Great Throughts Treasury

"The reason doctors are so dangerous is that they believe in what they are doing."

"Almost half of the 100,000 or so surgeons we actually do have right now are superfluous. Those 50,000 or so extra unsheathed scalpels do a lot of damage."

"Almost every stage of obstetrical procedure in the hospital is part of the mechanism that enables the doctor to create his own pathology."

"Being a skeptical soul, I have always believed that the most reliable way to determine what people really believe is to observe what they do, not what they say. If the greatest threat of rubella is not to children, but to the fetus yet unborn, pregnant women should be protected against rubella by making certain that their obstetricians won't give them the disease. Yet, in a California survey reported in the Journal of the American Medical Association, more than 90 percent of the obstetrician-gynecologists refused to be vaccinated. If doctors themselves are afraid of the vaccine, why on earth should the law require that you and other parents allow them to administer it to your kids?"

"Did you know that the whooping cough germ, Bacillus pertussis, when injected into animals, has long been known to lead to the secretion of insulin? In 1979, at the Fourth International Symposium on Pertussis, held in Bethesda, Maryland, it was shown that this same result occurs in those who have received pertussis vaccine. In their publication, Adverse Reactions after Pertussis Vaccination, Drs. W. Hennessen and U. Quast suggest, It seemed of interest to examine these reactions in comparison with the hypoglycemia syndrome.. . There was a close relation between the two.? If your child has juvenile diabetes (a disease characterized by wide swings in blood sugar levels), ask your doctor if he has ever heard of this effect of whooping cough vaccine. Maybe it?s time to investigate whether the pertussis vaccine has anything to do with the rapidly rising number of people with juvenile diabetes, adult diabetes, and hypoglycemic all disorders of insulin metabolism."

"Despite the tendency of doctors to call modern medicine an 'inexact science', it is more accurate to say there is practically no science in modern medicine at all. Almost everything doctors do is based on a conjecture, a guess, a clinical impression, a whim, a hope, a wish, an opinion or a belief. In short, everything they do is based on anything but solid scientific evidence. Thus, medicine is not a science at all, but a belief system. Beliefs are held by every religion, including the Religion of Modern Medicine."

"Although tonsillectomies should have been for all practical purposes abandoned for 2,000 years, they're still quite popular as a medical ceremony."

"Because routine immunizations that bring parents back for repeated office calls are the bread and butter of their specialty, pediatricians continue to defend them to the death. The question parents should be asking is: ?Whose death??"

"Doctors are given one reward for swallowing the fear pill so willingly and for sacrificing the healing instincts and human emotions that might help their practice: arrogance. To hide their fear, they?re taught to adopt the authoritarian attitude and demeanor of their professors."

"Doctors complain that quacks keep patients away from orthodox medicine. I cheer! Since all the treatments, both orthodox and alternative, for cancer, coronary heart disease, hypertension, stroke, and arthritis, are equally unproven, why would a sane person choose treatment that can kill the patient?"

"Doctors maintain that the (MMR) inoculation is necessary to prevent measles encephalitis, which they say occurs about once in 1,000 cases. After decades of experience with measles, I question this statistic, and so do many other pediatricians. The incidence of 1/1,000 may be accurate for children who live in conditions of poverty and malnutrition, but in the middle-and upper-income brackets, if one excludes simple sleepiness from the measles itself, the incidence of true encephalitis is probably more like 1/10,000 or 1/100,000."

"For a pediatrician to attack what has become the bread and butter of pediatric practice is equivalent to a priest denying the infallibility of the pope."

"I don't advise anyone who has no symptoms to go to the doctor for a physical examination. For people with symptoms, it's not such a good idea, either. The entire diagnostic procedure -- from the moment you enter the office to the moment you leave clutching a prescription or a referral appointment -- is a seldom useful ritual."

"Doctors turn out to be dishonest, corrupt, unethical, sick, poorly educated, and downright stupid more often than the rest of society. When I meet a doctor, I generally figure I'm meeting a person who is narrow-minded, prejudiced, and fairly incapable of reasoning and deliberation. Few of the doctors I meet prove my prediction wrong."

"I can remember when if a hospital's incidence of Caesarean deliveries went above four or five percent, there was a full scale investigation. The present level is around twenty-five percent. There are no investigations at all. And in some hospitals the rate is pushing fifty percent."

"Greed plays a role in causing unnecessary surgery, although I don't think the economic motive alone is enough to explain it. There's no doubt that if you eliminated all unnecessary surgery, most surgeons would go out of business. They'd have to look for honest work, because the surgeon gets paid when he performs surgery on you, not when you're treated some other way. In pre-paid group practices where surgeons are paid a steady salary not tied to how many operations they perform, hysterectomies and tonsillectomies occur only about one-third as often as in fee-for-service situations."

"I would consider the risks associated with measles vaccination unacceptable even if there were convincing evidence that the vaccine works. There isn't. While there has been a decline in the incidence of the disease, it began long before the vaccine was introduced. In 1958 there were about 800,000 cases of measles in the United States, but by 1962-the year before a vaccine appeared-the number of cases had dropped by 300,000. During the next four years, while children were being vaccinated with an ineffective and now abandoned killed virus vaccine, the number of cases dropped another 300,000. In 1900 there were 13.3 measles deaths per 100,000 population. By 1955, before the first measles shot, the death rate had declined 97.7 percent to only 0.03 deaths per 100,000."

"I no longer believe in Modern Medicine. I believe that despite all the super technology and elite bedside manner that?s supposed to make you feel about as well cared for as an astronaut on the way to the moon, the greatest danger to your health is the doctor who practices Modern Medicine."

"Medical students are further softened up by being maliciously fatigued. The way to weaken a person?s will in order to mold him to suit your purposes is to make him work hard, especially at night, and never give him a chance to recover. You teach the rat to race. The result is a person too weak to resist the most debilitating instrument medical school uses on its students: fear."

"If I had to characterize doctors, I would say their major psychological attribute is fear. They have a drive to achieve security-plus that?s never satisfied because of all the fear that?s drummed into them in medical school: fear of failure, fear of missing a diagnosis, fear of malpractice, fear of remarks by their peers, fear that they?ll have to find honest work. There was a movie some time ago that opened with a marathon dance contest. After a certain length of time all the contestants were eliminated except one. Everybody had to fail except the winner. That?s what medical school has become. Since everybody can?t win, everybody suffers from a loss of self-esteem. Everybody comes out of medical school feeling bad."

"In prepaid group practices where surgeons are paid a steady salary not tied to how many operations they perform, hysterectomies and tonsillectomies occur only about one-third as often as in fee-for-service situations."

"Mothers, too, are more likely to end up in the intensive care ward after an induced delivery. Postoperative complications occur in half of all women who deliver by Caesarean section. And the maternal death rate is 26 times higher than in women who deliver vaginally. I propose that we drop the term fetal monitoring and start calling it fatal monitoring!"

"Modern Medicine would rather you die using its remedies than live by using what physicians call quackery."

"My feeling is that somewhere around 90% of surgery is a waste of time, money, and life."

"One grandmother is worth two M.D.s."

"My suspicion, which is shared by others in my profession, is that the nearly 10,000 SIDS deaths that occur in the United States each year are related to one or more of the vaccines that are routinely given children. The pertussis vaccine is the most likely villain, but it could also be one or more of the others."

"The admission tests and policies of medical schools virtually guarantee that the students who get in will make poor doctors. The quantitative tests, the Medical College Admission Test, and the reliance on grade point averages funnel through a certain type of personality who is unable and unwilling to communicate with people. Medical school does its best to turn smart students stupid, honest students corrupt and healthy students sick. It isn't very hard to turn a smart student into a stupid one. First of all, the admissions people make sure the professors will get weak-willed, authority-abiding students to work on. Then they give them a curriculum that is absolutely meaningless as far as healing or health are concerned."

"The door to the doctor's office ought to bear a surgeon general's warning that routine physical examinations are dangerous to your health. Why? Because doctors do not see themselves as guardians of health, and they have learned precious little about how to assure it. Instead, they are latter-day Don Quixotes, battling sometimes real but too often imaginary diseases. The disastrous difference is that doctors are not tilting at windmills. Rather, it is people who are damaged by their insistent search for dubious diseases to conquer."

"The greatest threat of childhood diseases lies in the dangerous and ineffectual efforts made to prevent them through mass immunization... There is no convincing scientific evidence that mass inoculations can be credited with eliminating any childhood disease."

"One of the true tests of a fanatic is whether or not he takes his own medicine?or believes his own press releases. The fact that doctors do get in line for the sacrifice only strengthens its grounding in ceremony."

"Study after study has demonstrated that many women immunized against rubella as children lack evidence of immunity in blood tests given during their adolescent years. Other tests have shown a high vaccine failure rate in children given rubella, measles, and mumps shots, either separately or in combined form."

"The pediatrician's wanton prescription of powerful drugs indoctrinates children from birth with the philosophy of 'a pill for every ill'.... Doctors are directly responsible for hooking millions of people on prescription drugs. They are also indirectly responsible for the plight of millions more who turn to illegal drugs because they were taught at an early age that drugs can cure anything - including psychological and emotional conditions - that ails them."

"There are significant risks associated with every immunization and numerous contraindictions that may make it dangerous for the shots to be given to your child....There is growing suspicion that immunization against relatively harmless childhood diseases may be responsible for the dramatic increase in autoimmune diseases since mass inoculations were introduced. These are fearful diseases such as cancer, leukemia, rheumatoid arthritis, multiple sclerosis, Lou Gehrig's disease, lupus erthematosus, and the Guillain-Barre syndrome."

"Today your child has about as much chance of contracting diphtheria as he does of being bitten by a cobra."

"What does a Catholic do when he decides that his priests are no good? Sometimes he directly challenges them, but very seldom. He just leaves the Church. And that?s my answer. Leave the Church of Modern Medicine. I see a lot of people doing that today. I see a lot of people going to chiropractors, for example, who wouldn?t have been caught dead in a chiropractor?s office a few years ago."

"When I was Senior Pediatric Consultant to the Department of Mental Health in Illinois, I cut out a certain kind of operation that was being performed on mongoloid children with heart defects. The stated purpose of the operation was to improve oxygen supply to the brain. The real purpose, of course, was to improve the state's residency programs in cardiovascular surgery, because nothing beneficial happened to the brains of mongoloid children?and the surgeons knew that. The whole idea was absurd. And deadly, since the operation had a fairly high mortality rate. Naturally, the university people were very upset when I cut out the operation. They couldn't figure out a better use for the mongoloid children, and, besides, it was important to train people. In prepaid group practices where surgeons are paid a steady salary not tied to how many operations they perform, hysterectomies and tonsillectomies occur only about one-third as often as in fee-for-service situations."

"With the polio vaccine we are witnessing a rerun of the medical reluctance to abandon the smallpox vaccination, which remained as the only source of smallpox-related deaths for three decades after the disease had disappeared. Think of it! For thirty years kids died from smallpox vaccinations even though no longer threatened by the disease."

"You never hear about the dangers of a drug unless another drug to replace it is available."