First Do No Harm

First Do No Harm

On August 24^th, 1987 US District Court Judge Susan Getzendanner ruled that the AMA (American Medical Association) and its officials “instituted a boycott of chiropractors. The purpose of the boycott was to contain and eliminate the chiropractic profession. This conduct constituted a conspiracy among the AMA and its members and an unreasonable restraint of trade in violation of Section I of the Sherman (Anti-Trust) Act.”

Does this represent an isolated case of the AMA’s persecution to ‘contain and eliminate’ a competing profession and/or effective alternative treatment outside of the medical drug paradigm? No way!

Case closed: has the AMA stopped this type of persecution? No way! It is woven into the very core of their history and their ongoing mission; a medical-pharmaceutical monopoly.

The history of the AMA is a compelling read of personal and political power and corruption entwined with corporate interests, profits and greed; the usual suspects.

In 1909, Abraham Flexner, a teacher ( with no other qualifications), backed by the corporate interests of the Carnegie Foundation, with personal family ties to the Rockefeller Institute for Medical Education, issued The Flexner Report. This superficial and prejudiced opinion paper launched a kind of “paradigm coup. It declared and established an orthodoxy of healing dominated by the medical, allopathic, model based in modern chemistry and the prescription of drugs by doctors.

All other modalities were to be shunned (and labeled as quackery), especially the vitalistic approaches that talked about working with the energy or structure of the body, rather than its chemistry. From the manipulations of chiropractors or osteopaths, to the use of energy devices in connection with the body, any healing approaches based on physics were rejected. In the new medical realm, chemistry was king.” (HP of LENS 335)

The goal was to eliminate the competition.

Along the way it inextricably linked medical practice and research, for better and worse, with corporate-sponsored science. Together, they made medicine/health-care an ‘industrial mass-market phenomenon’ and empire.

Along the way they betrayed their Hippocratic Oath: First, Do No Harm by subverting, in so many ways, any other possible effective treatments, or even cures, for anything from back pain to depression to cancer, sacrificing untold numbers of lives.

But the irony of it is laughable. Modern medicine uses the body’s energy and physics in almost all realms of diagnosis, including x-ray, CT, MRI, EKG, EEG, Ultrasound, functional MRI, PET Scans, chromatograpy, lasers, the electron microscope, etc,. At the same time, they continue to condemn, marginalize, and ridicule any treatment or modality that uses the body’s own energy/physics to restore homeostasis and health. All but one that is; the rather medieval EST (electroshock therapy) now known as ECT (electroconvulsive therapy). That one they like. It fits their paradigm that treatment requires ever more potent and powerful interventions; that the body needs to be shocked, drugged or operated on; that more subtle energy techniques could not possibly work.

They deny funding for research into other healing modalities, supporting their claim of the absence of evidence. Yet, of all they do in diagnosis and treatment, it is estimated that only 15% has the standard of scientific evidence that they hold all other alternative treatments to. Not to mention that ‘the absence of evidence is NOT evidence of absence. The fact that there are few rigorous studies of an idea doesn’t mean the idea isn’t powerful; it may mean that science refuses, for whatever prejudices, to study the concept.’ (symp p xii)

This is not meant to condemn all of medicine. Some drugs, emergency and surgical interventions approach the miraculous. It is simply a condemnation of their arrogant quest to maintain a disease-oriented, chemical-based medical monopoly at the expense of other efficacious health-nurturing, physics-based alternative therapies such as chiropractic, homeopathy, naturopathy, bio and neurofeedback, among others.