My prior post, Cero, told about my getting very sick on the way to a Double A baseball game in Ciudad Bolivar (CB). Cero noticed I did not look well and told my father who then drove me ahead of the team to CB where our friends took us to their family doctor who determined my ailment and I was well by the end of the day.

For decades I had not thought of Cero or the event in which he played a prominent role. The recollections were prompted by the chapter, “The Crisis In Medicine” in Harold O.J. Brown’s The Sensate Culture.

“Once considered an art and a calling, medicine has become both industrialized and commercialized. In the United States, which often serves as a bellwether for all Western culture, medical care, surgery, psychiatry, and hospital care, are advertised like automobiles and cosmetics:

“‘The University of Chicago Hospitals — at the forefront of medicine’.

“‘The only Harvard-trained specialist in male sexuality in Northern Illinois….'”

As if that weren’t unseemly enough, medicine has also become thoroughly politicized, increasingly defined as a “right of all citizens and non-citizens in modern Western states.” And since it is a “right”, the state has taken over vast swathes of the medical-industrial complex, including encouraging the “right to die”, because, after all, it is very expensive to help people live longer than public well-being actuarial tables, is it not?

(About the “right to die”, Brown remarks pithily, “It is odd to define something that everyone must do as a right.”)

Medicine is at least as ancient as the first birth of a child. “Did Adam tie Cain’s umbilical chord…?” 

The close relation between medicine and religion persists to this very day, as attested by doctors who still repeat the old slogan, “I treat; God heals”.

Another close relation that has been revived in 20th and 21st Century America is that between medicine and the state.

This is nothing new. The world’s oldest law code, The Code of Hammurabi, reflects a unified culture, centered on the throne, with the monarch playing a semi-divine priestly role. And the physician was “trained, examined, and paid by the royal household. Those who did best in their examinations could become physicians to the royal household; those who did less well, treated the nobility and wealthy citizens, while the poorest candidates treated the common people.” Nothing new here as the president and both houses of congress have medical care and benefits which are unthinkable for the rest of us.

“Medical care was available to all classes without cost….” But this state-provided care came with something with which our modern society in increasingly afflicted, “the physician was a servant of the state and was expected … to keep the monarch informed about the affairs of his subjects.”

Are you not concerned about all the “checklists” doctors or practitioners go through whenever you happen to grace their clinics or offices? I know I am. Hammurabi seems not to be so far in the past.

The Hippocratic tradition, originating in the idealistic phase of Greek culture, “proved extremely durable, even through the sensate period of Roman Empire; it was developed and reinforced in both medieval Europe and the Muslim lands of the Near East. Only in the late sensate phase of our own culture has it begun to be seriously challenged.”

“The Hippocratic Oath taught physicians to consider their work a holy calling and to hold themselves accountable to God, to their professional colleagues, and particularly to their patients.”The patient was seen to be made in the image of the divine. Outside the Hippocratic tradition, “physicians frequently worked for the monarch or the state. They had no specific duty to their patients as individual human beings in the same way that a veterinarian has no specific duty to the dogs or horses he treats but rather to the owner who pays him. Hippocrates instructed his students and all who followed in his tradition concerning their duty to the patient first of all. Specifically, the new physician promised not to perform or counsel abortions and not to perform or counsel ‘assisted suicide’.”

Significantly, in the Hippocratic tradition, the physician works for the patient; in the Babylonian, totalitarian tradition, the physician works for the state.

In our increasing sensate culture the shift in medicine has been away from the patient and to the state, as it is the state who determines who gets paid and by how much. 

Medicine touches a broad and deep range of human existence and much of modern Western human existence is sensate to the core — materialistic, utilitarian, pragmatic, irreligious, and oriented to the temporal as opposed to the eternal. We therefore ought not be surprised at the cavalier attitude so prevalent in today’s medical-industrial complex. 

However, we do have a duty to push back and, wherever possible, to seek for and provide alternatives for ourselves and for our children. Alternatives such as direct primary care, health sharing groups, and surgery centers. We are not without hope.

Surgery centers along with Direct Primary Care and Health Sharing Groups are options available to those who seek to return to a less “state-centered” medical approach

Ciudad Bolivar circa 2000