On the eve of the Washington March to be led this weekend by Dr. Robert Malone and other medical professionals, I decided to revisit the first lecture I attended by Leonard Peikoff, “Healthcare Is Not a Right.” The lecture was given in 1993, so it’s been a while. But recently I recalled a passage from that talk, one discussing the necessity of respecting the autonomy and independent judgment of physicians. Peikoff warned that this quality would be an early casualty of socialized medicine, and this was one reason (among many) that we should do whatever possible to prevent government from taking over medicine.
In recalling the passage, I wondered whether many of those whom I have considered intellectual allies also remembered it, and recognized its relevance to the treatment of many doctors over the last couple years. Doctors have had their hospital privileges suspended, medical licenses suspended—some have even been referred for psychiatric examination. Why? Because they dared to treat their COVID patients with off-label prescription drugs such as ivermectin or hydroxychloroquine and, after they were convinced of the drugs’ therapeutic value, promoted treatment protocols including such drugs (often along with readily available supplements). Time will tell as to whether I am correct, but I tend to agree with those who say we are seeing deliberate suppression of inexpensive, effective, readily available treatments for COVID-19, at the behest of Big Pharma and their cronies in various government agencies. The problem isn’t so much socialism, as it is fascism and cronyism. (CronyCare)
It turns out I had forgotten that the passage in question was actually taken from an earlier lecture Peikoff gave in 1985, “Medicine: The Death of a Profession.” (He was even more prescient than I thought!) Here’s the key passage:
In medicine, above all, the mind must be left free. Medical treatment, as I have said, involves countless variables and options that must be taken into account, weighed, and summed up by the doctor’s mind and subconscious. Your life depends on the private, inner essence of the doctor’s function: it depends on the input that enters his brain, and on the processing such input receives from him.
What is being thrust now into the equation? It is not only objective medical facts any longer. Today, in one form or another, the following also has to enter that brain: ‘The DRG administrator will raise hell if I operate, but the malpractice attorney will have a field day if I don’t — and my rival down the street, who heads the local PRO, favors a CAT scan in these cases, I can’t afford to antagonize him, but the CON boys disagree and they won’t authorize a CAT scanner for our hospital — and besides the FDA prohibits the drug I should be prescribing, even though it is widely used in Europe, and the IRS might not allow the patient a tax deduction for it, anyhow, and I can’t get a specialist’s advice because the latest Medicare rules prohibit a consultation with this diagnosis, and maybe I shouldn’t even take this patient, he’s so sick — after all, some doctors are manipulating their slate of patients, they accept only the healthiest ones, so their average costs are coming in lower than mine, and it looks bad for my staff privileges…’ Would you like your case to be treated this way — by a doctor who takes into account your objective medical needs and the contradictory, unintelligible demands of ninety-nine different government agencies and lawyer squads? If you were a doctor, could you comply with all of it? Could you plan for or work around or deal with the unknowable? But how could you not? Those agencies and squads are real, and they are rapidly gaining total power over you and your mind and your patients.
In this kind of nightmare world, if and when it takes hold fully, thought is helpless; no one can decide by rational means what to do. A doctor either obeys the loudest authority; or he tries to sneak by unnoticed, bootlegging some good health care occasionally; or he gives up and quits the field.
The main differences between the socialized system that Peikoff imagined and the fascist CronyCare system we’ve ended up with are: (1) an apparent preference for the more expensive therapies over the cheaper, and (2) the doctors exhibiting autonomy, independent judgment and integrity aren’t quitting, but instead are being forced out of the profession.
Will the Washington March, led by our country’s bravest doctors, be Medicine’s last stand? Not if we support them.
Medicine's Last Stand?
Leonard nailed it
Of course I agree with this statement there is no way that a body or a community of people can be responsible for anyone. One must except responsibility for one’s own family we cannot be responsible for the whole world. This is simply a fact it is something that is unavoidable in society. We must take care of our own and promote a healthy atmosphere for our own. If we would make it man’s responsibility to take care of every person on the face of the planet we would be doomed. God tells us I might add in all religions which ever God you adhere to tells us a man who does not work and adheres to evil shall not prosper. I refer Muslim Buddhist Christian Hindu all faiths. Anyway socialize medicine kills people plain and simple