Aug 12, 2009

The Medical-Industrial Complex

As he retired from office, Dwight Eisenhower imparted a scary warning about the “military-industrial complex”: an insidious merging of America’s security apparatus with private and corporate profiteers that gobbles up vast national resources while spewing waste and destruction in its wake. Though there’s long been much nodding in agreement with Ike’s assessment, nothing has slowed the growth or dimmed the power of the military-industrial complex.

In 1971, President Nixon declared a “war on cancer,” promising a cure within the decade. Nixon totally misunderstood the “enemy” and committed the nation to an endless war of attrition and frustration. Even worse, he committed vast amounts of wealth to the funding of the “medical-industrial complex” that, like its military counterpart, drains the public treasury while providing a too often unhealthy medical product.

These mammoth conglomerates share a number of traits:

they redirect huge portions of public tax dollars into the private pockets of the corporate overclass;
as major sponsors of politicians, they achieve oligarchic influence over key social issues;
through the shear size of their businesses and bureaucracies and the millions of jobs they represent, they become too important to question, too big to fail, too Byzantine to investigate, and too entrenched to change;
they attack mere symptoms of problems, while exacerbating root causes;
and through their determination to solve all problems via war-think they inflict inevitable terrors, great and small, on an already war-torn world.

The medical-industrial complex avoids softcare questions of individual immunity and natural healing while focusing our intellectual energies and research on defeating specific disease symptoms, battle by battle, with an increasingly complex array of medical weaponry. Rather than a peaceful investigation into the nature of wellness—How do some people manage to stay healthy without resorting to doctors or medicines?—we have chosen to wage war on the real and imagined agents of disease.

Since Nixon declared the War on Cancer, American medicine has fought an all-out crusade against a single disease, spending some $100 billion on research and more than a trillion on treatment. Yet, 1.2 million Americans receive new cancer diagnoses each year and 1500 die from cancer every day. A huge anticancer apparatus has been funded and erected — universities and teaching hospitals, research centers, biomedical laboratories and startup companies, much of the pharmaceutical industry, several major charities — all geared to the continuing search for a cancer cure, year after year, one breakthrough treatment after another, even as new cancer rates remain steady.

After more than thirty years on this painfully expensive quest, we still have little understanding of why cancer arises in one person but not another, or of why some people die from it while others live on. We have, however, waged one hell of a war.

Weapons of Cancerous Mass Destruction

Waging war requires weapons, the more lethal the better, and all weapons inflict collateral damages as a matter of course.

The two primary weapons in the War on Cancer — radiation and chemotherapy — attack cancer cells with military zeal, but produce terrible side effects and unintended consequences, sometimes worse than cancer itself. Both radiation and chemotherapy have especially toxic effects on the human immune system; such “remedies” undermine the very capacities for self-healing that patients most need. While the latest advances in cancer treatment strive for “magic bullets” that target only cancer cells, mostly sparing healthy tissue, even the best of these treatments fail to alter the systemic conditions that trigger cancerous growths in the first place.

With Us or Against Us

Waging war also requires a one-minded obedience to the commanding ideology.

Paradigm-challenging theories get brushed aside and dissenting opinions face active suppression. Throughout the War on Cancer, the medical-congressional-industrial complex has abused the powers of state and federal law enforcement to squelch innumerable alternative therapies. Serious doctors and medical researchers, often supported by a host of grateful patients, have been dismissed as quacks, jailed as charlatans, and driven out of the country as dangerous felons.

Though cancer-war authorities early on saw the wisdom of reducing tobacco use — its single-most life-saving “battle” to date — it was decades slower in accepting that diet might play a role in the genesis of the disease. To this day, the medical-congressional-industrial complex seems reluctant to acknowledge or even investigate the likely link between cancer and the rise of the petrochemical and nuclear industries in America. And even when, as we have seen since the mid-90s, the cancer warriors begrudgingly admit the effectiveness of some low-cost alternative therapies — especially diet and stress-reduction — it does nothing to stem the flow of dollars into the search for, production, and use of more exotic weapons.

Peace Is Dangerous

Above all, waging war demands the silencing of peaceful voices and a rigid avoidance of viable peace plans.

In the War on Cancer this has meant paying no heed to the countless well-documented cases of people who have recovered from cancer through alternative means. One would think that a single such story, let alone thousands, would propel researchers into fervent study. One could imagine cancer detectives excitedly seeking out a few hundred of these “once cancerous, now healthy” people to test their blood and examine their immune systems and to earnestly dissect their histories of recovery. One might even dream of a worldwide database filled with documented stories of cancer recoveries, and at every new cancer diagnosis the patient could be told, “Here’s several people just like you, who suffered just as you do now, and they fully healed, and here’s how they did it.”

Cancer warriors simply ignore these living bodies of potent evidence, while steadfastly denying the possibility of any better way than continuing down their battle-worn path.

The medical-industrial complex, like its military counterpart, will never bring us healing or peace. It functions as a wage-war machine — the very opposite of the healthcare system we urgently need.

Michael Sky | CommonHealth