Health Care has taken the shape of a religious theocracy in this country, with Trillions spent for the allure of salvation and eternal life, and a medical industrial complex mimicking the Catholic Church of the Middle Ages driving people down dangerous roads of myth and dogma to feed the beast.  Medical priests, aka doctors, drive the faith and convince vulnerable and frightened patients to dive into the teeth of the medical religion lest they suffer eternal damnation.  No group of priests has so mastered the medical religion than cardiologists, who themselves have convinced their obsequious flock to sacrifice hundreds of billions of dollars and their bodies and souls to the gospel of cardiology.  Today we look at book three of that gospel, whereby the cardiologist priests have dogmatically declared the unassailable necessity of a very dangerous and often lethal drug called Eliquis (or Xarelto, same thing).  As we explore the Gospel of Cardiology, we will see that all the life-saving snake oils that these powerful priests toss at their faithful flock have led to more heart attacks, more strokes, and more deaths than had cardiologists merely left them alone.  As with many religions, the deception of the gospel maims and kills the very people it promises to save, and Eliquis is very illustrative of how these crafty priests have bamboozled so many people to hand over their money and bodies in obeyance to mythical cures clearly in opposition to their own self-interest.  A recent study shows us what we thinking doctors have known for quite some time: that the chance of dying or getting a stroke from Eliquis in the elderly far exceeds the chance of stroke prevention; 2% of people on these drugs die or get serious strokes a year and 15% end up in the hospital per year (all from bleeding), while only 0.6% of them prevent a stroke.  This calculus would mean that any Medical Dogmatist (MD) who prescribes this pill for afib in the elderly clearly is violating his/her Hippocratic Oath, while any patient knowingly taking it is more interested in the false allure of salvation than the dagger of scientific fact.  The proliferation of Eliquis, and its facile acceptance into medical society as a necessary and lifesaving drug despite robust data to the contrary, shows us the power of the Medical Industrial Religion, its self-serving and huckster Medical Dogmatists (MD's), the allure of the Gospel of Cardiology, and the propaganda network employed by the medical religion to harm people, drive up costs, and claim to be saving souls.  This is the medical religion in a nutshell, bloody and ugly but oh so revealing!