Modern doctors sell the illusion of control. Often when you describe your symptoms to your MD, he gives you an indifferent look, as if no such problem exists. The hospital staff is contented with a half truth. The investigation of the patient is decidedly unscientific in that it stops short of even an attempt to determine the real cause of the symptoms. As soon as an organic disease is excluded, the whole problem is given up.
Doctors generally do not confess ignorance. He is selling the illusion of omnipotence: the illusion that through consulting him you gain control over your body.
Occasionally your physician changes tactics. He gives you a name for your problem but no cure. The name alone makes you feel you have a problem your doctor can control. Or the doctor gives you a prescription. Often it is simply for an anti-inflammatory drug, an imitation aspirin. In most cases, an anti-inflammatory agent will not cure you; but it may provide a momentary relief from a symptom, and it could produce placebo effect.
The doctor may send you to the hospital for tests. The tests – and the elaborate equipment used to administer them – are frequently part of a show designed to enhance the illusion of a vast technology providing the doctor with control.
As long as the medical industry is run as a business, as long as profit is one of the goals, doctors will continue to sell the illusion of control.
The health care reform the president is proposing is good, but it is only a start.
You want to continue to live in the illusion? It is your choice.
Reference:
The Lucifer principle: a scientific expedition into the forces of history
By Howard K. Bloom
