Pimps and Drug Dealers

“Far too large a section of the treatment of disease is today controlled by the big manufacturing pharmacists, who have enslaved us in a plausible pseudo-science.”-William OslerAt the turn of the last century, William Osler's vision of a patient-centered health care system based on science, critical thinking, and compassion was taking root at Hopkins.  But then came the Flexner Report in 1910, and everything Osler fought to achieve collapsed under the weight of the corporate number-fixing blueprint that is still in tact today.  While Osler said:  "The person who takes medicine must recover twice, once from the disease and once from the medicine," todays doctors say, "Take the medicine or you will die, and don't worry about side effects, if you get any, they're in your head."  While Osler said: "One of the first duties of the physician is to educate the masses not to take medicine," today's doctors are all about flooding you with medicines lest some arbitrary numerical abnormality not fall in the proper range, and scaring you to death if you dare defy their all-knowing wisdom.  Today's doctors are really nothing more than pimps for the drug companies.  They do their bidding, they sell their drugs and devices, and they advertise their products.  They do this by not caring about the patient and by convincing themselves (and getting paid very well to do so) that science and compassion implores them to force patients to do a lot of tests, get labeled as having a lot of diseases, and then taking a lot of medicines and having lots of procedures to fix these things.  No one is living longer because of these drug dealers masquerading as doctors, but patients--like all those addicted to drugs--believe that it's all cool, that they can't get by without those drugs and tests and procedures, that they'd be dead otherwise.  It's easy to see why patients are so deluded and manipulated, it's easy to see why drug and device companies want patients to be addicted to their stuff, but it's more difficult to understand why doctors are the very people selling patients this pernicious myth that is no more scientific or humanistic than the charlatans of old.  We'll explore this before we move on to discuss in more detail how doctors pimp their wares.  As to why they do it, beyond being well paid, well, that will require us to figure out a better way to choose and train doctors, because right now medical schools--which are essentially financed by the drug industry--want nothing more than doctors who keep dealing drugs and act as well respected pimps.