Free Thoughts About Captive Medicine: In Defence of Hippocrates

By Thomas Doctor

Everyone, wherever he or she lives, is affected by the health care system and medicine. Have you ever thought how the decisions made by politicians affect you? How they may, one day, change your life? There is no such thing as freedom without free medicine. There is an increasing desire for political control in our hospitals. This limits our freedom, and without our knowing it, will come to change our lives. Hippocrates was a physician in Ancient Greeces Classical period who stood for freedom and patients rights in medicine. By defending him, we are defending ourselves. By becoming aware of the issues we face in today's medicine, we are enabling ourselves to guard and stand up for our own freedom. This book explores those key problems and offers solutions for how to overcome them.

• Language: English
• Publisher: AuthorHouse UK
• Release date: Oct 2, 2013
• ISBN: 9781481775731

Thomas Doctor

Thomas Doctor is a Polish cardiologist from Warsaw who has lived with his family and worked in the UK since Poland joined the European Union. Before this, Doctor practised clinical cardiac electrophysiology in Academic Hospital in Maastricht. He supports the idea of free-market medicine and disagrees with politically controlled medicine by defending the Hippocratic Oath in his book.

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FREE THOUGHTS

ABOUT

CAPTIVE MEDICINE

IN DEFENCE OF HIPPOCRATES

THOMAS DOCTOR

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© 2013 by Thomas Doctor. All rights reserved.

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Published by AuthorHouse 09/25/2013

ISBN: 978-1-4817-7572-4 (sc)

ISBN: 978-1-4817-7573-1 (e)

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Contents

AUTHOR’S NOTE

PREFACE

INTRODUCTION

This book is an intellectual confrontation of life and medical experiences in Great Britain, and Christian ethics in medicine.

Thomas Doctor is a Polish cardiologist

In defence of Hippocrates

AUTHOR’S NOTE

WHY DID I WRITE THIS BOOK?

Not long ago I had to pay my British General Medical Council (GMC) payments and my Polish GMC payments and my city council tax. At that time, few of the population had voted for prosperity; the majority had voted for austerity. It was the time of ‘the cuts’. I didn’t have enough money to take my wife and children for a winter holiday and to spend Christmas skiing in Courchevel in France as we had planned. We had to stay at our English home. The weather was bad—rain, rain, and rain, and no snow. I decided to make lemonade from those lemons. During my winter holiday I would defend Hippocrates; and during the Christmas holiday I would popularize love. The idea of the book was clear: ‘France avance!’ (This was battle cry of the Polish Chevau-légers.)

What, at that time, was happening in Poland? Fighting as usual! Groups of Poles fought against the ‘Imperium of Evil’—socialism and a socialistic health care system. It was a continuation of the fight of Polish writer Joseph Conrad, a resident of England, with ‘Imperium of Evil’ in human heart. The art of fighting and overcoming evil with good is difficult but if you don’t fight against evil, you participate in evil. A book is a good way to share understanding and solve problems with good will. This book is good. Buy it! Read it! Overcome evil! ‘Veni, vidi, vici,’ said Julius Caesar (I came, I saw, I conquered). ‘I bought it, I read it, and I overcame evil,’ said first reader of this book. Hippocrates is victorious!

Thomas Doctor

Christmas 2012 through Easter 2013

PREFACE

HOW AND WHY CAN WE ORGANIZE FREE MEDICINE?

That is a good question: How do we keep freedom in health services? These are some rules: Protect the rights of property owners, protect the freedom of movement of labour, protect the freedom of movement of capital, protect the freedom of movement of goods, and maintain an absence of coercion and an absence of constraint. There are two regulation tools in a free economy: free prices, which controls purchase in a free market, and free bankruptcy, which controls free enterprise.

A free market in medicine is an apolitical market, and a controlled market in medicine is a political market. Socialism is a spiral of evil: theft, lies, and killing. Socialism is theft. ‘Socialism or death’ is a famous Fidel Castro slogan. Doctors fight against death. Socialism means control and redistribution. Control is opposite to freedom. Why do people give back their freedom? Is it because freedom is a responsibility? People are afraid of responsibility. People are afraid to take responsibility for their lives. People want to forfeit their responsibility and give it to others. Responsibility is love, too, but responsibility for others. If people don’t love their lives enough to take on the burden of responsibility themselves, why do they think that others who are willing to take on the burden of responsibility would make the best decisions for them? Do they really believe that politicians love them well? Without freedom, responsibility, and love, we have existence, not life. People should take responsibility more seriously; it should be more popular among people. Life is a very individual value. It is not experienced collectively. Life belongs to an individual person not to the collective. Down with Bolshevism in medicine! Collectivization of life is Bolshevism. The power of a collective over individuals means slavery, captive minds, and captive medicine.

The sin of omission together with evil elements in the human soul enslaves and cause remorse as symptoms of disease appear. The human person, from his deep nature, wants to be good, but in his soul is evil—a ‘darkness of the heart’—that, being released, enslaves and destroys him, leading to death. Don’t allow evil to enslave you. Overcome evil with good. Free markets and a desire for profit work, and in effect give good results for all. This ‘evil’ desire for profit is the power that drives human effort and work. Work gives products—commodities—that end up on shop shelves. Capitalism means full shelves in every shop. Socialism doesn’t work; it means empty shelves. Release energy from people! Saint Thomas Becket’s bones may no longer lie in his grave, but his soul is marching on.

Do you remember the effects of the Corn Law of the nineteenth century? At around the same time in London, in the reading room of the British Museum, Karl Marx was composing his Communist Manifesto commissioned by socialist Engels. It was also at this time that Parliament passed a public health act. The tyranny of the majority can be painful. Do you remember effect of the Soviet Law of Three Spikelets? Yes, collectivization can be unhealthy. Man should be free from compulsion and free to operate in a free environment—and this includes every aspect of the medical field too. There is no argument against freedom!

Liberalism works! Let’s go work!

INTRODUCTION

Free medicine forever! Political medicine never! These are the questions: Shall we choose freedom or the loss of control of our health and lives? Which system is better? Which brings a bigger fount of plenty—an economy driven by a free market or one that is controlled? Which brings more founts of plenty? Free birth or controlled birth—which system delivers more children? What about the ‘one-child’ policy? This is ‘health policy’? In such a system, life and health do not belong to the individual; instead they become a political matter, which means that individuals’ values belong to politicians. When individual concerns of life and health are in the hands of politicians, politicians think of people in the collective, and individual concerns are not met. Free medicine forever! Collectivization never!

Free market is the only platform that guarantees personal political freedom and personal medical freedom. If there is no free medical market, patients are controlled and their lives and health are controlled. A free market is the only foundation for every kind of freedom. Any fight over a free market in any country is a fight about personal freedom in those areas. If patients are ill, they are weak, infirm, and much easier to control. To be truly free, patients should fight to be free in four main areas: spiritual, psychical, physical, and economical. If doctors are weak and not free in these areas, they can’t help their patients to be free in those areas either. There are no free patients without free doctors. There are no free doctors unless they have their own private consulting rooms. There are no free doctors unless they can follow the Hippocratic Oath. Hippocrates was a physician in Ancient Greece’s Classical period who stood for freedom of doctors and patients’ rights in medicine. The Hippocratic Oath comes from natural law; in order to be just, constituted law should be aligned with this natural law. Natural law exists in the human soul. Don’t be a slave—be free! We don’t need masters; we don’t want slaves. The fight about the Hippocratic Oath is a fight about the abolition of slavery. Sovietization of society is enslavement of society in all four areas. Total control over human beings is also total control over their souls. Captive soul, captive mind, captive body, captive money! Writers, humanists, and liberal politicians fight to save the human soul, and they are spiritual doctors.

Breaches of the Hippocratic Oath are the biggest crime and the original cause of evil in medicine. These breaches cause great problems between patients and their doctors. The Hippocratic Oath is a promise to practice medicine honestly. It has, for hundreds of years, been taken by doctors. It is an ancient, natural, civilized, and humanistic sacrament, which is taken in a solemn ceremony as a way to impress it as a true and deep and serious obligation. It is in the deepest interest of the patient and the doctor that we defend the Hippocratic Oath. Bringing back the Hippocratic Oath is the best remedy for evil in medicine, which has become a menace to civilization. The spirit of the Hippocratic Oath must prevail in medicine. Nobody can force doctors from their commitment to the Hippocratic Oath because their commitment is consequential to the doctors’ ego, the nature of medicine, and human natural rights. The ethos of Hippocratic Oath must prevail in medicine. The oath gives strength and encouragement to doctors to fight against death. We have to be faithful to the oath. We cannot consent to political medicine. Medicine must be free. The Hippocratic Oath is also a symbol like a Chariot of Fire or Uncle Sam.

The source of any suffering should be only that which is natural. The danger in the centralization of medicine and centralized planning is that they can cause unnatural suffering for patients. We risk invoking the symbol of ‘Uncle Joe’ Stalin if society substitutes individualism with any form of collectivism no matter what the motives. Socialist control of the medical market means that medicine is controlled by the power of politics. The problem in a planned and centralized system is that knowledge of all circumstances and issues, which doctors must make use of to make correct decisions, never exists in concentrated and integrated form. This knowledge is gathered and dispersed—and sometimes not dispersed—as bits of incomplete and frequently contradictory information from all the separate individuals involved. In reality, only experienced doctors are able to gather and analyze this knowledge after examining individual patients.