Medical Sentinel
Article Type: Feature Article
Issue Number: 1
January/February 1999
This article describes how the ever increasing control by third party payers of the physician-patient dyad is reinforcing family dysfunction and producing a regressive deterioration of the health care system into a system resembling that of a dysfunctional family. A component contained in both systems is a lack of respect for autonomy and individual freedom through the exercise of tyrannical control in the name of compassion and care.
The Erosion of Liberty by the Misuse of Words
James Madison made the point over a century and a half ago that the real threat to the erosion of liberty comes not from major and conspicuous changes, but from small steps that are scarcely discernible. This caveat applies to the health care reform movement. The small steps by which liberty is...
Tags: freedom in medicine
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Article Type: Feature Article
Issue Number: 1
January/February 1999
In his second Inaugural Address, President Clinton called for a new Constitution. He borrowed language from the Declaration of Independence where, in 1776, Thomas Jefferson presented the argument for a new government. While Mr. Clinton did not refer to the Constitution in so many words, his meaning was clear. "We need a new government for a new century," he proclaimed on January 20, 1997. Unlike our present one, his new government would "give" a number of benefits to the American people.
We at the Center for the American Founding disagree. We believe that our present form of government, as articulated in the Constitution, brought forth the most successful society in the history of Planet Earth. Indeed, the country that was established here more than two centuries ago is one of a kind.
No...
Tags: freedom
Article Type: Feature Article
Issue Number: 5
September/October 1998
*This article is excerpted from the Foreword of Dr. Prioreschi's latest volume (Vol. III --- Roman Medicine) of his A History of Medicine, released this year.(1)
In the Foreword of the second volume of our work, A History of Medicine, we expressed the hope that the Foreword of the third would deal with more inspiring themes. Alas, this is not to be. In the last four years we have found no improvement in the academic landscape in general and in historiography of medicine in particular. In fact, the signs of decay in our society are increasingly visible in all fields. In view of the nature of this book, we will limit our observations to medical education and medical historiography.
Perhaps nothing is more symptomatic of the decaying of medical education than the status of the Oath of...
Tags: medical history
Article Type: Feature Article
Issue Number: 4
July/August 1998
As the only physician giving a presentation for today's program --- perhaps I should have worn a bull's eye. I hope you will lend me your attention. I assure you that I did not come here to praise my profession --- I simply do not wish to see it buried. I came to speak about honor and the Law. I will proceed from the assumption that in this audience are men and women who do not simply wear the title "honorable," but who uphold justice and the honor of their profession.
I wish to speak to those whose goal is not simply to collect a piece of a $3 billion pie, or to "minimize the risk of fines and penalties" for whatever they are doing, but to end the scandalous outrage of fraud in American medicine. Our goal should not be to work at the problem, or to spend money on the problem, but to...
Tags: health care fraud
Article Type: Feature Article
Issue Number: 4
July/August 1998
Introduction
First, I would like to thank the Drug Policy Foundation for the opportunity to speak to you today. I understand that the rights of patients to effective treatment and the impact of current drug policy on the patient-doctor relationship are very much on your minds, as they are on mine. I offer my story as a case study of regulatory abuse, as we try to fashion an adequate political and legal response to what I think of as "The Police State of Medicine."
I will begin with a review of the legal events in my case. I will then tell you about my patients and the impact the legal action against me had on them. Finally, I would like to address two related questions: How does the police state of medicine affect medical care? And what can we do about it?
What Happened to Me?...
Tags: regulatory abuse
Article Type: Feature Article
Issue Number: 4
July/August 1998
For many Americans, their fight against cancer is nothing compared to their battles with the Food and Drug Administration (FDA). Just ask the many patients of Dr. Stanislaw Burzynski. They'll tell you about their 14-year war with the FDA and that they won!
Yet, They Still Implore Congress to Reign in the FDA
Here's how their long battle evolved. Since 1977, more than 2,500 cancer patients have sought out an experimental drug named Antineoplaston (meaning anti-cancer) developed by Dr. Burzynski, a polish-born physician and biochemist. Many of the patients had been diagnosed with terminal cancer after chemotherapy and radiation failed to reduce their tumors. Others opted for Antineoplaston treatment as their first choice. Either way, patients (including patients who received...
Tags: FDA
Article Type: Feature Article
Issue Number: 4
July/August 1998
I am the first doctor in the history of the United States legal system criminally convicted for using medical judgment. My conviction in 1993 was for reckless endangerment and willful neglect (both misdemeanors and Health Code Violations) for ordering the transfer of a completely stable nursing home patient [to a hospital across the street] in the afternoon instead of the morning --- "a 10 hour delay" --- on Sunday, May 20, 1990. I was deemed negligent even though I examined the patient three times on that Sunday (7 a.m., 2:30 p.m. and 5:30 p.m.). One Federal District Judge is on record saying that my case should be reversed and if he had the power, he would have overturned it. Another Federal District Judge wrote a dissenting opinion stating that I was innocent (but he was overruled 2 to...
Tags: police state of medicine
Article Type: Feature Article
Issue Number: 4
July/August 1998
Orange County Jail, Santa Ana, California Brad Gates, Sheriff Bookkeeping Number 91-347438
The cold concrete benches were hard, very hard, and because of the noise and the cursing of other prisoners, sleep was impossible. The "booking" consumed more than 24 hours; afterward, the newcomer was marched along the side of the hall, silently, according to the barking orders of the jail deputy. He was then shown a second-tier steel bunk on which to roll the smelly and pillowless one-inch foam rubber pad. Scattered around the "tank" were 64 other prisoners and a couple of stoolies, who tried to figure out what this gray-haired, overweight, inmate might have done. Was he a drug dealer? A child molester? Or merely some poor fellow behind on his child support payments?
The new stranger was a 1959...
Tags: police state of medicine
Article Type: Feature Article
Issue Number: 4
July/August 1998
Advances in the conquest of pain are underway, we are told, in Europe, England and the U.S. Pain clinics and pain specialists are increasing, as are hospices and pain-management courses in medical schools. This sounds wonderful, but the reality does not seem as wonderful as the labels. Our check into these facilities and their methods indicate that they seem dedicated more to teaching people to endure pain than to efforts to alleviate it. Europe, an older and more sophisticated culture, may take a less rigid position than is adopted here --- for we are a nation of extremists --- but that's only an assumption. The fact is that medicine has never really regarded pain as important, although pain is what sends people to doctors in the first place.
When Jeffrey Bernard, the famous columnist in...
Tags: medical care
Article Type: Feature Article
Issue Number: 4
July/August 1998
Shortly after retiring, I was invited to become the third associate of two "retired" physicians conducting a walk-in practice dealing to a great extent with the medically indigent. Shortly thereafter, medical problems claimed my two associates and they quit: I continued solo five mornings a week.
Although I rarely, if ever, prescribed "pain killers" or anything more than non-steroidal anti-inflammatory drugs (NSAIDs) for the bulk of my mainly itinerant patients, I inherited about 10-15 Chronic Pain patients for whom I prescribed methadone. Chronic Pain patients treated with narcotics will become narcotic dependent, a simple fact that causes turbulence in the posse mentality of authorities and galvanizes them to action.
Within a brief period, I became the target of a major investigation by...
Tags: police state of medicine
Article Type: Feature Article
Issue Number: 2
March/April 1998
The crisis of American medicine is not tobacco, AIDS, silicone implants, the Gulf War Syndrome, breast or other forms of cancer, physician-assisted suicide, euthanasia, licensure, medical care for the poor, or any other specific medical or ethical issue. The crisis of American medicine is far greater than any one of these problems, indeed it is far greater than all of them combined, because the answers to these problems do not come from within them but from medical ethics. It is the same crisis that faces our culture in every other area, how do we decide ethics? That is, how do we decide what is right and what is wrong? Is there a method which will stand the test of time or do ethics change with changing cultures? How are medical-ethical decisions decided today?
Few Are Consistent
What...
Tags: medical ethics
Article Type: Feature Article
Issue Number: 2
March/April 1998
The physician should be contemptuous of money, interested in his work, self-controlled, and just. Once he is possessed of these basic virtues, he will have all others at his command as well. Galen
Can the Medical Profession Survive Flexible Ethics?*
The medical writers of antiquity wrote and discussed ethics merely as individuals trying to find out the best way and the right way to conduct themselves using immutable, self-evident principles and propositions in their dual functions as philosophers and medical practitioners. Ethical principles are absolute, and, in a benevolent profession, reflect the authentic feelings of the members of the profession who have answered a calling and are willing to clearly demonstrate what is right and what is wrong, not echo what is politically...
Tags: medical ethics
Article Type: Feature Article
Issue Number: 1
January/February 1998
We are witnessing today what could be described as the grandest expansion of the Nanny State (Socialism) in the history of America. And, I believe this expansion to be one of the most diabolical, intricate, and subversive schemes to plague the landscape of American public policy.
This atrocity is "The Medicalization of the Schools." From a purely educational viewpoint it could be termed "The Destruction of the American Educational System." From a health care perspective, it could be viewed as "The Subversion of the World's Finest System of Health Care." From a societal vantage point, it could be described as "The Subduing of the American Family." However, because of the integration of business and labor it could also just as accurately be dubbed, "The Collectivization of American...
Tags: health care policy
Article Type: Feature Article
Issue Number: 1
January/February 1998
In matters of style, swim with the current; in matters of principle, stand firm like a rock. Thomas Jefferson
The Corporate Practice of Medicine
One hears repeatedly that managed care penetration in health care delivery continues unabated; that it continues to interpose itself in the medical decision-making process erstwhile reserved to the patient and his physician; and that it continues "to dramatically increase its economic shares in the medical marketplace despite intense physician dissatisfaction." How has all of this taken place? What has allowed this egregious corporate penetration to take place in an ancient, beneficent, and revered profession that had held itself together as a sacred calling for centuries? I believe that the answers to these questions are found in the...
Tags: medical ethics
Article Type: Feature Article
Issue Number: 4
Fall 1997
When the American POWs returned from captivity in Vietnam, military authorities noticed there were no amputees. At the time, this puzzled the experts. With over 2000 men in captivity, one would expect at least a few amputees. But in light of what is known about the Soviet human experimental program, it now makes a lot more sense. Most likely, these men were used either for military experiments or for training young surgeons. As in North Korea, once the procedures were completed the "experimental subjects" were killed and their bodies incinerated.
As I stated in Part I, the KGB, renamed the Ministry of Security, not only continues to exist and control much of the old Soviet society, but it has actually grown in size and scope. At the fall of the Soviet state there were approximately 400,...
Tags: assassination, China, communism, Czechoslovakia, doctors, espionage, experiments, KGB, mind control, POWs, ricin, Soviet Union, Soviets, USSR, Vietnam, virus
The Oath of Hippocrates
The Cancer Risk from Low Level Radiation: A Review of Recent Evidence...
Vandals at the Gates of Medicine — Have They Been Repulsed or Are They Over the Top?Special Issues
- Medical Ethics (March/April 1998)
- The Police State of Medicine (July/August 1998)
- The Modus Operandi of Managed Care (January/February 1999)
- Socialism, Euthanasia, and the Right to Health Care (July/August 1999)
- Vaccines, Viruses, and Chronic Illnesses (September/October 1999)
- Futility of Care and the “Duty to Die” (November/December 1999)
- Vaccine Scene 2000 — Infectious Diseases and Immunizations (March/April 2000)
- Lawyers, Public Health, and Labor Unions (May/June 2000)
- Medicine as a Tool of the State — Cuba (September/October 2000)
- Doctors and Guns (Part I) — A Failure of the Public Health Model (November/December 2000)
- Doctors and Guns (Part II) — A Failure of the Public Health Model (Spring 2001)
- Controversies in Clinical Medicine (Fall 2001)
- Bioterrorism in Our Own Backyard (Winter 2001)
- Neuropharmacology and Behavior (Spring 2002)
- Individually-based Medical Ethics vs Population-based Bioethics (Summer 2002)
- Medical Liability Crisis and Tort Reform (Fall 2002)
- Vignettes in Medical History (Winter 2002)
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