Oct 23, 2023·edited Feb 10Liked by Russell Gonnering
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.
Very well thought out Russ. Education of the true nature of medicine will hopefully get us back on tract. Let doctors be doctors as Ive recently heard Dr. Paul Marik say is the road necessary for healthy interactions of patients and physicians.
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.
Very well thought out Russ. Education of the true nature of medicine will hopefully get us back on tract. Let doctors be doctors as Ive recently heard Dr. Paul Marik say is the road necessary for healthy interactions of patients and physicians.