A Plea for Medicine That Deserves the Name
Medicine was meant to heal, to restore balance, to be a force that stood between human suffering and unnecessary death.
It was meant to be guided by wisdom, humility, and the deep ethical responsibility of primum non nocere—first, do no harm. But somewhere along the way, the system that was supposed to safeguard life became an industry, and the patient became a customer.
Austrian social critic Ivan Illich warned us decades ago that modern medicine was heading toward iatrogenesis—a system that no longer cures, but perpetuates illness for its own survival.
In Medical Nemesis, he argued that institutionalized medicine had overstepped its purpose, replacing traditional healing with a bureaucratic machine that profits from dependency. Instead of empowering people to understand their own health, it medicalized life itself, creating a world where being “healthy” is less about actual well-being and more about being trapped in a cycle of prescriptions and procedures.
Michel Foucault, too, saw it coming. His concept of biopower exposed how modern states use medical institutions not just to heal, but to control—defining what is normal, what is pathological, and who must submit to treatment.
The recent pandemic revealed how modern medicine, when fused with state power, can shift from healing to governing. Foucault warned that medicine could become a tool for political enforcement, regulating populations under the guise of care.
COVID proved him right: medical expertise was used not only to guide but to dictate, to moralize, to silence dissent.
The doctor’s authority, once grounded in empirical science and ethical duty, is now increasingly dictated by pharmaceutical interests, insurance companies, and political institutions.
We don’t just see this in medicine—we see it everywhere. But nowhere is the betrayal of trust more profound than in the realm of health, where the very essence of life is at stake.
This isn’t just a theoretical debate. It’s real. It’s the millions of people suffering from conditions that could be managed or even reversed if the right interventions were taken seriously.
It’s the patient who’s told that his options are a lifetime of symptom management or an expensive, invasive procedure—while the simplest, most effective solutions are dismissed as “off-label” or ignored altogether.
There are conditions with no gold standard cure—where the medical establishment offers the same limited options: symptom management, procedures with uncertain outcomes, and a lifetime of pharmaceuticals.
Patients are kept in the orbit of commercial medicine, following a script that never asks deeper questions about root causes. Instead of exploring metabolic factors, mitochondrial function, or promising alternatives, the conversation remains fixed on what is already routine.
Yet, those who step outside this script often find that the very solutions dismissed or ignored by mainstream medicine are quietly being used by doctors themselves.
This is about an entire way of thinking. Medicine should not be a business of managing disease—it should be a discipline of preventing it, understanding it, and healing it at its roots. But that requires something radical: the courage to break with the existing paradigm.
It is time to demand medicine that deserves the name. Medicine that is not ruled by the profit motive, but by the Hippocratic spirit.
Medicine that is not afraid to look beyond patents and protocols, but seeks the truth wherever it may be found. Medicine that does not see patients as passive recipients of treatment, but as partners in their own health.
Without this shift, we are merely spectators in a system that no longer serves life but profits from its dysfunction.
And that is not medicine. That is a betrayal of everything it was meant to be.