X-TREME Rant

…and other X-TREMities

Another strain of rant, that I bludgen into all those around me whether they want to hear it or not, concerns the extortionate and self-aggrandizing nature of our health care system. Outside of the whitecoat, I have been diagnosed with an untreatable ailment, that has been so eloquently named “nutcracker esoghagus”, for which I have been instructed to consult my gastroeternologist on a regular basis. Inside the coat, I’m employed as a research assistant; a job that affords me frequent contact with MDs who conduct research and provide clinical care. Through my exposure to modern medicine, both as a patient–one who is supposed to benefit from MD expertise — and as a researcher — one who labors to qualify and verify that expertise — I’ve noticed a disparity between the superhuman, supremely competent personae that MDs are taught to assume in front of their patients, and the true extent of their knowledge and ability.

Keep in mind that I am merely ‘scientifically’, as opposed to ‘medically’, trained. Ungrounded or not, by our society’s valuation, the medical profession outranks us hard science folks in the hierachy of of esteemed occupations (as if modern medicine would have progressed much beyond bloodletting without physical science). Be that as it may, I still think that my opinion has merit because my background lacks all the ego-driven posturing bullshit that is crucial in the making of a “good doctor” – that is, I was actually encouraged to express the limits of my knowledge and punished if I made a claim I could not justify.

Rather that shooting my mouth off more than I already have, I would like to share with the reader an excerpt from Howard Bloom’s The Lucifer Principle. It’s nice to know that there is an author out there whose skepticism of modern medicine far surpasses even my own. Too bad Howie couldn’t contain his racism later on in the book; I might have actually taken his rants seriously. Anyway, enjoy:

In the Nilgiri hills of India, shortly before the Europeans came, there lived four tribes. One tribe, the Badaga, were farmers. Another, the Kota, were craftsmen. A third, the Toda were herdsmen. And the fourth, the Kurumba, made and raised almost nothing at all. The Badaga, Kota, Toda, and Kurumba lived together in delicate harmony, each supplying a vital something that the other three needed and paying for the indispensable products of its neighbors with its own handiwork. But there was one form of merchandise for which the Badaga, the Kota, and the Toda were willing to pay far more than for any of the others. Sometimes their need for this single good mounted to the level of hysterical panic; yet to us this commodity might seem the least essential of them all… …Of all four tribes, the one with the greatest economic power was the Kurumba. Living in the jungle, the Kurumba did not raise wheat, did not make household utensils, and did not provide any meat. They never even set forth to sell their wares; yet the work they offered brought the Kota craft folk trekking through the dense foliage to the Kurumba village, begging for a service that was totally intangible, one whose value cannot even be proven to exist. The Kurumba were sorcerers.

The Kota utensil makers paid regular insurance to these forest magicians. After all, the Kurumba spell weavers controlled the dark forces that could snatch you in the middle of the night and bring you down with dropsy, epilepsy, or sleeping sickness. In his classic book Economic Anthropology, Melville J. Herskvists writes:

The Kurumba exacted all the market would bear, and on occasion their demands were anything but modest. When a Kota fell ill, for example, his relatives, indicating how they had been regular and generous in sending gifts to their Kurumba worker of magic, would complain that he had not fulfilled his part of the agreement to keep them from harm. The customary reply would be that some especially powerful Kurumba sorcerer had been insulted by a Kota, or had become envious of their good fortune, and was therefore sending unusually strong magic against his victim. Only sustained effort, to be called forth by the giving of extra gifts, might counteract this influence; and since there was no other recourse, the Kota would have to give more and more lavishly.

Since nature endows the body with vast arsenals for self-defense, the majority of the Kurumba necromancers’ clients recovered. Occasionally, however, one succumbed. When a relative died, the furious Kota artisan family did not ask for their money back. Nor did they complain that the sorcery of their jungle neighbors was a fraud. Far from it. The Kurumba ‘protector’ was offered sympathy for having had to grapple with so powerful an adversary.

Later on, Bloom continues:

How backward these Kota villagers were, you may very well say. What strange nonsense preyed on their primitive minds. How fortunate we are that in our modern age few of us are this gullible. But we are.

Like the Kurumba sorcerers, modern doctors sell the illusion of control. Often when you describe your symptoms to your M.D., he gives you an indifferent look, as if no such problem exists. You are not the only one your doctor treats this way… A doctor does not generally confess ignorance. He is selling the illusion of omnipotence: the illusion that through consulting him you gain control over your body, the same illusion sold by the sorcerers in of India.

Harsh, but not without some truth.