In this Age of Bullshit Flying, it (IMO) is necessary to take Physicians off their never-to-be-questioned pedestals that they have enjoyed, and demote them to just another class of both reputationally as well as financially conflicted agents ultimately serving whoever “butters their bread” (Corporate Paymasters and/or The State). They are no more credible than any other “actors”. Much transpires outside of the public’s view.
Ewan developed a condition called hypersensitivity pneumonitis - something he was breathing in was setting off his immune system, with catastrophic consequences. “You get an over-exuberant inflammatory response and the lungs pay a price and develop respiratory failure,” Dr Bhatt said. … When scientists tested the two e-cigarette liquids Ewan had been using, they found one of them was triggering an immune reaction.
The way that an “allergic reaction” is tested for - where that phrase is actually defined (in medicine) as true “anaphylactic shock” (very serious) - is to pop a bit of the suspected “antigen” under one’s skin, a look for some kind of skin-tissue level sensitization. Hardly a precise art. When physicians are unsure, and political winds are blowing strongly this way or that, it is a rare physician (in privatized medicine, anyway) who will not feel great pressure to give those with social power and authority the “diagnosis that they so want to hear”.
How did they somehow extract the one (allegedly offending) substance from the patient’s e-juice (as seemingly implied) ? I highly doubt that they did. What substance might they - acting on guesses - have somehow administered to the patient, and how could they with certainty say that such was the substance that induced a (described as) “over-exuberant response” ? Why are their specific methods not identified ? There do exist certain immune-system-marker tests that they might possibly have performed. What were they ? What were the results. How do they substantiate stated diagnosis ? Who has reviewed their work ?
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Besides being his own agent, which of course the medical scientist or physician always is, and besides being an agent of his patient, which the physician is more and more rarely (hence the disenchantment with medical care among both physicians and patients despite the remarkable technical advances of medical science), the physician may be - and indeed often is - the agent of every conceivable social institution or group. It could hardly be otherwise. … the physician is enlisted, and has always been enlisted, to help some persons and to harm others - his injurious activities being defined, as we have already see in Plato’s Republic , as helping the state or some other institution. … physicians have through the ages not only helped some, usually those who supported the dominant social ethic, but also harmed others, usually those who opposed the dominant social ethic. … … the medical police were never intended to help the individual citizen or sick patient; instead, they were quite explicitly designed “to secure for the monarch and the state increased power and wealth.” …
… The principle moral decision for the physician who does not work in an ideal private-practice situation is choosing what organization or institution he shall work for; more than anything else, that will determine the sort of moral agent he can be to his patient and others. It follows from this that we should pay more attention than has been our habit to the ways institutions and organizations - whether the CIA or the United Nations or any other prestigious and powerful group - use medical knowledge and skills. …
… In general, we should regard the medical man, whether as investigator or practitioner, as the agent of the party that pays him and thus controls him; whether he helps or harms the so-called patient thus depends not so much on whether he is a good or bad man as on whether the function of the institution whose agent he is, is to help or harm the so-called patient. Insofar as the biologist or physician chooses to act as a scientist, he has an unqualified obligation to tell the truth; he cannot compromise that obligation without disqualifying himself as a scientist. In actual practice, only certain kinds of situations permit the medical man to fulfill such an unqualified obligation to truth telling. Insofar as the biologist or physician chooses to act as a social engineer, he is an agent of the particular moral and political values he espouses and tries to realize or of those his employer espouses and tries to realize. …
The biologist’s or physician’s claim that he represents disinterested abstract values - such as mankind, health, treatment - should be disallowed; and his efforts to balance, and his claim to represent, multiple conflicting interests … should be exposed for what they conceal, perhaps his secret loyalty to one of the conflicting parties or his cynical rejection of the interests of both parties in favor of his own self-aggrandizement.
“The Theology of Medicine: The Political-philosophical Foundations of Medical Ethics”;
Thomas Szasz, Professor Emeritus of Psychiatry, State University of New York.
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… the paradigm of religious authority under priests has been replaced by the paradigm of quasi-religious authority of doctors over patients. Instead of dazzling peasants with Latin phrases and convoluted creeds as did the priests of yore, doctors now dazzle their patients with abstruse medical terminology and jargon. The result is that very few people have thought to question the authority of the new state-sponsored religion of medicine.