Upstream Health Glossary

By Atom Bergstrom

Atom’s Blog

cascade iatrogenesis — medical treatment causing injury or illness requiring further medical treatment causing further illness or injury, and so forth. This is the normal and ongoing state of affairs within the aegis of the Medical Cartel.

clinical iatrogenesis — (coined by Ivan Illich) illness or injury done to patients by ineffective, toxic, and unsafe treatments.

Code Brown — hospital bed full of excrement.

crump — go downhill quickly and/or die.

cultural iatrogenesis — (coined by Ivan Illich) the destruction of individualistic and traditional ways of dealing with pain, illness, and death. Only a medical professional can issue a Birth or Death Certificate. Birth and death without medical presence is becoming culturally unacceptable if not outright illegal. Cradle to coffin health management places the autonomy of death in the hands of a physician in a “high-cost death chamber.”

disease mongering — widening the diagnostic boundaries of illnesses and vigorously promoting their public awareness to expand the markets for treatment; in other words, over-diagnosing and over-treating for more money. It includes strategies such as increasing the profits on diabetes by concocting the pseudo-disease of prediabetes, and of adding a second category of vitamin D insufficiency to vitamin D deficiency to move more product.

downstream medicine — (coined by At-OM) alternative and naturopathic medicine. Both are copycat versions of mainstream medicine. Instead of Lipitor, expect something like red yeast rice extract. Instead of aspirin, expect something like willow bark. Instead of a COX-2 inhibitor, expect something like glucosamine. According to Pam Popper, “The problem that I saw with naturopathy school is it was treatment and addressing health conditions for the most part within the same paradigm which I’d already learned was incorrect, which is, ‘You give me a symptom and I’ll give you stuff. Now if I’m a medical doctor, I give you drugs; if I’m a naturopath, I give you supplements, but the problem that we have is that you still have the disease.”

FTD — elderly person, a “failure to die.”

iatrogenesis — any illness or injury that occurs because of medical care. Ivan Illich (1926-2002) popularized the word iatrogenesis, regarding it as the relentless increase in disease induced by doctors.

medical amnesia — (coined by At-OM) forgetting a medical cure or effective treatment. Countless medical facts have been left by the wayside. How many times was it deliberate? How many times are medical researchers reinventing the wheel?

medical care — capital-intensive commodity production demoting every individual into a technological product.

Medical Cartel, the — U.S. Health Care System Cartel in the process of becoming a worldwide syndicate. It includes doctors, dentists, nurses, technicians, hospitals, nursing homes, universities, pharmacies, laboratories, pharmaceutical companies, medical electronics companies, medical device companies, supplement companies, health care insurance companies (including Medicare and Medicaid), peer-reviewed journals, and all the agencies and officials within the jurisdiction of the U.S. Department of Health & Human Services (including the law enforcement agencies and officials to enforce it).

over-medicalization — practice of non-validated medicine with no proven benefits and the potential for harm; disease mongering.

social iatrogenesis — (coined by Ivan Illich) the “medicalization of life,” medicalizing as many of life’s problems as possible, and subjecting them to medical intervention; Inventing new non-diseases is part of this process. In the realm of mental diseases, the DSM-5 is an appalling example, being a manual filled with hundreds of fictional disorders. According to Ivan Illich, “What need is there to worry about a murderous environment when doctors are industrially equipped to act as life-savers!”

unhygienic death — death not appropriated by the Medical Cartel.

upstream medicine — (coined by At-OM) food-based medicine not based on mainstream medical propaganda.

walker — elderly person in a hospital or nursing home, derived from zombie slang in The Walking Dead.

worried well, the — people unnecessarily concerned about their physical or mental health. Caring for the worried well is Big Business that is aggressively cultivated. The Medical Cartel propagandizes people to seek unnecessary tests for as many diseases as possible, including many fictional ones, convincing healthy men and women that they’re diseased and in need of medical treatment.

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According to Ivan Illich (author of Medical Nemesis, 1974) …

“The major threat to health in the world is modern medicine.”
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