This report from 1910 marks the beginning of the medical system that we have in place today.
“He effectively created a culture that enabled the monetization of medicine like never before.”
Read on to learn how we got where we are today…with pharmaceuticals and surgery at the core of our healthcare system…and natural medicine as it’s victim!
Keep in mind there were no real effective governmental agencies in place monitoring the state of affairs within the medical community, so what Flexner did at the behest of the robber barons, he did so in favor of profits rather than the long-term care of patients.
You can’t patent a plant or an essential oil, but you can patent a lab-created molecule that strongly resembles that of the plants. If profits are what you’re after and it all seems rather harmless, why not make some money while you’re making people well.
But here’s one problem with that. Drugs, on the whole (there certainly are exceptions), don’t really make people well. Pharmaceutical success is not based on the effectiveness of the drug. It’s based on the amount of profit it can generate. That’s what “blockbuster” in “blockbuster drug” means.
Drugs do a masterful job of making us feel well, and often pretty quickly. But only temporarily, because drugs are created to treat symptoms and only rarely treat the actual cause. Plus, drugs create their own symptoms, sometimes requiring additional drugs to offset their ill effects. We live in a quick-fix culture where we crave immediate gratification. We certainly have more drive-thru restaurants than we have home gardens.
Five Things to Know About the Flexner Report
1. Abraham Flexner was not a doctor, but a school teacher and educational theoristfrom Louisville, Kentucky. In 1910 he published the Medical Education in the United States and Canada, known as the Flexner Report, which elevated the importance of German educational methods in the teaching of medicine.
2. There is a connection between the robber barons and medicine. John Rockefeller, Andrew Carnegie, and others saw this as a progression of peddling pharmaceuticals, which began as byproducts of oil refinement.
3. There were no real effective governmental agencies in place monitoring the state of affairs within the medical community, so what Flexner did at the behest of the robber barons, he did so in favor of profits rather than the long-term care of patients. He effectively created a culture that enabled the monetization of medicine.
4. Drugs are created to treat symptoms and only rarely treat the actual cause. Plus, drugs create their own symptoms, sometimes requiring additional drugs to offset their ill effects. We live in a quick-fix culture where we crave immediate gratification.
5. For the most part, medicine has become tone deaf to the oath it claims to uphold — the Hippocratic oath. We believe Flexner paved the way for this overthrow of whole-body health by making scientific research and training alone the only desirable and credible approach to human wellness.
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