The Tragedy of Postmodern Medicine
The Tragedy of Postmodern Medicine
Censoring the Present Cancels the Past to Rob the Future
“So let it be written….so let it be done.” As a boy watching The Ten Commandments, I was puzzled by this phrase. To my young mind, I thought that you needed to DO the thing before you wrote about it. I had not thought that Pharoah was talking about making a royal edict and then forcing the adherence to that edict. As it turns out, my puzzlement was indeed well-founded, as that is what has happened in today’s world in general, but particularly in medicine. We write the conclusion, then do the study.
Past and Future are separated in the vector of time by a narrow, ever moving band of the Present. The Present soon becomes the Past. Our understanding of the Future is predicated on our perception of the Past. I wish I could take credit for this very prescient concept…but I can’t. It was articulated by Del Tackett in Lesson 6 of The Truth Project by Focus on the Family:
https://www.focusonthefamily.com/faith/the-truth-project/
available at:
https://www.truthforhealth.org/
In George Orwell’s iconic 1984,
Winston Smith, the protagonist, works at the Ministry of Truth. His job is rewriting history to fit the government’s current narrative. With the fixation on misinformation, disinformation, and malinformation, one can only observe that Orwell apparently set his novel 40 years too soon. These words appear to be “Newspeak” for “differences of opinion”, with varying nuances, of course, to make it seem more scholarly.
https://thehill.com/opinion/white-house/3472878-joe-bidens-ministry-of-truth/
The Biden administration was enjoined to cease collusion with social media with their efforts to silence those physicians and scientist who disagree with the stance on COVID. That ruling was recently placed on hold pending further litigation:
https://www.nytimes.com/2023/10/20/us/supreme-court-social-media-biden.html
Let’s think about that for a minute. For the 40 plus years I functioned as an Oculofacial surgeon, I was bound by the doctrine of Informed Consent. I was both ethically and legally bound to provide my patients with the risks, benefits and alternatives to my proposed treatment plans, and then was honor and legally bound to allow them the freedom of choice to either accept or reject my recommendations. That is still the case…. except for one disease. Regarding COVID I could lose my license (many physicians have) for explaining to a patient the treatment options available to them other than: 1) sicken at home; 2) social distance; 3) present to the hospital when they could no longer breathe and be given Remdesivir, a drug that failed its randomized clinical trials. This has been amended to now include treatment with “approved” oral agents:
Of possible significance is the fact that the clinical trial of this drug compared it to treatment with a placebo, not treatment with other agents that had shown significant observational effectiveness:
https://covid19criticalcare.com/treatment-protocols/
Why is this? Why is this ONE DISEASE treated so differently?
Why was Ivermectin constantly denigrated as a “horse dewormer”?
Why was it not mentioned that the developers of this drug won the 2015 Nobel Prize for Medicine and Physiology for treatment of disease in humans?
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4731589/#:~:text=The%20Chinese%20scientist%20Youyou%20Tu,treatment%20of%20roundworm%20parasitic%20diseases.
It is currently listed as an Essential Medicine by the World Health Organization:
https://list.essentialmeds.org/medicines/58
During a lawsuit, lawyers for the FDA claimed their campaign to discredit the use of human Ivermectin by equating it with veterinary Ivermectin was not a ban, but a “recommendation”. Read this story and notice the bias:
Prior to the “War on Ivermectin”:
Hydroxychloroquine was demonized after it was recommended as a possible treatment by President Donald Trump. It was loudly decried as dangerous, even though it is recommended as safe in pregnancy and breastfeeding by the National Health Service of Britain:
a leading Rheumatology journal
https://www.the-rheumatologist.org/article/is-hydroxychloroquine-safe-during-pregnancy/
and the American Journal of Obstetrics and Gynecology:
It should be noted that the dosage of this drug in treating rheumatic diseases far exceeds, by at least an order of magnitude, the dose used in treating COVID in all of the studies cited above.
Why was this the case?
One possible reason is that in order to be granted an Emergency Use Authorization by the FDA, there must be NO TREATMENT alternative available. If an alternative were available, there would have been no Emergency Use Authorization for any of the mRNA agents.
A relationship between the mRNA agents and myocarditis was postulated as early as 2021:
https://www.nytimes.com/2021/08/25/health/covid-myocarditis-vaccine.html
Finally, on October 13, 2023, Pfizer admitted a relationship between their mRNA agent and myocarditis:
Authorized or approved mRNA COVID-19 vaccines show increased risks of myocarditis (inflammation of the heart muscle) and pericarditis (inflammation of the lining outside the heart), particularly within the first week following vaccination. For COMIRNATY, the observed risk is highest in males 12 through 17 years of age. Seek medical attention right away if you have any of the following symptoms after receiving the vaccine, particularly during the 2 weeks after receiving a dose of the vaccine:
chest pain
shortness of breath
feelings of having a fast-beating, fluttering, or pounding heart
In the same press release, the following warning is also issued:
You should NOT receive COMIRNATY® (COVID-19 Vaccine, mRNA) if you have had a severe allergic reaction to any ingredient of COMIRNATY or a previous dose of a Pfizer-BioNTech COVID-19 vaccine.
Despite this, the administration of these agents is still recommended for ALL individuals over the age of 6 months, and medical exemptions based on prior adverse reactions are routinely denied by employers, schools and the US military.
Why? WHY??
We are now in the era of Postmodern Medicine. It will continue until society finally understands that the millennium-long dictum of primum non nocere, “first do no harm”, seems to have gone by the wayside.
So, what is “Postmodernism”? In a nutshell it is this:
Postmodernism is an intellectual stance or mode of discourse characterized by skepticism toward the "grand narratives" of modernism; rejection of epistemic (scientific) certainty or the stability of meaning; and sensitivity to the role of ideology in maintaining political power. Claims to objectivity are dismissed as naïve realism, with attention drawn to the conditional nature of knowledge claims within particular historical, political, and cultural discourses. The postmodern outlook is characterized by self-referentiality, epistemological relativism, moral relativism, pluralism, irony, irreverence and eclecticism; it rejects the "universal validity" of binary oppositions, stable identity, hierarchy and categorization.
from:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Postmodernism
Postmodernism sounds like a world on the cusp of that described in 1984, doesn’t it? We have our own version of “Newspeak”: misinformation, disinformation and the dreaded malinformation for plurality of opinion. Diversity for orthodoxy, equity for inequality, and inclusion for exclusion.
This sounds pretty accurate to what we now experience in healthcare, doesn’t it? Consensus is termed science. We even have one man claim he IS science! We have agencies claim they never prohibited the use of a drug, only recommended against it use. We have leaders claim they never demanded a lockdown, even though the magic of video clearly shows they have. I wonder how long that evidence will remain before it is scrubbed? We had a governmental publication state that masks worked in COVID despite analysis of their own data by Tracy Høeg and associates showing that conclusion was invalid:
https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/37777144/
In our world of Postmodern Medicine, we have science and particularly medicine being the servants of the Unholy Trinity of Big Pharma, Big Tech and Big Politics. Both science and medicine definitely seem to now have a “sensitivity to the role of ideology in maintaining political power”. This is despite the historical record of the abject moral failure of those disciplines in the past when serving the racial ideology of the Third Reich and the Communist ideology of Lysenkoism in agriculture in the Soviet Union.
Do you like this form of healthcare??
I don’t. I graduated from medical school in 1975, filled with the idealism contained in the Hippocratic Oath. In one of my prior substack articles, I mentioned that I was contemplating a career in International Law or Medicine and finally chose Medicine because, as I naively explained to my Dad back in 1968, There are no politics in medicine:
https://russellgonnering.substack.com/p/the-summer-of-68
Amazing, now that I look back on it. In another substack, I shared the message of A.J. Cronin in his novel, The Citadel:
https://russellgonnering.substack.com/p/aj-cronin-and-covid-19
I would urge you to review this, as it has only become more relevant as time has elapsed since I wrote that. I ended that essay with this:
We need to value critical thinking, courage, ethical behavior and moral reasoning in those we accept into training in the health professions, and even more, in those who advance to leadership positions. The actual study of leadership needs to be a part of education in the health professions.
This should be by no means only a preparation for leadership IN medicine. We need to understand that a physician should not be a “treater of disease” but a “leader of patients”!
We as physicians need to look to the nursing profession, as they have done a much better job than we physicians have. We must make a conscious effort to form healthcare “Communities of Practice” that are composed of groups of vertically and horizontally integrated professionals. Those just entering, those in active practice and those in retirement can utilize such a Community of Practice for the effective transgenerational transfer of both tacit and explicit knowledge. We may be able to attempt to restore the soul to medicine….
Heavy, heavy thoughts. But more importantly, EXCITING THOUGHTS!! Let’s do it!
Unfortunately, professional school is too late to start this process. It must start in undergraduate education at the latest, and preferably in secondary or even middle school. It will require an educational institution with a significant reach, both vertically and horizontally. Hillsdale College is the only institution that comes to mind. It already has the mission, ability and evidence to impart critical thinking, courage, integrity, values, ethics and moral reasoning to its students. It can reach into secondary and middle schools, and through its Academy for Science and Freedom, extend that throughout the course of a career in healthcare.
There is a Chinese proverb that goes: “The best time to plant a tree was 20 years ago. The next best time is today.” I hope they will step up to the challenge.
If we don’t, where are we headed? What is beyond Postmodern Medicine? Perhaps we can get a horrifying glimpse by looking at the “Great Reset” planned by the World Economic Forum where “you will own nothing but be happy”:
https://twitter.com/JamesMelville/status/1602551782227558400?lang=en
Sounds wonderful, doesn’t it? That’s before you see what is behind the curtain:
https://www.amazon.com/Homo-Deus-Brief-History-Tomorrow/dp/0062464310
This excerpt from:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Homo_Deus:_A_Brief_History_of_Tomorrow
is telling:
Harari suggests the possibility of the replacement of humankind with the super-man, or "homo deus" (human god) endowed with abilities such as eternal life.
Hmm… where have I heard this before?
GENESIS 3
Now the serpent was more crafty than any of the wild animals the Lord God had made. He said to the woman, “Did God really say, ‘You must not eat from any tree in the garden’?”
2 The woman said to the serpent, “We may eat fruit from the trees in the garden, 3 but God did say, ‘You must not eat fruit from the tree that is in the middle of the garden, and you must not touch it, or you will die.’”
4 “You will not certainly die,” the serpent said to the woman. 5 “For God knows that when you eat from it your eyes will be opened, and you will be like God, knowing good and evil.”
We’d better get busy… There’s not much time left.
As I am about to publish, this tweet became available:
https://twitter.com/stkirsch/status/1715820838564593745
Postmodern Medicine: It's Simply Un-American
While an individual's "version of the truth" has been the accepted form and vision of a basis for both knowledge and reality, which have served modern medicine and Anglo-American jurisprudence for centuries, the more recent, avant-garde, certainly Postmodernism-inspired use of anyone's "my truth" has gainfully entered our culture's mainstream. In learning that new meaning's been added to the concept of "personal" (why wait for any organic and a major measure of authentic, real evolution in a term's meaning?), we are perhaps experiencing the dissolution of the long-recognized, culturally institutionalized distinction between public and private.
Postmodern medicine -- with its CRT-, DEI-, and WHO-informed protocols -- must be examined closely.
So we find certain changes, chief among them being epistemic (politicized science, theoretical as well as empirical) and metaphysical (distorted and perverse Einsteinian relativity reality; more than you care to believe is "relative," for "in reality," there are no firm "absolutes" or standards) bases to stand the strains, contributions, and institutional achievements over millennia of Western civilization on its "naive[ly realistic]," objectivity-seeking head. Beyond all sense and reason has such "self-[referential]," solipsistic/narcissistic rubbish filled the heads and hearts, and passively enabled the slow but sure corruption of so many free and morally responsible characters in our civilization, in effect undermining the West's very long, very hard struggle to do good and no harm, among, of course, many other things.
Our famous and often-used sacred ethic -- reflecting both Yeshua's Sermon on the Mount's Golden Rule (affirmative version) and Torah, as commented on by an earlier rabbi, Hillel (negative version), is almost dead and buried. But our Judaeo-Christian heritage only adds to the rich corpus of classical ethics in our civilization's unique fabric, our amalgam of right conduct.
If the primum, or first thing, in medicine is still, pretty much, non nocere, or not to harm -- and not ruling-party politics, and raw, crude profit, instituted more likely to either fatten the compensation, or enhance the market-power, of (a) certain corporate principal(s), or both, than to dedicate increased institutional earnings toward the promotion of greater community reach via the institution's expansion, to provide more of its claimed beneficence to more patients in need -- then a postmodern frame of reference and its affiliated pseudo-moral paradigm is neither a good nor a right approach for the structural improvement of modern medicine. The huge multiplicity of "my truths" will lead hopelessly to conflict, interrupting the provision of quality healthcare. A hypothetical: A patient and his or her postmodern physician can't understand each other's basic points about the patient's health-related problem -- what could be or go further wrong?!
Based on experience, the look to an elusive, objective and nonexistent "common ground" between those in a healthcare relationship, based on a paucity of rigorous professional ethics and overarching, ruling party-made law -- especially its overbroadly enabled, unconstitutionally conceived and implemented, administrative rules and regulations -- has revealed itself repeatedly in terms of ethical unintelligence and the lack of inherent personal interest and trained professional skill, as a frustrating, if not a futile enterprise.
Legal proceedings in court might prove even more problematic, those between differing parties' pursuit of American Constitution-based, Equal Justice Under Law -- if and only if our Constitution survives. Question is, Will Lady Justice remain properly blinded, always in pursuit, in the end, of social balance? ("Social justice?" one might ask and suggest. "Social balance," I would quickly affirm; for I regard the former as a conceptual and, where tried, programmatic fraud on the American citizenry. For regular, normal, everyday people, social justice is simply imaginary and not a real thing at all.)
At its core, you likely already know by experience, Postmodernism advances the theme that individuals ultimately share nothing in common in the abstract. How, then (if it manages to retain its civil worth), does purposeful, productive, and effective argumentation ever begin, let alone proceed and conclude, legitimately? Absent the availability, cultivation, and routine exercise of a robust body of professional principles, how would a fruitful discussion and relationship form as we know them to be? They wouldn't, I'm suggesting.
Given our historic human nature, verbal and social chaos would be expected to ensue and, I am arguing overall, is the goal intended by probably most postmodernists as their brand of medicine.
As these hubris-filled, amoral figures generally worship at the altar of neo-Marxist (in Naomi Wolf's recent view, "Feudalist/Globalist/Oligarchist") anarcho-nihilism, it seems fitting to warn the reader: Beware of these "healers'" clinical outcomes. Be that as it may, however, say good-bye today generally to modern medicine's first principles -- and maybe the long-honored medico-ethical principle without which few others could make any good sense, primum non nocere. By its very own teachings, iatrogenic harm to maybe uncounted, genetically unlucky patients will be deemed acceptable, if not promoted, in postmodern medicine.
To sum up to this point, a modern medicine model is thus fundamentally, practically -- in all likelihood, too, corporately and in sociopolitical dimensions -- incompatible with a principles- or standards-averse, thus amoral, postmodern medicine model.
So much and more are already abundantly clear. We don't need a Chinese proverb to warn us off our present, postmodern medical course -- in all manners interrelated and exploitative with BigTech/Info and BigPharma. Life on Earth was hell for humans during the years 2020-2022, and most Western or modern physicians participated in or facilitated the healthcare debacle. Because they chose to do so.
And then there are the Rockefellers and their early, petrochemical exploits and related entrepreneurial endeavors, leading to philanthropic, educational, foundational, and eventually global/UN-WHO activity. But particularly pertinent is the dynasty's impact on all matters medical, especially its silent drive behind the Carnegie Foundation's effort to publish in 1910 the Flexner Report, which resulted in identifying allopathy -- ie, a very complicated development into what evolved, if you will, as our so-called "Western, modern, biomedicine, or evidence-based medicine" (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Allopathic_medicine) -- as the only real and dependable school of medical thought and practice in the early twentieth century, and the most likely school that would permanently reward the Rockefeller investments well into the future in all phases of both allopathic medicine's and the petrochemical industry's respective development. They would grow up together, leaning on each other, and, to be sure, well enough.
Witness, too, the famous family's significant and active, thoroughly managed organization, FSMB, which, unless I'm sorely misled and mistaken, played no small role "guiding" all the nation's state medical boards during the recent COVID-medical crisis.
Welcome to postmodern medicine's world -- one they created, in part, to take, rather than to give; to deceive, rather than to deal honestly; to profit obscenely at their patients' expense and higher risk of harm . . . to play healer and not be ashamed, accountable, or remorseful of professional misconduct.
Hence, we're already seeing and feeling the undeniable unpleasantness of our arrival at the long-dreaded, perhaps scheduled, but quite foreseeable destination of postmodern medicine's bizarre landscape, and it certainly looks and feels un-American.
To have the look and feel of American, a medical model should routinely include both the practice and promotion -- according to medicine's first and foremost principle, learned empirically through the ages -- of primum non nocere, or the first thing is not to harm.
Such devotion must be shown or done first, articulated second. It must be willed primarily, coming from the kindness, charity, and protectiveness of the heart, as it were; the head's cerebral, rational, evidence-based, clinically evaluated science cum, as appropriate, a taught or intuited clinical judgement, would naturally follow. And this idealized combination of activity, full-fledged in character, would be both sufficiently authentic and American.
Modern medicine has the capability to and, in the main, presently does achieve this degree of authenticity. Postmodern medicine, on the other hand, is neither structurally capable of, nor, as a social institution, interested in such excellent technical, humane, and organizational achievement.
I agree. The first thing that must be done is remove big Pharma from medical schools, medical centers, medical journals, federal bureaucracies and main stream media. They have inserted themselves everywhere. The next thing is to return physicians to their role as independent contractors rather than dependence on institutions for their livelihood where they must follow protocols. Critical thinking needs to be part of their training and that’s difficult when you must follow the institution’s rules about the appropriate care of patients. Additionally, insurance companies need to get out of the way of dictating what’s paid for with patient care.