368. REVIEW: SHERYL UTAL INTERVIEWS ME ABOUT CURRENT EVENTS

SURVIVING HEALTHCARE

Healthcare is an environment of blaming. Throughout my professional life as a cosmetic surgeon, I experienced threats, lawsuits, and a surprising array of other hassles despite doing my best to help people. I wrote about it in Butchered by “Healthcare.” Like any practitioner, my work was imperfect, but I struggled to understand why my experience was so brutal.

Here is Seamus O'Mahony’s eloquent explanation:

More than most professions, medicine colonizes one’s life. After graduation, I was consumed by the demands of the job. Years went by in a blur of weekends on call and post-graduate examinations. My horizon was always near: the next job, the next qualification. For many years, I embraced this way of living and thinking. It is not without its advantages: medical career structures, and what passes for success in the profession, are so rigid and clearly laid out that the true careerist knows instinctively what to do in any given situation.I slowly ascended the ladder to the status of consultant in a British National Health Service teaching hospital, spending many years along the way in various training positions. As a young consultant, I became something of a Pharisee, a vector of institutional and professional culture. By the age of forty, I had achieved a state of perpetual busyness, and might have continued along this well-trodden pathway for the remainder of my career.A series of events during my forties changed everything; the details are both too tedious and too personal to recount here. When, at the age of fifty, I surveyed the wreckage, I concluded that I had somehow sabotaged this promising career. The sabotage may have been subconsciously deliberate: the real problem was a loss of faith, an apostasy. The cartoon character Wile E. Coyote falls to his doom in the canyon only when he no longer believes; as long as he is unaware of his situation, he remains blissfully suspended in mid-air.My apostasy did not extend to the clinical encounter, and old-fashioned doctoring. I lost faith in all the other things: medical research, managerialism, protocols, metrics, even progress. I became convinced that medicine had become an industrialized culture of excess, and that Ivan Illich’s assertion that it had become a threat to health–which seemed ludicrous to many doctors in the mid-1970s–was true.I qualified just as the golden age of medicine was ending. In the thirty-five years since then, I have worked in three countries and many hospitals. I have witnessed the public’s disenchantment with medicine, the emergence and global domination of what might be called the medical–industrial complex, and the corruption of my profession. This medical–industrial complex includes not just the traditional villain known as Big Pharma, but many other professional and commercial groups, including biomedical research, the health-food industries, medical devices manufacturers, professional bodies such as the royal colleges, medical schools, insurance companies, health charities, the ever-increasing regulatory and audit sector, and secondary parasitic professions such as lobbyists and management consultants....The real problem was a loss of faith, an apostasy. — Can Medicine Be Cured? (2020).

As I approached retirement, I began studying medical corruption. What I learned eventually evolved into Butchered by “Healthcare.” During this process, I learned to write, solidified my ideas, and became increasingly radicalized as I uncovered more about the systemic degeneracy of healthcare.

During my research, I discovered that the entire system—not just corporate entities but also doctors—is engaged in harmful practices. Every medical specialty and every corporation is guilty.

I approached the subject cautiously, but as my understanding deepened, I realized Western medicine was a disaste

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