The Hospital
January 31, 2022
ANOTHER excerpt from Confessions of a Medical Heretic (Contemporary Books, 1979) by Robert S. Mendelsohn M.D. (read online for free):
When hospitals started relaxing visiting hours, they didn’t do it because they realized that people should be allowed to be with their family. They did it because pediatrics was dying and the beds in the pediatric wards were empty. They would have done anything to get children in there — let mothers, fathers, siblings, cats, or dogs in for a visit! Obstetrics is dying, too. People want to have their babies at home, not in the hospital. So today they’ll let anybody in the delivery room, husband, sister, mother, boyfriend … anybody! As long as they get the revenue.
What they’re counting on is that people will be lulled into feeling that the hospital really is the place for them, that the Temple really can save them. Of course, it can’t. The Temple has nothing to do with health. There are no facilities in hospitals for health or for any of the things commonly recognized as contributing to health. The food is as bad as you’d find in the [138] worst fast food drive-in. There are no facilities for exercise. All the personal factors that can make you well or keep you healthy are removed — family, friends, and sense of self. In no uncertain terms, when you walk into a hospital, you are surrendering — “Here | am, totally unable to help myself. You must save me. I am without power. All power is yours.”
Hospital costs are the biggest single element in the country’s total bill for medical “care.” That bill is rapidly overtaking defense, the Number One item on the country’s total bill for everything. When medicine exceeds defense, the Inquisition will really be unstoppable. No one seriously challenges whatever institution is the first item on the budget. Whatever costs more than anything else gathers bureaucratic inertia of such immense proportions that it controls the destiny of the country. Then the dream of Modern Medicine will be fulfilled: the whole country will become a hospital. We’ll all be patients in the Temple of Doom.
Read more here. [Not a blanket endorsement of Mendelsohn’s book.]
