How did people treat maladies before the age of modern medicine - I call it Rockefeller Medicine? Why Rockefeller?

 

In 1913 the Flexner Report, commissioned by the Rockefeller Institute, described the state of healing in the US at the time. At the time, there were doctors in the lineage of Harvey and Hippocrates, but there were also faith healers, homeopaths, herbalists and midwives. There were snake oil salesmen and “quacks” - German salesmen promoting mercury fillings to dentists. Some of these practitioners were practicing valid healing modalities, some were promoting worthless, or even toxic and poisonous, remedies.

 

The Flexner Report was produced by educator (not a MD) Abraham Flexner, to sort out the scientific wheat from the chaff, so to speak. The report became the basis for what we refer to now as “evidence-based medicine”.

 

Since then, modern medicine has become so narrowly focused and so pervasive, that no one thinks of anyone to go to but a Medical Doctor or perhaps a Doctor of Osteopathy when they have any sort of problem. Medical schools teach students a certain way to diagnose and treat, that is increasingly technological, scripted and mechanized to the point where everyone has forgotten any other way. Petroleum based drugs, radiation and surgery are the ONLY options. Protocols must be followed or doctors could lose their license.

 

Since then, the last school of homeopathy closed in the 1930’s, although the doctor who invented this most elegantly safe and effective treatment method has a (conventional as any other) medical school named after him - Hahnumann, in Philadelphia - and he himself was an MD.

 

Since then, herbalists have been discredited and even jailed (at one time they were branded as witches and burned at the stake for their trouble) at times for “practicing medicine without a license”. As I have said many times, my guild has a lot of power, and has chosen - always - the most profitable path to healing, as well as discrediting and vilifying those who choose another path.

 

The “evidence” that these choices are based on is largely limited to what is published in a small number of “peer reviewed” journals, collectively known as the  medical literature. Such articles come out of university labs, and Pharma industry labs, sometimes funded by public monies and costing ungodly sums. The gold standard is a large, randomized, placebo-controlled study involving hundreds, if not thousands of people over a long time. Hundreds of thousands of dollars, quite often millions, are required to meet the standard, which is, of course, set by the established establishment itself. That’s what “peer reviewed” means.

 

Only chemicals which are not found in nature can be patented under the US Patent Office. Only patented medicines can generate huge profit, so no one is researching natural options. There is no way a small herbal company - however effective and safe their products might be - can compete with the drug companies to produce the kind of “evidence” that will gain their product entry to the medical armamentarium. Not to mention the industry failure to publish unsuccessful studies showing low or no benefit - or harm -  of many invented chemicals.

 

Many practitioners learn things over the course of a career that will never be published, unless they write a book. That type of evidence might be called accumulated wisdom. Instead, it is branded “anecdotal”.

 

Another type of evidence is observational studies that follow the same group over time to ascertain changes then analyze the data after the fact. For example, the Nurses’ Study of 2002 that got it all wrong and scared a generation of women (and their doctors) off hormones, one of the minor tragedies of this century. 

 

The most compelling, and most meaningful for any patient, is personal experience. Hard to refute, although it is true that experience is seen through the filter of the ego, and even personal experience can get it wrong at times and delude the person involved. How then, to gauge the weight of the “evidence” when confronted with a patient in the actual flesh, complete with her package of pain, fear and suffering?

 

Even a good therapy, natural or otherwise, will not work for everyone. The key is to match the risk to the intended benefit, factoring in the level of acuity - how sick is this patient - to come up with a treatment plan that will work for this person. That is the only thing that matters for the person in front of me. Cost, speed of action and longevity of effect has to be factored.

 

My experience as a doctor has been broad and far reaching. I have worked in rural emergency rooms where I was the only doctor for many miles around as well as big city ER’s where the knife and gun club played outside all night. In the ER you learn to distinguish a true emergency from the rest of the pack. A true emergency deserves the best that Rockefeller Medicine has to offer. No point in offering herbs when someone is bleeding out or having a heart attack. But my tool box is filled with tools I learned after medical school that are more appropriate for a slower moving problem, and for primary prevention in the first place...

 

Most conditions do not require a full-scale rescue operation (pun intended). Most conditions can wait till morning or can be treated with another type of therapy. The key is to ascertain “level of acuity”. When an issue has reached the stage of chronicity - diabetes, coronary artery disease, chronic kidney disease, obesity, etc., then there is no reason to start with a toxic, expensive therapy. Herbs will do just fine. Homeopathy, despite the skeptics, has such a low toxicity profile that it is worth using if the practitioner has some experience with its use. (In Arizona, an MD can get certified by the state as a homeopath). In all other states homeopathy is available to the general public. It is worth learning about the most commonly used remedies for home use and for treating children, as the remedies are tasty and quite safe.

 

Adding to the complexity of choices is the option of “energy medicine”. Since when did we decide to focus on the chemistry of the body, and ignore the fact that physics also powers the human body, from the electrical activity of the brain, to the huge magnetic field generated by a beating heart. Light from the sun is required for optimal health. Sound healing is a real “thing”. Acupuncture works on the invisible energy meridians crisscrossing the body like lay lines on the earth’s surface.

 

In my class, “An Apple a Day”, I delve into different ways of healing, different options for treatment, and how empowering a person through education and respect for their agency over their body, is a better way to go.