Medicine

Hippocrates, ancient Greek physician who lived during Greece's Classical period is traditionally regarded as the father of modern medicine, which is based on observation of clinical signs and rational conclusions, and does not rely on religious or magical beliefs.

The Hippocratic Oath contains the Pythagorean duties of justice, secrecy, respect for teachers and solidarity with peers. The clinical and ethical basics of medical practice as well as most clinical terms used even today have their origins in Hippocrates. His contribution in clinical medicine is immense.

As the founder of the Methodic School, Asclepiades was the first known physician who spoke about what is known today as molecular medicine. ¹⁾

AMA Archive 1860 History of Medicine in America p22 “It was not until 1760 that the General Assembly of New York ordained that “no person whatsoever should practice as physician or surgeon, in the city of New York, before he shall have been examined on physic and surgery, and approved of and admitted by one of His Majesty's Council, the Judges of the Supreme Court, the King's Attorney General and the Mayor of the city of New York for the time being, or by any three or more of them taking to their assistance for such examination, such proper person or persons as they in their discretion shall see fit” ²⁾

• The American Medical Association

Evidence-Based Medicine (EBM) has been described as, “the conscientious, explicity and judicious use of current best evidence in making decisions in making decisions about the care of individual patients.”³⁾ It is entirely unclear from this and other decisions how this distinguishes EBM from “medicine” most generally given that even that initially self-described anti-scientific schools of medicine (such as chiropractic medicine) have generally grown to be inclusive of scientific observation. It is more likely that EBM expresses a certain level of deference toward political institutions that use science as a banner of supremacism.

“Evidence based medicine has been corrupted by corporate interests, failed regulation, and commercialisation of academia, argue these authors

The advent of evidence based medicine was a paradigm shift intended to provide a solid scientific foundation for medicine. The validity of this new paradigm, however, depends on reliable data from clinical trials, most of which are conducted by the pharmaceutical industry and reported in the names of senior academics. The release into the public domain of previously confidential pharmaceutical industry documents has given the medical community valuable insight into the degree to which industry sponsored clinical trials are misrepresented.1234 Until this problem is corrected, evidence based medicine will remain an illusion.”⁴⁾

Our historiographical research in this paper is based on an analysis of Flexner's Medical Education in the United States and Canada: A Report to the Carnegie Foundation for the Advancement of Teaching (1910) and the available secondary scholarly, medical, and psychiatric literature on the subject.

By way of an introduction, textbooks and journal articles on Complementary and Alternative Medicine and Psychiatry are also briefly discussed. Finally, we will scrutinize gray literature and pamphlets published by both the American National Institutes of Health NIH and the Canadian Institutes of Health Research CIHR, as these pertained to the relationship between the biomedical paradigm and CAM-related approaches after the publication of the Flexner Report and, in particular, the inclusion of complementary and alternative therapies and approaches in psychiatry during the second half of the 20th century. This perspective will allow the impact of the Flexner Report to be placed within a contemporary context and its long-lasting effects analyzed.

The Period Ensuing from the Flexner Report from 1910s to 1940s

The decades following the publication of the Flexner Report witnessed considerable pressure on all nontraditional forms of medical and health care training, which would nowadays be associated with CAM, as “a group of diverse medical and health care systems, practices, and products that are not presently considered to be part of conventional medicine” [14]. In his report, Flexner had made the following claims about the new “standardization” of American medical education. ⁵⁾

Logically, no other outcome is possible. The ebbing vitality of homeopathic [medical] schools is a striking demonstration of the incompatibility of science and dogma. […] Science, once embraced, will conquer the whole. Homeopathy has two options: one to withdraw into the isolation in which alone any peculiar tenet can maintain itself; the other to put that tenet into the melting-pot. Historically it undoubtedly played an important part in discrediting empirical allopathy. But laboratories of physiology and pharmacology are now doing that work far more effectively than homeopathy; and they are at the same time performing a constructive task for which homeopathy, as such, is unfitted. It will be clear, then, why, when outlining a system of schools for the training of physicians on scientific lines, no specific provision is made for homeopathy. […] “A new school of [medical] practitioners has arisen,” says Dr. [William] Osler, “which cares nothing for homeopathy […]. (The original text can be found in: Flexner, 1910

The True History of Deceit Within the Rise of Western Medicine The Last American Vagabond ~ Posted on March 3, 2016 ~ Author Ryan Cristián

In the early years of the American empire, when there was still a free market in the medical field, there were many thriving homeopathic hospitals and medical colleges. Over a century ago the Carnegie and Rockefeller foundations decided to engineer the medical curriculum through their grants and donations to the many different medical schools they deemed could be profitable for their associated businesses. As they have done with most facets of American society, they decided that they would reform medical education in America to suit their financial desires.

There were many different types of medical schools from homeopathic and herbal, to what we know today as modern western medicine. The Rockefeller and Carnegie foundations sought to patent the petrochemical medical education as the sole practice in the United States. The natural health colleges were not pushing enough chemical drugs, and those drugs were primarily owned by the Carnegies and the Rockefellers.

So out came the authorized preordained Flexner Report, funded by the two foundations, that called on American medical schools to enact higher admission and graduation standards, and in so many words, stated that it was far too easy to open a medical school. This report was used to shift from holistic to pharmaceutical practice. The American Medical Association, who were evaluating the various medical colleges, made it their job to target and shut down the larger more respected homeopathic medical colleges. Carnegie and Rockefeller began to immediately shower hundreds of millions of dollars on the medical schools that focused on teaching drug intensive medicine. ⁶⁾

• Medical Research
• Medical Schools
• Pharmaceutical Industry