people’s access to health. So whenever anything comes along that promises to have a beneficial effect on health that doesn’t involve drugs, surgery or some potentially lucrative procedure, most doctors dismiss it as a fad or quackery.

Forum: With that kind of attitude, it seems likely that the medical profession will continue to consider you a heretic for many years to come.

Dr. Mendelsohn: I consider it an honor. My concern is with patients, not doctors.

Death By Medicine by Gary Null