The statistics bounce around about COVID even as the virus wanes and becomes just another recurrent cold.  But the religious fanaticism of the COVID faithful, the rituals, the restrictions, those have not disappeared.  In my world of geriatrics and long term care, my patients are still being made to suffer and even killed by those doctors and policy makers who insist that the COVID religion must not be challenged.  Here is a story of one such patient, I call her Mrs. X, who made me cry one morning during my rounds because amidst the religious zealotry of COVID and our medical system I stood helpless as her life drifted away.

From masks to one -way aisles to PPE to 20-second hand washing and 6-foot separation, COVID has demonstrated the religiosity of health care more than any singular event in my lifetime.  The Gospel of Infectious Disease, which includes public health, is a frightening one; these doctors and their agents have consistently been on the wrong side of science and have helped orchestrate some of the most heinous medical outrages in our nation's history.  In COVID, they took their religiosity to new heights, condemning our land, its people, and our medical science to baseless rituals and religious mythology all of which they and our nation's doctors conflated with science.  The result has been a desecration of medical science, and the instigation of death and suffering of millions of souls.  This is the first of several discussions of COVID, because COVID opens a window in the most blatant way possible for us to see how our doctors and medical institutions have abused science and inaugurated a medical theocracy that benefits them and harms all those who are its faithful congregants.  

In my book The Great Stupidity, which chronicles the journey of a naive and gullible French boy who seeks to find a cure for the Black Plague and to speak with the Great Frenchie in Paris who promises to provide the scientific means of stopping the plague, from waving ones hands to other absurd but accepted rituals, I seek to show how dangerous it is when we use religion to combat a medical crisis.  When the boyh finally finds the Great Frenchie he sees that this man is misusing science for his own advantage and is in fact a charlatan, although the world refuses to believe such heresy.  In this blog I talk about the religiosity of health care through the lens of the Great Frenchie, showing how we are really no better than those who confronted the Black Death with similar medical deceptions and rituals all to the same devastating end.  I have included the Sciencey Song, although it can also be found on my website under songs at www.andylazris.com.

Prostate cancer helps us understand the religion of health care through a very unique lens.  For any religion to be effective it must instill fear into its adherents, have priests who offer a means of alleviating that fear, and then provide appealing but ultimately deceptive techniques to "cure" someone that seems to be sensible and effective but which in fact are dangerous and misleading.  Prostate cancer inflicts about 30-40% of all men, but kill less than 1% of those who get it.  Most men die with prostate cancer, not of it.  But the Medical Industrial Religion and its Medical Dogmatists (MD's) have used this common and frightening disease to convince millions of trusting men to put their bodies and pocketbooks in the hands of the medical priests to their and society's detriment.  About 1% of men who have prostate cancer die of it, and the very expensive and dangerous treatment (hormones, radiation, surgery, chemo) does not change that calculus.  Let me say that again: 1% of men die of prostate cancer whether they are treated or not.  Since it's a slow growing cancer, it's fairly resistant to treatment.  We can measure a PSA lab test to see if a man may have cancer.  If it's high, we can do a biopsy to confirm it.  Then we can assault that man with treatment that may maim or kill him and almost certainly will cause some palpable harm, but it will not help him live a day longer.  A recent study confirmed this, as have so many others. Checking PSA levels doesn't help anyone live longer or better, and treating prostate cancer doesn't help anyone live longer or better; just the opposite in fact.  But the Medical Industrial Religion has so bamboozled the public as to make them think that PSA testing is useful and treatment is both necessary and effective.  We pay over $100 billion a year to the medical priests and hospitals and other agents of the faith all to lower the PSA number (treatment does do that!) but not to help a soul.  We pay that money to deceive people and harm them all in the name of salvation.  Listen to this podcast to learn how well prostate cancer helps us to understand the power and appeal of the medical religion.

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!

The only way I can grasp the huge gap between medical fact and the dogmatic myths spewed out by doctors and slurped up by frightened patients who seek salvation and long life is to view health care through the lens of it being a religion.  Everything about our health care system and its doctor-priests is tainted by dogma.  We spend $4 trillion dollars largely ticking people into selling their bodies and souls, and a lot of cash, for the promise of cure and life.  People rarely question doctors or the medical system.  They are inundated by dogmatic proclamations on TV, by their friends and family, by doctors and agencies like the CDC and various societies (American Cancer Society, Alzheimer's Association, ect) that tell them to dive into the health care system and to ask no questions.  It's all about faith, not science, and all of it is orchestrated and financed by our medical industries from big Pharma to the hospital lobby to physician organizations. That fact that our bloated Medical-Industrial complex is fueled by self-serving doctors and drug companies and hospitals and other agents of dogmatic deception, the fact that it has led to shorter lives and more chronic illness, that fact that science proves that it does not work, none of that deters people from believing their smart and caring doctor-priests and from tasking the Eucharist and adhering to the requisite rituals that they are assured will give them salvation and ultimately eternal life.  Thus will we unravel the religiosity of health care, the danger of believing doctors and others whose own goals verge far from yours, and the huge gap between science and the medical dogma being sold to us under the guise of being necessary.  See my most recent blog about this, and I have more books on the way!!

We have talked about how Flexner's imprint on US health care leaves doctors as unthinking pimps for the drug companies.  Doctors rarely independently evaluate interventions and tests, nor is their gaze patient-specific.  Rather, they are apt to listen to "experts," many of whom are either directly or indirectly (in terms of their academic funding and research opportunities) beholden to drug companies.  Doctors also listen to "authoritative" groups like the CDC or American Diabetes Association, all of which too receive the bulk of their funding and leadership from the pharmaceutical industry.  Rather than read studies, digest the pros and cons of purported "life saving" drugs an tests and treatments, and treat each patient as a complex nuanced individual, doctors rely on protocols typically scripted by drug-company tinged companies or doctors.  They essentially become robots, reciting the company line and not actually using their own brains.  This is most apparent when a doctor uses a calculator to tell you whether you are at risk from a certain ailment or should take this drug or that.  Calculators like this seem precise, but they are programmed with bogus data of which the doctor is unaware, and typically they are drug-company created.  Doctors don't know about this; they simply use the calculators as though they are factual and spit out the conclusions as thought they are unassailable.   These are robot doctors, and we will discuss more about them, as they can be very deceptive and dangerous.

We have been told that picking up cancers early and fixing them will save lives.  But does it?  It depends on the cancer.  For breast and colon cancer, for instance, lifetime screening saves 1/1000 people from cancer deaths compared to those never screened.  Other cancers, such as ovarian and pancreatic, are so aggressive that screening is not of value, since once these cancers are visible they have already spread.  Prostate Cancer is the opposite.  It effects 35% of all men, but kills only 1% of them.  It grows so slowly that early treatment doesn't impact the rate of death; if you're unlucky enough to have the rare and severe form, treatment won't help.  Doing PSA blood tests will pick up prostate cancers, lead to biopsies and tests, lead to aggressive and harmful treatments, but save no lives.  Then, why do we do it?  It costs our health care system tens of billions of dollars every year, feeds doctors and other members of the Medical Industrial Complex with lots of money, and gives men the illusion that their lives are saved, but causes far more harm than good.  Listen to why PSA tells us a lot about our nation's doctors and health care system and why we need to fear both.