You Can't Intubate A Fish

The Fatal Flaw Of Modern Medicine - And Some Rays of Hope!

Imagine you’re a doctor. A fish walks into your office. “Doc,” he says, “I’m having a real hard time breathing.” A quick exam confirms it: your new patient does indeed have shortness of breath. Your medical training kicks in immediately. Suspecting an asthma attack, you give the fish the appropriate emergency medication: no relief, his air hunger persists. You move quickly and professionally through your diagnostic possibilities, treating him for COPD, pneumonia, a pulmonary embolism, heart failure, anaphylaxis, every cause you can think of: no luck. Blood tests, a chest xray, a lung mRI, a biopsy, and countless other expensive diagnostic tools prove useless. He’s as air-hungry as ever. You have no choice, you have to intubate. Yet even this drastic step has no effect: there he is, in the ICU, sedated, hooked up to a vent, monitors beeping away, yet his oxygen numbers still won’t come up.

Then a nurse walks in, unplugs the machinery and the IVs, throws him in a bowl of water, and he’s cured.

What does this episode teach you? If you answer “asthma meds don’t work and xrays are a waste of time,” I’m afraid you’ve missed the point. The moral is: you have to understand the nature of the patient you’re treating. You can’t treat a fish like a human. The very first step, the most fundamental step, the one on which the success of all subsequent intervention hinges, is the simple act of recognizing that he’s a fish.

If I had to explain what was wrong with modern medicine in one line, it would be that my colleagues are intubating fish right and left.

Take the pediatric mental health epidemic, for starters. How can you treat a kid if you do not know what childhood is? If you are a doctor presented with a six year old boy who won’t sit still to do his math homework after spending all day being told to sit quietly at his desk, being forbidden from running and playing with his friends, from exploring the natural world, and from doing anything unsupervised except watch idiotic mass entertainment on his tablet, and you think the appropriate course of action is to put him on mind-altering drugs to get him to sit still for even longer – you do not know what a child is.

What about the female mental health epidemic? Why are women – with record high professional success, workplace equality with men, and financial independence – simultaneously suffering from record high rates of misery? If you are a modern doctor, it is an unsolvable mystery, but one worth throwing more Prozac at. If you are such a doctor, you also don’t know what a woman is. If you knew what a woman was, you would understand that, contra the advice of these white-coated Havishams, becoming more like a man is not in fact the obvious path to female joy.

Forget about kids and women - do doctors even know what a human is? People today are ever more divorced from their faith, their neighbors, and the natural world, while ever more dependent on garbage food, garbage anti-culture, pot, gambling, and pornography.  If you knew what a human being was, how could you possibly expect one to thrive in such a world? How could you look at such a person and say what they really needed was a higher dose of anti-anxiety meds? No, doctors no longer understand what people are.

“Lord,” wrote Augustine, “you have made us for yourself, and our heart is restless until it rests in you.” Well, take a look around. A whole lot of restless hearts out there, and a whole lot of silence where the gospel used to be. You do the math. The Big Pharma Version ain’t cutting it, folks.

You can keep intubating those fish til the end of time, I promise you it’s not going to work. Maybe it’s time for a different approach?

Allow me to end on an uplifting note. Do not despair! The tide is turning, there is hope out there! More and more people are realizing the dangers of this secular, materialistic, drug-filled dead-end modern medicine is ushering its suffering patients into. And we are starting to fight back.

Please, if any of this resonates with you, check out Dr. McFillin’s Conscious Clinician Collective. If you’re a doctor/therapist/provider, please sign up to be listed by it, so that struggling patients looking for someone who won’t push drugs and gender transitions on them and their children can have somewhere trustworthy to go. If you’re not a provider, please consider donating to help them build the network. All the details are at the link above, if this takes off it could make a tremendous difference.

Along similar lines, please don’t miss this podcast in which Allie Beth Stuckey interviews the director of the Association of Certified Biblical Counselors. It is a fascinating introduction to biblical counseling, and you can learn more, and find a nearby counselor, at their website here. The more we support and encourage alternatives like these, the more people we will be able to save, Lord willing, from the ignorant harms caused by our medical fishmongers.

A couple quick afterwords: I cannot, of course, let the topic of what a child is go by without mentioning that, over at the world’s best substack, Word and Song, every day last week was devoted to the theme of childhood, concluding with a fantastic speech by Prof Esolen. Please do check it all out and subscribe if you can. Similarly, you can never go wrong with the indispensable Joy Pullman, and if you’d like to have a more fleshed out discussion of what womanhood is, I cannot recommend more highly her recent Federalist essay on how women can become truly happy.

Thank you for reading and have a wonderful week!