Transcription
The balance of medical power remained equal until the turn of the century. Then new medical treatments emerged that were potentially very profitable. The AMA joined with strong financial forces to transform medicine into an industry.
The fortunes of Carnegie, Morgan, and Rockefeller financed surgery, radiation, and synthetic drugs. They were to become the economic foundations of the new medical economy. The takeover of the medical industry was accomplished by the takeover of the medical schools. Well, the people that were talking about Rockefeller and Carnegie in particular came to the picture and said, "We will put up money." They offered tremendous amounts of money to the schools that would agree to cooperate with them. The donors said to the schools, "We, we're giving you all this money. Now, would it be too much to ask if we could put some of our people on your board of directors to see that our money is being spent wisely?"
Almost overnight, all of the major universities received large grants from these sources and also accepted one, two, or three of these people that I mentioned on their board of directors. And the schools literally were taken over by the financial interests that put up the money. Now, what happened as a result of that is that the school schools did receive, uh, an infusion of money. They were able to build new buildings. They were able to add expensive equipment to their laboratories. They were able to hire top-notch teachers. But at the same time, as doing that, they skewed the whole thing in the direction of pharmaceutical drugs. That was the efficiency in philanthropy. The doctors from that point forward in history would be taught pharmaceutical drugs. All of the great teaching institutions in America were captured by the pharmaceutical interests in this fashion, and it's amazing how little money it really took to do it.
Surgery became viable with anesthesia and infection control, and doctors advocated expensive, radical operations. These, in turn, produced the need for a large, lucrative hospital system. Radium fever swept medicine. The price of radium rose 1,000% almost overnight. Another costly technological industry entered the hospital system. A drug industry grew out of the booming patent medicine business. The doctors changed educational standards and licensing regulations to exclude the empirics. Soon, only AMA-approved doctors could legally practice medicine. In a brief 20 years, the AMA came to dominate medical practice. Organized medicine launched an immediate campaign to associate the empirics with quacks. The code word for competition was quackery.
So now the average doctor goes through school. He gets a great education. Uh, he has to be really smart to get through it. He learns all about drugs. He doesn't know too much about basic nutrition. I found that the average wife of these physicians knows more about nutrition than he does. But they sure know their drugs. And if you go to your typical doctor today, I don't care what it is, chances are you're going to walk out of there with a prescription. Why? Because that's what he has been trained to do.