death of medicine

"I no longer believe in Modern Medicine. I believe that despite all the super technology and elite bedside manner… the greatest danger to your health is the doctor who practices Modern Medicine. I believe that Modern Medicine’s treatments for disease are seldom effective, and that they’re often more dangerous than the disease they’re designed to treat. I believe more than 90% of Modern Medicine could disappear from the face of the earth—doctors, hospitals, drugs and equipment—and the effect on our health would be immediate & beneficial… Modern Medicine can’t survive without our faith, because Modern Medicine is neither an art nor a science. It’s a religion." more
~ Dr Robert Mendelsohn MD (Confessions of a Medical Heretic)
• head of the Illinois State Medical Licensing Board,
• taught for 12 years at Northwestern University Medical School,
• served for 12 years as Associate Professor of Pediatrics, Preventative Medicine and Community Health at the Illinois State University.

"It is typical that the man who conducted the first heart transplant in the world, the South African physician Christian Barnard, points to Thomas Crapper as one of humanity’s greatest benefactors. Crapper was a British plumber who invented the flush toilet….

"That last characteristic is essential because dying is not failing. Dying is a natural process that no one can avoid. Modern medicine digs its heels in against death, but in so doing robs people of the meaning of life…more

As i read through several articles above, it dawned on me that Modern Medicine may not be that modern at all. It could be a killer by itself. Maybe it is the failure to grasp the true meaning of being in the field of medicine.

What Dr. Barnard said was indeed true. Mr. Crapper should be given a better recognition. In my old learning hospital, a wise Cardiologist who once taught me in my 6 week introduction to medicine, our so-called preclinical grace period once told me: lots of people came in to UMMC with appendicitis and goes dead with septicaemia (germ infection). And he goes to demonstrate the "hygienic" nature of hospital staff (including medical students) by pointing at my coursemate who at that time was rubbing her moderately runny nose.

Speaking about recognition. Usually it comes from the society itself. People tend to give more respect to you in the account of how many lives you’d actually saved in the actual scene itself. We don’t see the people over at Social Preventive Medicine saving any life, but do they actually did something for the society? Does the ‘Mr. Barnard’ in our society recognize the ‘Mr. Crapper’?

Sadly, it is sort of a vicious circle. Preventive Medicine hardly can stand by the whole principle that it builds itself on. They can publicised how much they had done, all the statistics and so on and so forth, but the difference is not in the numbers. We can see the growing population of patients who came in to hospital due to improper nutrition (obesity, alcoholism) or lifestyle (smoking). I’m sure some of the great people in Preventive Medicine are part of this population. Walk the talk, please !!

I was lucky enough to have known a bit about toilet and bla bla bla in my Klang year, but somehow they are all just words to me, and the whole CRP is just another holiday break. The society or the public are the one who needs to know more about Mr. Crapper. They must be made to realize that Mr. Barnard aint gonna help them if they continue to go back to

• high cholesterol diet after triple bypass surgery.
• unhygienic foot care after ray amputation.
• smoking after any bloody tumor resection from the body.

Hopefully, once in a while, the busy doctors around us will find some little tiny bit of time to inject an adequate dose of Mr. Crapper into the patient’s understanding.