2023 Preview: The End of Medicine, The Beginning of Health?

Or, A Whole Lot of Lipstick

Can your actions be corrupted by a corrupt environment? I certainly always thought so. I think most people agree. When hearing of a criminal in the news, many will so often sympathize: “well, he had such a rough upbringing,” “he comes from a terrible neighborhood,” or the like.  

The first time I read The Gulag Archipelago, I expected Solzhenitsyn to make the same point. After all, we’re not talking about some mean streets, we’re talking the unimaginable brutality, the hell on earth, that was life in a Soviet prison camp. We were treated worse than animals, I expected him to say, so we became worse than animals.  

Only, he doesn’t. If you haven’t read it, please do, for his work is no mere prison diary, it is one of the most profound reflections on the nature of good and evil, of man and God, of suffering and redemption, you will ever encounter. If you have already read it, then, like me, you will never forget the passage in which he disagrees with those fellow writers who claim that the gulag corrupted the people. In response, he highlights the many heroic stories of unsullied souls, from simple old women to idealistic young men, who kept their consciences clean, their heads high, and their prayers loud, as they suffered privation, torture, and death. Refusing to hand wave away their example, he writes:

Those people became corrupted in camp who before camp had not been enriched by any morality at all or by any spiritual upbringing […] Those people became corrupted in camp who had already been corrupted out in freedom or who were ready for it. Because people are corrupted in freedom too, sometimes even more effectively than in camp.

If a person went swiftly bad in camp, what it might mean was that he had not just gone bad, but that that inner foulness which had not previously been needed had disclosed itself.

[…]

Yes, camp corruption was a mass phenomenon. But not only because the camps were awful, but because in addition we Soviet people stepped upon the soil of the Archipelago spiritually disarmed – long since prepared to be corrupted, already tinged by it out in freedom…

That inner foulness which had not previously been needed had disclosed itself.

How fortunate: American medicine in the 21st century is in desperate need of an epitaph, and a perfect one presents itself.

Despair is a sin, and I do not want to begin the New Year bumming y’all out. So I’ve been trying hard to save up as much lipstick as I can for this pig. Here’s my best shot: everything that has been revealed during the Covid and transgender era about the corruption, politicization, groupthink, incompetence, and outright malice of the medical establishment was already festering for years. Don’t think of it as a case of a revered institution making some errors and tragically losing our trust, think of it as a decades-old brood of vipers finally revealed as such for all to see!

Were our public health leaders notably competent and successful before the recent events? Allow this juxtaposition to answer for me.  

Does it surprise anyone at this point that increased public health funding and power correlated directly with the rise of the most visible marker of public unhealth? These were the same geniuses, after all, whose main action to combat a disease of the overweight was to shut down gyms and basketball courts.

So much for the public health types. But they always seemed a little off. Surely the really smart, lower profile doctors – you know, the ones quietly dedicated to researching cancer, Alzheimer’s, and the like – are a different breed? Well, about that. Amid all the other medical news of the past year, you may have missed the devastating revelation that the past twenty years or so of Alzheimer’s research was fraudulent. More here on the corruption of that area of research by academic groupthink, pharma profits, and (of course) the FDA. Sound familiar? The reliable, moderate Dr. Prasad argues that oncology is in the same boat.

What has been revealed publicly in the medical elite’s approach to castrating teenagers and masking toddlers has been their modus operandi for years. Don’t grieve the loss of institutional trust, celebrate the exposure of this house of cards.

There’s no way to sugarcoat it: the loss of medical credibility will have terrible consequences. Important public health directives will go unheeded, good medical advice will be ignored, solid research will be distrusted, many will needlessly suffer and die.

Yet there is reason for hope. As long as people blindly followed the experts, reform was impossible. Now that those experts have been revealed as the corrupt little ideologues that they are, we finally have a real chance at saving medicine.

It won’t be easy - we must be saved first.

 As Solzhenitsyn implies, it is not simply a question of a legal change here, a congressional hearing there. Of course medicine is corrupt – we are corrupt. Who would ever expect a nation of unrepentant sinners - worse than that, a nation that doesn’t even believe sin exists - to produce a saintly medical establishment? The only way to save medicine is to reverse our longstanding spiritual disarmament. So don’t just find yourself a new doctor – start a new Bible study, reconnect with a strong faith community, and pray!

With the grace of God, I will be dedicating the next period of my career to fighting big pharma, protecting childhood innocence, and standing up for His truth, against the AAP and the other collapsing medical authorities in the land. I know I’m not the only one. So don’t lose heart, and have a blessed, healthy, and happy new year!