By Gary G. Kohls, MD
In this two-part series, Dr. Kohls explores how the intersection of big business and the pharmaceutical, vaccine and medical device corporations have come to rule the healthcare industry. Part one of the series appeared in the October issue of Westview.
The Big Pharma propaganda campaigns are much more potent today than in the days before my retirement from my medical practice a decade ago. At least back then there were no drugs (oral or injectable) that cost tens of thousands of dollars per year. Now there are dozens and dozens of drugs that can cost $60,000 to $120,000 per year! Even wealthy patients would refuse to pay out of pocket for such drugs, so insurance companies are being forced to raise premium rates dramatically. And the sociopaths in Big Pharma and Big Vaccine feel no guilt. It is just the way business is done.
What pains me the most is witnessing the huge influence that the massive propaganda campaigns have over both the prescribers of the risky drugs and vaccines and the patients of those prescribers, despite the vast and valid scientific information that is never advertised or even written about in the mainstream media, which relies on ad dollars from Big Pharma and Big Vaccine.
Giving short shrift to the informed consent principle is legal nowadays, for there is another principle called the “Community Standard of Care,” which is a legal principle that has nothing to do with medical ethics. I don’t recall being taught about it when I went to med school. Below is one definition of “standard of care” as cited by Canada’s Center for Research on Globalization:
“In legal terms, (standard of care is) the level at which the average, prudent medical provider in a given community would practice. It is how similarly qualified practitioners would have managed the patient’s care under the same or similar circumstances. The medical malpractice plaintiff must establish the appropriate standard of care and demonstrate that the standard of care has been breached.”
In other words, the standard of care in one community could be considered malpractice in another community depending on what is considered normal or average. So, an injured patient-victim of malpractice in one community couldn’t sue for malpractice if the “guilty” physician was practicing in a way that was considered normal or average in that community.
Corrupt capitalist principles—including the need for the individual physician to be highly “efficient” and “profitable” and “quick”—have gradually taken over the once honorable practice of medicine. Fulfilling the Fully Informed Consent principle is too time-consuming to be fulfilled when there are dozens of potential adverse effects from every drug or vaccine that should be explained in detail to the patient. Those adverse effects include immediate reactions; delayed reactions (which are often not recognized, and even illogically and diabolically denied by the physician); permanent disability; and even death.
Physicians employed by large healthcare corporations are rarely allowed the valuable time to explain to the patient about the many potential adverse events, so physicians and nurses have been told by their corporate rulers to just mention a handful of the problems. Giving short shrift to fully informing patients of side effects and then obtaining informed consent (signed or unsigned) from the patient has now evolved into what is a new standard of care in most communities.
Essentially all Big Healthcare, Big Pharmaceutical and Big Vaccine Corporations are now managed by non-physicians who have Masters of Business Administration (MBA) degrees and are competent enough and sociopathic enough to guiltlessly manage gambling casinos, for-profit penitentiaries, hedge funds or any other questionably ethical corporations, for all MBAs know how to milk the system in favor of their bottom line and their investors, ethics be damned.
Following are a number of quotes that refer to the ethical problems and even the criminal activities of medical-related corporations that have taken control over what once were ethical endeavors.
Let the prescriber and the patients of the prescribers beware.
Dr. Kohls is a retired family physician from Duluth, MN. Since his retirement from his holistic mental health practice, he has been writing his weekly Duty to Warn column for the Duluth Reader, northeast Minnesota’s alternative newsweekly magazine. His columns deal with the dangers of American fascism, corporatism, militarism, racism, malnutrition, Big Pharma’s over-drugging and Big Vaccine’s over-vaccination agendas, as well as other movements that threaten human health, the environment, democracy, civility and the sustainability of all life on earth.
“The corporation is a true Frankenstein’s monster—an artificial person run amok, responsible only to its own soulless self… representing capitalism at its very purest, completely unconcerned with anything save profit and power.”
— William Dugger
Author of Corporate Hegemony“The medical profession is being bought by the pharmaceutical (and vaccine) industry, not only in terms of the practice of medicine, but also in terms of teaching and research. The academic institutions of this country are allowing themselves to be the paid agents of the pharmaceutical industry. I think it’s disgraceful.”
—Arnold Seymour Relman, MD(1923-2014), Harvard Professor of Medicine and former Editor-in-Chief of the New England Journal of Medicine
“The case against (corporate) science is straightforward: much of the scientific (and medical) literature, perhaps half, may simply be untrue. Afflicted by studies with small sample sizes, tiny effects, invalid exploratory analyses, and flagrant conflicts of interest, together with an obsession for pursuing fashionable trends of dubious importance, science has taken a turn towards darkness.”
—Richard Horton, MD
Editor-in-Chief of the highly esteemed
British medical journal The Lancet“The transcripts of the Joint Committee on Vaccination and Immunization (JCVI) meetings also show that some of the Committee members had extensive ties to pharmaceutical companies and that the JCVI frequently co-operated with vaccine manufacturers on the strategies aimed at boosting vaccine uptake. Some of the meetings at which such controversial items were discussed were not intended to be publicly available, as the transcripts were only released later, through the Freedom of Information Act (FOIA). These particular meetings are denoted in the transcripts as “commercial in confidence,” and reveal a clear and disturbing lack of transparency, as some of the information was removed from the text (i.e., the names of the participants) prior to transcript release under the FOI section at the JCVI website.”
— Lucija Tomljenovic, PhD
