Sickness As Industrial Label

By Atom Bergstrom

Atom’s Blog

According to Ray Peat (interviewed by Jeremy Stuart & Brad Abrahams) …

“If you don’t know Gilbert Ling’s work thoroughly, it’s hard to understand the idiocy behind contemporary (last eighty years) of biological and medical thinking. It’s a type of insanity that is reinforced by the culture, the fact that it can make vast profits.”

According to the same source …

“The drug research industry is so far unrelated to reality that many other things could abolish essentially our whole drug industry because it’s corrupt and based on nothing but selling substitute products for basically old herbal and biological drugs that were available 100 years ago.”

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Let me add to this …

“If you don’t know Ivan Illich’s work thoroughly, it’s hard to understand the idiocy behind contemporary (last eighty years) of biological and medical thinking.”

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Ivan Illich (Medical Nemesis: The Expropriation of Health, 1973, 1974) wrote …

“Advanced industrial societies have a high stake in maintaining the epistemological legitimacy of disease entities. As long as disease is something that takes possession of people, something they ‘catch’ or ‘get,’ the victims of these natural processes can be exempted from responsibility for their condition. They can be pitied rather than blamed for sloppy, vile, or incompetent performance in suffering their subjective reality; they can be turned into manageable and profitable assets if they humbly accept their disease as the expression of ‘how things are’; and they can be discharged from any political responsibility for having collaborated in increasing the sickening stress of high-intensity industry. An advanced industrial society is sick-making because it disables people from coping with their environment and, when they break down, substitutes a ‘clinical,’ or therapeutic, prosthesis for the broken relationships.”

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Vernon Coleman (“That’s not science; it’s propaganda,” Jul. 2020) wrote …

“How can doctors regard medicine as a science when it has been proven many times that at least a third of patients will get better if given a placebo — a medicine that contains no active ingredients?

“How can doctors regard medicine as a science when it is known that a large proportion of patients expecting to have heart surgery will get better if they are merely given a scar on their chests and told that they have had an operation?

“Medicine is no science.

“It’s an art. Mysticism.”

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