The Corruption of Science, Part II: When Politics Determines Medical Parctice

Obama’s Universal Health Care Plan: The end of separation of medical science and politics

If Americans believe health care and medical science itself will not radically change under the Obama administration’s proposed health plan, they are deluded.

Lost in the current debate on universal health care is the fact that when the state runs medical care, political ideology rather than true science and individual conscience determines medical science and practice. When government becomes responsible for medical practice, the corruption of the medical community is inevitable. That is because medicine becomes an instrument of the government to achieve political goals, which are subject to the ideological vagaries of the moment rather than to the rigorous demands of the scientific method. Instead of orthodox science, pseudo-science, that perverted offspring of real science, finds a foothold in political circles. That is because pseudo-science is easily malleable, easily sold to the populace and easily distorted toward political ends. Just as bad, the hijacking of the medical professions means the entire medical system is subject to the demands and ends of the state.

For the above reasons, the acceptance of the American Medical Association of the Obama universal health care plan–to say nothing of the health care plan itself-- is grave cause for alarm, as it indicates a large part of the medical profession has accepted the re-casting of medical science and practice espoused by the far left political elite now running the US government. To put it bluntly, the entire medical profession is in immanent danger of being politicized and controlled by far left ideologues. The capitulation may have potentially horrific results not foreseen even by the Obama administration, the AMA; or, most importantly, by the American people.

For one thing, if the proposed health care plan passes with the blessing of the AMA, reorganization of the medical professions along leftist political lines can now safely proceed apace.
While examples selected from the Nazi and Soviet regimes may provoke "here we go again" reactions because so often cited, the both the Soviet and Nazi governmental paradigms still speak strongly to the dangers of medical care and medical science being pre-empted by politics. The fact of the matter is that what is presently occurring in the US as relates to medical practice is along the lines of the National Socialists’ agenda for medical practice in Germany of the 1930's.
As Michael Hayes notes in "Recasting the German Elites," Hitler achieved through his political lackey Gerhard Wagner a through reorganization of the medical profession via the German Health Insurance initiative, a universal plan which, when established in 1933, quickly absorbed the thousands of regional and local public and private insurance funds. By 1936 a new centralized Reich Physicians Chamber assured full Nazi control of the entire medical profession. The former self-regulated groups of physicians that were part of the medical conscience of Germany for decades were instantly out of business. The result was that the rigorous criticism necessary to the scientific method and the practice of medicine were erased.

Hayes writes that in addition to the Reich Physicians Chamber, a National Socialist Physicians’ League (NSAB) melded the medical profession under one governmental organization. So in addition to eliminating private medical insurance, Wagner sought to unify medical practice throughout the nation. Thus his ultimate goal was to destroy traditional, autonomous regional health care institutions as well as regional insurance funds..

The medical putsch under Wagner purged politically and racially undesirable doctors from insurance lists, and the Reich Physicians Ordinance of 1935 centralized German medicine for the first time in its history. Among other requirements it compelled all practicing physicians to join the RAK.

Once the reorganization of the German medical profession was achieved (by 1936), Wagner ordered doctors to report on mentally and physically handicapped patients in preparation for forced sterilization and euthanasia programs. Wagner also required doctors to attend medical extension seminars, which offered indoctrination courses in racial biology. Here in present day America, we can already see some of the directions the government might take. Czar Eric Holdren has written he favors forced abortion and teh adding of sterilizing agents to public water supplies in order to achieve population control. In addition, the conscience cluases protecting doctors from being forced to perfomr abortions are under severe attack.

How bad can things get when medicine and government are unified?

Very, very bad.

While most readers will be familiar with the atrocities of individual doctors such as Joseph Mengele, whose medical practices were approved by the Nazi regime, many will not know the extent the medical profession was involved in the extermination of Slavs and Jews during operation Barbarossa. The SS was peopled with doctors who considered the extermination of Slavs and Jews in the Soviet Union a medical necessity because Slavs and Jews polluted the human gene pool.

The reason for pointing out the involvement of German doctors in the einsatzgruppen campaigns aimed at eradicating certain undesirable populations is to point out how unbelievably corrupted medical "practice " can become when run by a state in the grip of an ideology captured by pseudo-science that furthers its political ends.

While matters in our own country certainly are not at the level reached by Germany until the end of World War II, all US citizens should be extremely wary as they watch the US medical profession, represented by the AMA, cooperating with and capitulating en masse--with very few exceptions--to leftist ideology demanding universal and uniform health care and health insurance.

Certainly as of this moment, endorsing the Obama universal health plan, almost certainly ensures procedures similar to Germany of the 1930s to completely unify medical theory and practice with politics.

Note the German reorganization of the medical profession required reporting cases of mental deviance. This should be a particular worry to US citizens, as mental health which is defined by government bureaucrats can easily become a tool for persecution. Do American citizens really want the government to be in charge of a vast medical bureaucracy which has the capacity to define and mandate "cures" for mental health problems? For make no mistake, the government will be in charge of mental as well as physical health.

Americans should take a lesson from USSR history, the second societal paradigm which offers instruction concerning universal care run by the state.

It is well documented that the universal Soviet health care system, which included psychiatrists devoted to curing mental health problems, turned out to be a useful tool in silencing political opponents. For decades, dissidents who opposed the communist regime were simply declared insane. As Sidney Block and Peter Raddaway write in Russia’s Political Hospitals: The use of Psychiatry in the Soviet Union: "The abuse of psychiatry...presents an Orwellian nightmare because the standard political or religious dogma is self-evidently correct, any dissent can only be a manifestation of mental disorder...Dissent is regarded as a symptom of madness, in many cases dissent is the only symptom of madness."

A former NKVD "chemist" cited in Kolyma Tales writes: "It is possible to quell the human will by injections, with pure pharmacology and chemistry, without any "physics such as breaking suspects’ ribs...The physicists and chemists-- these were the two schools of interrogation."

Alexander Solzhenitsyn commented on the above practices in 1970, protesting against the arrest and detention of Zhores Medvedev and Natalya Gorbanevskaya:

"Last Tuesday, a Moscow court found Natalya Gorbanevskaya, a young poetess prominent in the civil rights movement in the USSR, to be of unstable mind and committed her to an insane asylum for an undetermined period of time...If one does not think along the prescribed lines, they say, "You are not normal!" And compatibility means that everyone must think the same thing...Obliging, perjured psychiatrists characterize mental illness in the following manner: "concern for social problems, excessive vehemence or excessive indifference, too much ability or too little."

Anyone who has read some of the responses of the present administration to those who disagree with their political ideology will recognize the concerns of Solzhenitsyn should also be our concerns.

Solzhenitsyn concluded: "...the detention of free-thinking people in insane asylums is spiritual murder, is a variant of the gas-chambers and even more cruel: the torture of those who are being killed is worse and lasts longer."

Lest any reader be thinking such atrocities couldn’t happen here under a US universal government run mental health program, he/she should seriously consider the recent attacks on Francis Collins, the great Christian scientist whose towering work on the human genome project is considered suspect by far leftists merely because Collins is a Christian. Being a Christian is considered mental aberrance by some leftists such as Richard Dawkins. This unsustainable prejudice is very similar to the attacks on "Jewish" science during the Hitler regime. Jews, too, were considered mentally ill and inherently inferior because of their faith and supposedly irrevocably polluted racial makeup.

Further, the enactment of "hate crime" legislation is an invitation to the establishment of a mental health bureaucracy with powers to persecute those with different beliefs than the prevailing political ideology by declaring them mentally ill. It is no secret, for instance, that honest discussion of race problems within the US is impossible, as the term "racist" has become as ubiquitous and politically useful tool for silencing dissent as the terms "hooligan," "enemy of the people," and "rabble rouser" were in the former Soviet Union.

The above is to say nothing of the potential for the establishment of mental health monitors in the public school system. It is not out of the realm of legitimate concern to consdier just what bureuacracy might be established ot ensure our children are mentally "healthy:" that is, to ensure they and their parents toe the current idological line. It is not inconceiveable that Johnny and Mary might be encouraged to report on their parents' ideological abberations. Such things have happened before and can happen here.

Actually, no one has to limit him/herself to examples from the history of Nazi Germany or Soviet Russia. No one has to limit one's self to speculative scenarios in order to become alarmed at the proposed erasure of distinctions between the spheres of politics and medicine/science.

American history is rife with examples of miscarriages of justice due to the incorporation of junk science, particularly eugenics, into public policy, be those unjustifiable and unscientific theories touting inferior races, inheritable criminal tendencies, genetic determinism, survival of the fittest, craniology, biological destiny and a host of other theories amounting to sheer quackery.
Even our august judicial system has been guilty of endorsing junk scientific theories aimed at promoting the public "health."

One has only to consider the infamous case of "Buck vs. Bell," in which Oliver Wendell Holmes approved of the sterilization of a young woman deemed an imbecile (she wasn’t), writing in his one page decision supporting the state’s right to sterilize her:

"We have seen more than once that the public welfare may call upon the best citizens for their lives. It would be strange if it could not call upon those who already sap the strength of the state for these lesser sacrifices...Three generations of imbeciles is enough."

As Stephen Jay Gould points out in his classic The Mismeasure of Man, the law Holmes upheld remained in effect for forty-eight years.

It was overturned only because government and medical practice were not yet one unit. Protest from independent scientists and medical authorities as well as thoughtful citizens was still possible because of the tradition of independent hospitals and institutions devoted to scientific research and practice still relatively unsullied by government domination.

And that is the crux of the matter.

D..P. Agin, author of Junk Science writes that the main reason the eugenics movement Holmes supported had different results in Germany and the US is because the two countries had different governments in the years following World War I. If the US had become a dictatorship like Germany during the 1920s and 1930s; if medicne had been put completely under the aegis of government, "the programs advocated by American eugenicists might have–indeed probably would have–been implemented by an American government that had already incorporated many of the ideas of eugenics into government policies."

It is my belief that our present government is being radically and rapidly transformed into something formerly unthought of; namely, a completely socialist state with an all powerful executive branch. It certainly doesn’t look like the US government of the 1920s and 1930s, a government which had at least a braking effect on the eugenics movement; a government which still recognized the separate spheres of medicine and politics. As transforming as the decades of the 20's and 30's were, there still remained a fairly distinct separation between the practice of medicine, scientific research and that of politics.

The erasure of the remaining distinctions between medicine/science and politics is happening before our eyes with the proposed universal health care system; and, as noted in "The Corruption of science, PartI" in the appropriation of a dubious theory of "global Warming' into the poltical process. The resutl of the erasure of former barriers between government and medicine means the stellar accomplishments of American medical science and practice will be a thing of the past.

Miguel Faria sums it up well when he stated, "Whenever science and medicine have been subordinated to the state...the results have been as perverse as they have been disastrous."
The conclusion: Universal health care, with its accompanying bureaucratic nightmare and intrusion of political ideology and the effectuation of an ideological/political agenda intruding into and dictating the mores of medical science and practice must be resisted at all costs.


Fay Voshell