What's Wrong With Doctors?

It's an unfair question, of course, but it needs to be asked.

Today's answer:  What's wrong with doctors is their medical education!

What's wrong with medical education?  For one thing, there is a common teaching procedure of giving doctors (when they have become interns) regular schedules so that they get no sleep for 24 to 36 hours.  Their schedules are often planned, deliberately, to put the student-doctor into a state of sleep deprivation for the psychological purpose of seeing how he will "act under stress."  That may appeal to some, but a more realistic explanation for this procedure is to brainwash the young interns.

People who want to become doctors are often, initially, motivated by the very highest principals of wanting to help and serve.  They also know that there are tons of materials that they don't yet understand.  So, they are usually eager to learn and willing to listen.

When they are sleep-deprived is the very best time to teach them according to many educators.  They don't have the strength to disagree -- it's just like learning under hypnosis.  It "works" in the sense that they learn the data implanted into them, but the process bypasses any shred of personal judgment.

In a sleep-deprived state the intern will accept the false datum that "60 mg of vitamin C per day is all that anyone needs, and he can get it from his diet!"  That is a false datum, but the intern who hears that after 36 hours of no sleep is very likely to accept it without question.

Likewise, he will accept a great deal of other information, about drugs, medical procedures, and even medical ethics.

Dr. Bok, once the President of Harvard University, criticized his own Harvard Medical School because during the entire medical education, the medical student spent less than 5% of all his class-room time on the three subjects of "preventive medicine, nutrition and medical ethics."  Even then, during this tiny amount of time, they "learn" false information.

Some of the most dubious information is saved for the time of the internship.  The actual teachers during a doctor's internship are nothing more than senior interns -- it is verbal data coming into the head of a sleep-deprived medical student.

Dr. Robert S. Mendelsohn was a regular guest on my nightly radio show many years ago, and commented about this frequently.  He even suggested that a medical student who tried to exercise too much "independent thought" during his internship would likely be flunked out.  Medical situations often call for quick decisions, and that is no place for an inexperienced and untrained doctor.  So, the young interns learn to follow the lead of the older, more experienced interns and doctors.  When the young intern is sleep-deprived, he will follow robotically.

The late Robert S. Mendelsohn put forward the word "iatrogenocide" in his best seller, Confessions of a Medical Heretic.  The meaning, of course, is death caused by the doctor, but in this case, the death of whole ethnic groups caused by the doctor.  I suggest that sleep-deprivation, as in brain-washing, is a deliberate teaching technique in our medical schools, for the purpose of implanting rote certainty on the validity of drugs.

Ten years after medical school, as a practicing doctor, it is THAT education which is at the core of his robotic reaction to any suggestions about "alternative health care."