The physicist Max Planck observed in his autobiography that scientific advancement proceeds in fits and starts: “A new scientific truth does not triumph by convincing its opponents and making them see the light, but rather because its opponents eventually die, and a new generation grows up that is familiar with it.” This observation was paraphrased as “science advances one funeral at a time.”
Medicine is, at best, applied science, where practitioners try to apply the latest techniques of their field to the unique patient in front of them. I propose a corollary to Planck’s principle to describe the glacial progress of medicine:
Theodoric’s Principle of Medical Advancement: “Medicine has advanced when the old standard of care becomes a joke.”
Making Fun of Medicine’s Former State-Of-The-Art Techniques
In 1978, the comedy show Saturday Night Live (SNL) aired a skit titled Theodoric of York, Medieval Barber. This gently poked fun at life in medieval England. Theodoric was a barber-physician who attempted to help his sick and injured patients with treatments and diagnostic techniques that couldn’t possibly have helped. Theodoric commented on all the progress Medicine had made by 1303 A.D., and sincerely implemented his day’s state-of-the-art interventions to help his patients. Theodoric’s default treatment was the ancient art of bloodletting.
The opening roll of this classic skit:
In the Middle Ages, medicine was still in its infancy.
The art of healing was conducted not by physicians, but by barbers.
The medieval barbers were the forerunners of today’s men of medicine,
and many of the techniques they developed are still practiced today.
This is the story of one such barber.
The skit conveys some examples of state-of-the-art healthcare in England, circa 1303 A.D.:
- The first patient arrives: “Hello, Theodoric of York. It’s springtime and I’m here for my annual haircut and bloodletting.”
- A mother arrives carrying her listless daughter. None of Theodoric’s earlier treatments have helped, so Theodoric orders his assistant to “take two pints” of blood.
- A man arrives with another man in a cart with broken legs. Theodoric says to the man with compound fractures, “you’ll feel a lot better after a good bleeding.”
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=edIi6hYpUoQ
Bloodletting Was Once a State-Of-The-Art healing intervention
A comment on YouTube says the SNL writers consulted with historians to make their skit as historically accurate as possible. I think this old skit is funny because of the truth of how medical techniques that were once considered state-of-the-art became a joke.
The theory behind bloodletting—that the body’s blood humor is in excess and needs to be drained to restore balance—was falsified in 1628, when English physician William Harvey published his studies establishing that blood circulates in his book, Du Motu Cordis.
171 years later, President George Washington’s doctors hadn’t heard about Dr. Harvey’s book. On his final days in 1799 President Washington caught a cold, treated himself with a bleeding, then his doctors arrived to finish him off with blister agents and 3 more rounds of bloodletting.
Bleeding was very popular in colonial America. Dr. Benjamin Rush, who is known as the Father of American Psychiatry, thought bleeding was curative for madness. In Medical Inquiries and Observations Upon the Diseases of the Mind, Rush talked about how bleedings made the mad docile, quiet, and lacking in energy. Rush’s techniques involved strapping patients into a tranquilizer chair and bleeding them for days.
The last medical text recommending bloodletting as a useful all-purpose treatment was published in 1923. According to Wikipedia:
“Bloodletting persisted into the 20th century and was recommended in the 1923 edition of the textbook The Principles and Practice of Medicine. The textbook was originally written by Sir William Osler and continued to be published in new editions under new authors following Osler’s death in 1919.”
Medical Progress
An 1853 letter to the New England Journal of Medicine recommended using calomel to treat typhoid. Calomel is a mineral containing the toxic heavy metal mercury. It sometimes seemed to help patients because of its laxative effect. But when calomel reacts with ammonia (as found in the kidneys), it releases free mercury into the body. Allopathic M.D.s used calomel into the early 20th century.
In the early 1800s, a variety of alternative medical practices arose to challenge then-mainstream standard practices of treating patients with toxic amounts of mercury, blister agents, purging, and bloodletting. Herbal medicine, eclectic medicine, and homeopathic medicine were some of the pre-1850 approaches to health that, whatever faults they might have had, did not encourage practitioners to bleed their patients to death or poison them with mercury.
This also applies to what is now called “mental illness.” The Quakers had a simple approach to helping members of their community who had a mental episode. Their Asylums provided “moral treatment”, which included safety and community, four meals a day and meaningful activities. The majority of the people who entered these asylums recovered and were able to resume their lives.
Conventional doctors responded to the challenge posed by medical dissidents by forming a guild in 1847. This was the American Medical Association. Some of the AMA’s early work was certainly important, but the guild also sought to monopolize medicine by outlawing the doctors who did not believe bloodletting was effective.
In some ways, conventional medicine started to make progress figuring out how to help their patients by the 1890s and early 20th century. For example, by 1903, rheumatoid Arthritis was found to resolve when treated with intestinal antiseptics.
By the early 1900s, most U.S. states had passed licensing laws. After making their competition illegal, the AMA next undertook an effort to improve medical techniques and education. The Carnegie Foundation financed Abraham Flexner to visit all the country’s medical schools in 1908. The Flexner Report was published in 1910. This book concluded, essentially, that all the medical schools should be similar to John Hopkins School of Medicine. Half the country’s medical schools closed over the next few decades. The closures fell particularly hard on the schools that taught medicine to Black Americans.
The only group of alternative doctors that was able to lobby for licensure equivalent to the Medical Doctors (M.D.) were the Doctors of Osteopathy (D.O.). In many ways Osteopaths in the early 20th century were much more effective helping their patients than doctors who were still implementing Theodoric-style medicine. A D.O. (presumably educated in the 1980s) told me of Osteopaths in the early 1900s getting much better results treating typhoid than the Medical Doctors who were still using calomel (mercury).
Another example of the progress in Medicine was in understanding cancer. Otto Warburg won the Nobel Prize in 1931 for his discoveries regarding the metabolism of tumors. The Warburg Effect describes how cancer cells have an inefficient metabolism resulting in lactic acid production, even if adequate oxygen is available. By the 1950s, Warburg had cancer almost entirely explained as a metabolic problem.
Medical Backslides
Then medicine started forgetting its own discoveries. Antibiotics were discovered, and the simple intestinal antiseptics fell out of use. DNA’s structure was discovered in the 1950s, cancer was assumed to be caused by DNA mutations, and Warburg’s metabolic insights mostly disappeared from cancer literature from about 1972 until 2002.
The success of the Quakers’ asylums was not replicated by non-Quakers. By the early 1900s, conventional psychiatrists had switched to trying to help their patients with electrocution, insulin comas, and lobotomies. When the pharmaceutical industry realized their new tranquilizers could be sold to make psychosis more manageable, psychiatrists were easy marks for the promotional campaigns.
The Soviets found an inventive use for psychiatric tranquilizers. According to Torture and Democracy, Soviet psychiatrists deliberately used the agony induced by the antipsychotic drug haloperidol to motivate their dissidents into compliance. Dissidents rapidly learned the Soviet gulag was better than the Soviet psychoprison. After their brief treatments, many dissidents were able to be returned to the gulags.
American psychiatrists—then and now—are trained to think the drugs they prescribe are the only meaningful factor behind improvement in the patient’s symptomatic presentation, and have a tendency to maintain their patients on these palliative drugs, no matter the cost to the patient.
The leading cause of acute liver failure in our modern world is poisoning via acetaminophen (aka paracetamol, brand names: Tylenol and Panadol). Medicine knows this, but still allows this metabolic poison to be sold.
The twin epidemics of obesity and autism, which started to really take off around 1980 and 1986, are undeniable backslides of medical progress that conventional medicine has been incapable of arresting with its modern pharma- and surgery-based approach to health.
I don’t have any insights into medicine’s habit of forgetting what was figured out. I suspect a primary problem is the pharmaceutical industry coming up with new pills to sell. Any new product with a marketing team will get more attention than inexpensive effective treatments.
Modern Rediscovery of the Old Medical Knowledge
Medicine is starting to rediscover aspects of what it forgot. Genomic testing determined that specific types of intestinal bacteria are a primary cause behind rheumatoid arthritis. This means the doctors who used intestinal antiseptics in 1903 were correct in their choice of therapeutics.
A 2016 New York Times article, “An Old Idea, Revived: Starve Cancer to Death,” tells of modern cancer researches realizing that Otto Warburg was correct that cancer is primarily a metabolic condition. Our poor oncologists seem to be struggling to figure out how to meld this fundamental truth with the 50+ years they spent pursuing the failed paradigm of chemotherapy. ‘Killing all the cancer cells’ with chemotherapy often kills the patient too.
Conventional psychiatry has begun to consider that there are possibly metabolic causes behind their traditional ‘mental’ diagnostic labels (which are mostly based on symptoms). In 2022, psychiatrist Chris Palmer published Brain Energy, which shares his discovery and implementation of the 80+ years of research establishing that “mental health” conditions are associated with metabolic problems. Dr. Palmer’s book is about how the symptoms given psychiatric labels resolve when the underlying metabolic problems are addressed.
If anyone has any insight into why conventional medicine ignored 80+ years of science, and why it wasn’t until 2022 that Palmer was able to drag these findings out of pharma-based medicine’s memory hole, I would greatly appreciate your comments.
Informed Consent and Imperfect Medicine
One of the most important ethical principles in modern medicine is “informed consent,” whereby patients are informed of the doctor’s assessment of their conditions and their options for addressing it. This allows humans to be doctors without having to get perfect results at every patient encounter. The consent portion of this ethical consideration leaves the ball in the patient’s court: “These are my recommendations, the choice of what to do is yours to make.”
Medieval barbers were more ethical practitioners of medicine than what I’ve observed of involuntary psychiatric doctors. Even the doctors who accidentally euthanized George Washington were fully compliant with modern ethics: President Washington was informed of his diagnosis of stagnant blood, agreed with it, and consented to his doctors’ treatment plan.
Modern Pseudo-Medicine
The prefix “pseudo” means “fake”. There are lots of medical treatments being actively used today which don’t work or don’t work very well, and which should be retired from use. But even ineffective and obsolete medical interventions can seem to be helpful.
A science-inspired doctor apologized for the psychiatric standard of care: “Psychotropic drugs are far from ideal. They don’t work well for everyone, and they can sometimes cause devastating side effects. But they do save lives, and they do allow some patients to lead a more-or-less normal life. They are the best we have at the moment” [emphasis added].
Obsolete psychotropic drugs, which always “cause devastating side effects,” aren’t appreciated by patients, and are often administered with violence: forced injections of psychiatric tranquilizers (“antipsychotics”) in hospital emergency rooms, and under force by orders of the court. Furthermore, the Quakers’ asylums irrefutably prove that there have always been better options than trying to drug patients’ symptoms away.
Sometimes doctors use obsolete medicine because they don’t know what else to do, and they hope that their patient will receive some benefit, however slight. As long as the patient is given choice, even obsolete medicine is still ‘medicine’. The involuntary use of psychiatric drugs, that arguably cause the deterioration supposedly being treated, is pseudo-medicine.
The only psychiatrists who can practice ethically are those who do not participate in America’s involuntary treatment industries.
Theodoric of Arizona: A Future SNL Skit
Arizona, like the rest of the United States, has laws that allow doctors to do anything they want to their patients when they have a court order for involuntary treatment and/or guardianship. These programs are predicated on the assumption that the involuntarily treated will benefit from their involuntary treatment or guardianship.
Arizona is not the only state perpetrating fake medicine on its most vulnerable citizens, but it’s where I’ve made my observations. I’ve tried to intervene to prevent my friend’s treatment-induced deterioration, but the whole state and federal judiciary stood behind the lowly county judge who denied my petitions for writ of habeas corpus by misquoting the applicable statutes. Judges at the lowest level of the United States’ various courts know it’s challenging to represent yourself without the assistance of an attorney. Because my petitions had broad implications for having to relitigate a massive number of civil commitments and the treatment of the ‘insane’ by the state’s jails and prisons, I think it was easier for the state judges who got my petitions and appeals, the federal judges in Arizona, the U.S. Court of Appeals, and the Justices at the Supreme Court in Washington DC, to just make my case ‘go away’. Indeed, there’s been no outrage at the Supreme Court of the United States’ having thrown me under the bus.
Arizona’s current Attorney General Kris Mayes claims to “fight” for “bodily autonomy.” But her staff has no interest in investigating allegations that people are being deteriorated by Arizona’s system for stripping psychiatric patients of their bodily autonomy. I’ve sent the Arizona Attorney General’s office YouTube links of the videos proving my allegations of psychiatric misdiagnosis, and still AZAG Kris Mayes’ staff doesn’t care about the fundamental violations of bodily autonomy endured by Arizona’s involuntarily treated. Hopefully this essay will motivate AG Mayes’s staff to let her know of the dumpster fires burning in Arizona’s mental hospitals. (“Dumpster fire” is a colloquialism for “a catastrophe that no one wants to deal with”.)
I won’t try to write SNL’s future skit for them. There’s an abundance of absurd observations of allopathic psychiatry’s current standard of care that would be excellent fodder for making fun of current “science-inspired” degenerative treatments.
Conclusion
Mad in America founder Robert Whitaker’s book Psychiatry Under the Influence examines how the psychiatric medical specialty was captured by the prescription drug industry starting in the 1950s. Today we have a profession—and society—that practices a modern form of forced bleeding complete with tranquilizer chair: injections with antipsychotics like Haldol.
Drugs in the antipsychotic category were originally known as neuroleptics, meaning they took hold of the nervous system and rendered people quiet, fatigued, and like a zombie. This outcome is little different than quieting people by taking two pints of blood. Modern psychiatrists tranquilize their patients “scientifically” with FDA-approved drugs and a needle, rather than a tranquilizer chair and a knife for poking holes in the patient’s veins.
Haldol is still used because it’s inexpensive and effective at zonking people out. Apologists for psychiatry believe the newer “atypical antipsychotics” are better. My impression is the “atypical” drugs are, in some ways, much worse than plain old haloperidol. I invite anyone with experience or personal observations of both haloperidol and the “atypical antipsychotics” to share their experience of these fundamentally-defective drugs.
Patients and their advocates have been complaining about psychiatric pseudo-medicine since the 1950s. The standard response to criticism of the psychiatric standard of care is to dismiss the dissidents as “antipsychiatry.” Modern Dr. Theodorics are no different than the barbers of old. Hubris is a timeless problem of the medical profession. It’s been a long struggle, but I think allopathic psychiatry and their apologists are on the verge of complete and total defeat.
Arizona’s mental health industry is not yet fit for the SNL treatment, as the state is still in the midst of perpetrating fake medicine on its most vulnerable citizens. But in a few years, hopefully Saturday Night Live’s comedians will be able to immortalize Arizona’s pivotal role in removing violence from medicine with a skit: Theodoric of Arizona: Involuntary Psychiatric Pseudo-Doctor.
Is your criticism of blood letting based on scientific research into bloodletting, or your own socially conditioned ignorance and prejudice? Because bloodletting would amongst other things stimulate the increase in endorphines and potentially lower pain. Also pain is itself known to have therapeutic value because self-harm through cutting and certain religious and sexual practices are based on pain, and religious asceticism is productive of pain which is felt to ncrease the resiliance of the body and brain through stress. So who is being unscientific here, the bloodletters alone or you in your prejudice against a practice? Because dismissing as rubbish any cultural phenomena prevents you understanding what it actually is, what processes lie behind and explain it. I find that traditional medicines do have such explanations, as do traditional religious practices, but one has to be really interested to find out and not dismiss human actualities as meaningless, which is itself a meaningless thing to do because these things were born and proliferated for a reason, whatever that might be, to do with social health or social pathology, good or bad, but the intellect has a habit of preventing deeper perception and understanding of the human realities the understanding of which might transform your world completely.
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Cutting and bleeding definitely have physiological effects. My point is that they aren’t used prophylactically anymore because the invisible science behind their beneficial effects is somewhat understood.
I went to the Arizona State University to check references – their science library had a copies of Hans Selye’s various books. Selye was a pioneer in the physiology of stress. One of the sections I remember was a discussion of how bleeding induces the stress response, which can rally the body to repair itself. Selye said this is why bleeding sometimes seemed to have a beneficial effect – it really was helpful, in some cases. But Barber Theodorics didn’t know why bleeding sometimes helped, and sometimes killed their patient.
An earlier draft of this essay had a bit about how bleeding and leeches are still used for specific conditions (excess iron in the blood and limb reattachment). Scientists have figured out how to more directly aid the body’s stress response, so draining blood to induce stress isn’t necessary anymore.
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All doctors are psuedo-doctors because it is not possible to BE a doctor. A doctor is a socally conditioned merely conceptual identity on the one hand, and a set of socially conditioned activities on the other, and I am not a conceptual identity or set of socially conditioned activities: I am the human being, the human consciousness, within which the phenomena of conceptualization through social conditioning takes place.
But in another sense, taking a doctor to be a real social activity that seeks to restore health, we see that even this has no truth in it whatsoever. We only invented the doctor when we forgot what it is to live a healthy, natural life. Traditional medicines were used for external diseases, but let’s remember that suffering from an external disease does not imply lack of health. If the body fights it off with tenacity and strength it may produce appalling symptoms but this is a measure of it’s strength in rebounding back to health despite the opposition of foreign intrusive elements. So that kind of sickness, what we call disease, is nothing to do with the presence or absence of health. It has something to do with the reality of the world and natural order that we live in, and that natural order knows only health. It’s only with the development of society that we need doctors, but their job is not to restore health – it’s to try and mitigate the symptoms of health’s destruction by society, and that is not at all what the doctor imagines themselves to be doing, so in all manor of ways the doctor is an illusion which in truth we cannot possibly be. Who is the one to be a doctor? Thought? So is thought saying “I am a doctor” you actually being a doctor, in which case, what is this you, actually? Things are always beyond words and the more you look at the actual the more you realize the insanity of all of our words and lives. Our lives make up civilization, make up the whole human world, and you realize the insanity of it all. We know only insanity and nothing on Earth is in an acceptable condition to clear eyes which have produced a clear mind. A clear mind and clear eyes implies seeing through the illusion of being a doctor, or indeed being anything at all, because you are nothing, which is eternity.
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It all began with the cry of terror. The cry of terror became the word for terror, the name for terror, but at first the word for terror WAS terror, it’s very cry. But then words became petrified cries. All of language are the petrified yearnings and the laughter and the cries of once free spirit. Anger is the very boiling of this spirit and injects it’s black milk, it’s boiling and dissolving rage, back into language. Free the spirit and listen to the moans and groans of spirit so that they can find peace through your own understanding of them. Become free, life – and then, through learning, become free life, which is perfectly free, without injury, which is golden and green light, exactly like sunlight falling through the leaves. Because there are no coincidences. The blue river flows and dissolves all things of time.
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Great article, thanks!
“Conventional doctors responded to the challenge posed by medical dissidents by forming a guild in 1847. This was the American Medical Association. Some of the AMA’s early work was certainly important, but the guild also sought to monopolize medicine by outlawing the doctors who did not believe bloodletting was effective”
I wasn’t aware of this fact. It seems extremely relevant to the current situation
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