A story recently turned up in the Orlando Sentinel that describes a urologist in that area who has posted a sign on his door that attempts to turn away from medical care in that practice anyone who voted for Obama or supports his health care reform. The story goes on to describe the ethical dereliction that this piece of professional arrogance represents. I suggest that if there are any firefighters in that area who disagree with the good doctor they should refrain from putting out any fires at his home. The pathologically anti-social nature of the sign on his door should deter anyone with any sense from putting themselves in the hands of such an ethical monster.
Unfortunately, the medical establishment in this country has been heavily colonized by this kind of sensibility. There is an interesting work by E. Richard Brown entitled Rockefeller Medicine Men: Medicine and Capitalism in America which provides an excellent introduction to the impact that both medicine has had on capitalism and vice-versa. (It should be noted that the entire work can be downloaded on the Internet at the site which has been hot-buttoned). There is little doubt that medicine as practiced in this country has been an auxiliary to the Fordist and Taylorist practices that have until recently organized the time, minds, bodies of the great masses of American humanity. In return for their faithful service, physicians have received an almost sacred status and the highest medical salaries in the world, although the impact of medical care on gross measures of health do not bear out any great return from all this expense.
It is high time that Americans freed themselves from mystifications of all kinds, but a good start would be the professional mystifications that abound in almost every area of life. Medical mystifications are some of the most durable, most resistant to being dispelled. This is not difficult to understand because we are all wary of criticizing the very people upon whom we rely for the maintenance of our health and the health of our loved ones. Thus, it becomes doubly important that the individuals who operate within that arena of activity, the medical/health care arena, do so on the most disinterested basis that can be arranged. Those who aspire to practice medicine must bring with them a strong sense of social responsibility as well as a basic humanity that transcends politics or economics. Physicians whose lives are taken up with entirely venal considerations are no better than priests who abuse the worshippers in their charge.
But our civilization has given itself over to the idea that we should recognize self-interest as the only worthy motive of action and competition as the engine providing the organizing principle of human relations. The result of this has been the perversion of human values and the transformation of American society into a version of ultimate cage fighting. Winning is everything and your opponent is an object to be eliminated in the pursuit of your goals. Religion, morality, education and even medicine, all these institutions are insidiously transformed to support this shift in values. In fact, there are some who would replace the book held by the Statue of Liberty that has carved into it “July 4, 1776” with something similar to the sign on the doctor’s door: Stay Out – Survival of the Fittest Rules!
