Doctors Are Dangerous

An Essay on the First Leading Cause of Death

Author’s Note: The framing of prescription drugs as the third leading cause of death, associated with Peter Gøtzsche and Barbara Starfield, is treated here as an underestimate. When heart disease and cancer are themselves largely produced by the same profession’s pharmaceutical and dietary framework, ranking the profession third against its own products misses the arithmetic. The essay does not argue that individual doctors are malicious. It argues that the training installed by the 1910 Flexner Report was an inversion of what heals, that the Rockefeller and Carnegie foundations exported that training globally, and that a century of it has produced the epidemic of chronic disease now called the natural burden of modern life.

The essay operates in two registers. When examining establishment evidence against itself, establishment terminology appears. When stating the author’s own analytical position, terrain language governs.

This essay discusses medical topics for informational purposes. It is not medical advice.

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The Prosecution

Sarah Myhill has been investigated by the United Kingdom’s General Medical Council more than thirty times across two decades, more than any doctor in the Council’s history.¹ Not one of the complaints came from her own patients. Every complaint came from other medical professionals and regulatory officials. At the 2010 interim hearing, over 800 patient support letters were submitted alongside a petition with 3,615 signatures. Tom Kark, the Queen’s Counsel acting for the government’s prosecution, described the difficulty of the case in plain terms: the problem with the Myhill cases, he said, was that all the patients had improved and all refused to give witness statements.

The prosecution’s complaint was that her patients got better.

Her practice addresses cellular metabolism through nutritional support and toxin removal. Her patients improve. Her regulator has spent twenty years trying to stop her.

What kind of medical profession prosecutes its healers? A profession whose training was designed to do the opposite of what heals. That training runs across the lifespan of every person the profession treats, from injection in infancy to intubation in the ICU at eighty-three, and it has produced the epidemic of chronic disease now called the natural burden of modern life. The pattern operates in London, Sydney, Toronto, Berlin, Tokyo, and São Paulo because the training that produces it was standardized globally from a single source.

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The Kitchen Table

A child has a fever of 102.4. The parent reaches for the cabinet, measures a dose from the red and white bottle, and delivers it to the child’s mouth. The doctor’s advice at the last checkup was clear: bring the fever down.

The child’s body raised the temperature to accelerate metabolic clearing. Higher body heat speeds the enzymatic processes that break down and eliminate whatever the terrain is discarding. The fever is the operation. The intervention interrupts it. The doctor did not fail to know this. The doctor was trained to do the opposite.

The inversion is not confined to fever. It structures every intervention the doctor will offer. The body cleanses through fever, discharge, inflammation, diarrhea, skin eruption; training teaches suppression of each. The body signals distress through cholesterol, glucose, blood pressure; training teaches blocking the signals. The body’s operations and the doctor’s interventions map onto each other with the precision of a mirror.

The pattern was installed deliberately and runs across the lifespan of every person the doctor will treat. The evidence assembles across five thresholds: birth, childhood, adult screening, chronic illness, and death. Applied at scale, this training produces harm at scale. The scale is now planetary.

Joy Garner’s Control Group Survey, conducted in the United States because the American vaccine exemption structure was one of the few environments in the industrialized world where a large fully unvaccinated cohort could still be found, established chronic disease in the fully unvaccinated adult population at 2.64 percent. In the vaccinated it runs at 60 percent.² Standard attributable-fraction methodology assigns 95.6 percent of chronic disease in the vaccinated population to vaccination itself.³ Cancer, heart disease, and the diagnoses that account for the majority of deaths across the industrialized world are conditions Garner counted.

This is the arithmetic behind the essay’s subtitle. Heart disease is ranked first among causes of death in every industrialized country. Cancer is second. Prescription drugs are ranked third by Peter Gøtzsche and Barbara Starfield. The ranking treats the first two categories as phenomena the doctor arrived to treat. They are not. The cholesterol hypothesis that produced the statin era, the seed oil epidemic, and the sugar substitution was invented and sustained by the same profession, and exported through the WHO and every major national dietary guideline body.⁴ The injected substrate from childhood, the screening cascades that route the healthy into oncology pipelines, and the suppression of acute clearing across the adult lifespan produce much of what is later counted as cancer. When the top two categories on the mortality list are themselves iatrogenic, ranking iatrogenic third makes no arithmetic sense. The profession is not the third leading cause of death. It is the first.

Not About Bad People

Most doctors entered medicine because they wanted to help. The individual doctor is not the argument. What was installed in the individual doctor is the argument.

The system runs on convergent opportunism, not coordination. The physician, the researcher, the regulator, the journal editor, the medical school department chair — each pursues rational self-interest within a structure whose maintenance no single actor is responsible for. Upton Sinclair named the local mechanism: a man does not understand what his salary depends on not understanding.⁵ Applied across a profession of a million practitioners, that mechanism produces a system that behaves as if it were coordinated while requiring no coordinator.

There is a category of medical practice this argument does not address: acute trauma care. Broken femurs need setting, gunshot wounds need pressure and sutures, genuine appendicitis needs surgery. These interventions support the body’s repair rather than opposing it, and this is what a critic means by “doctors save lives every day.” They do. The concern here is the other category — the management of chronic illness and the maintenance of ostensibly healthy people through screening, prescription, and intervention. This is the majority of what modern medicine does, and the majority of what it earns.

The life expectancy objection runs like this: populations in the industrialized world lived to roughly 47 in 1900 and to the high seventies today, and medicine is given the credit. The arithmetic does not support it. Most of the increase was compression at the bottom — the reduction of infant and childhood mortality, which the data traces to sanitation, nutrition, and clean water rather than to medical intervention. Life expectancy at age 65 has moved much less: from 76 in 1900 to about 85 today. American life expectancy has been declining since 2014.⁶ British, Australian, and continental European life expectancy has stagnated or reversed across the same period. Cardiovascular disease, overdose, and metabolic collapse are the categories driving the decline — domains the profession has managed with confidence for decades.

The Installation

Ignaz Semmelweis noticed in 1847 that women whose babies were delivered by doctors died at rates several times higher than women whose babies were delivered by midwives. The doctors moved between autopsies and deliveries without washing their hands. He proposed the connection and required his students to wash with chlorinated lime. Deaths in his ward fell dramatically.⁷ His colleagues rejected the finding. He was driven from his position, committed to an asylum, and died there at forty-seven, beaten by guards, according to his autopsy. A century later, Bernard Lown challenged the strict-bedrest dogma for heart attack patients and let his patients sit up in a chair at the end of the bed. His colleagues met him on the ward with Nazi salutes, chanting “Heil Hitler” at a Jewish physician for suggesting that his patients need not lie motionless for six weeks. Strict bedrest is now understood to have killed tens of millions of people worldwide. The man who challenged it received the salute.⁵ Medicine has a documented history of destroying the practitioners who correctly identify iatrogenic harm.

The mechanism that produced modern medicine’s training is documented. In 1910, Abraham Flexner, funded by the Carnegie and Rockefeller foundations, published a report evaluating American medical schools.⁸ Within two decades, the number of American medical schools fell from 162 to 66.⁹ Schools teaching homeopathy, naturopathy, and terrain-based approaches were closed. The surviving schools adopted the curriculum the foundations had specified. Rockefeller money — which was Standard Oil money — flowed to compliant institutions. The American Medical Association’s consultation clause prohibited its members from associating with practitioners outside the approved framework, creating a professional monopoly enforced by economic exclusion.

This is the anti-knowledge point. Flexner did not fill a gap in medical education. The gap did not exist. Many of the 162 schools operating in 1910 taught how the body actually heals — homeopathic, naturopathic, terrain-based traditions with functioning clinical practices and patient outcomes that outperformed the emerging pharmaceutical model. What Flexner destroyed was not ignorance but knowledge. What replaced it was not more knowledge but its inversion: a curriculum designed to suppress the body’s healing responses rather than support them. The distinction matters. A profession that lacks the knowledge to heal can be educated. A profession trained to do the opposite of what heals cannot be corrected without abandoning the training that constitutes it.

The model did not stay inside American borders. Flexner himself was commissioned by the Carnegie Foundation to conduct the same evaluation of European medical education in 1912. The Rockefeller Foundation’s International Health Division and its China Medical Board carried the template outward across the following decades, funding medical schools in England, Belgium, France, Brazil, Thailand, and China on the same pharmaceutical model, closing or defunding institutions that taught otherwise.¹⁰ The Peking Union Medical College, opened in 1921, became the pharmaceutical training center for East Asia. The World Health Organization, established in 1948, took over the export function internationally. By the middle of the twentieth century, every major medical school on the planet was training doctors on essentially the same curriculum.

John D. Rockefeller personally used homeopathic physicians for his own family throughout his life.¹¹ The man who understood terrain well enough to choose it for himself directed his foundations to fund only allopathic schools, at home and abroad. The framework that produces pharmaceutical dependency was profitable. Terrain medicine was not.

The consequences run through every medical school on the developed continents. Approximately two-thirds of American academic department chairs have financial relationships with pharmaceutical companies, a figure equivalent audits in the UK, Australia, Canada, and continental Europe have found to be broadly comparable.¹² The average medical student, whether in Boston or Manchester or Melbourne, receives roughly twenty contact hours of nutrition instruction across four years, less than one percent of classroom time.¹³ A doctor cannot teach what they were never taught. Taught that symptoms are the malfunction and that the body attacks itself, they prescribe drugs that suppress both. What the training installs is what the training produces.

Birth

The body knows how to birth. Every human being who has ever lived was produced by that process, mostly without medical management.

The training the modern obstetrician receives teaches management, extraction, and control. The process is broken into stages, each with an approved intervention. Consent is technically obtained, in labor, on a hospital bed, surrounded by people in scrubs speaking with confidence and urgency. It is not consent as most people understand the term.

Pitocin, synthetic oxytocin, is delivered by IV during the third stage of labor as a matter of routine.¹⁴ Cochrane reviews show it reduces hemorrhage rates in the overall population, but the absolute risk reduction in low-risk women is small: hundreds of women receive the drug to prevent one hemorrhage that would have occurred. Women who have experienced both physiological and pharmacological third stage describe them as fundamentally different. Natural contractions are productive. Synthetic contractions are violent and overwhelming. Sometimes the drug closes the cervix before the placenta has exited, at which point a doctor’s hand goes inside the uterus to remove the fragments manually.

Fundal massage — deep kneading pressure on the abdomen minutes after delivery — is administered by protocol despite evidence not supporting routine use; many women describe it as the most painful part of their birth. Controlled cord traction is standard. The placenta, left alone, releases in ten to thirty minutes with the mother in a state of physiological calm. Traction rushes what biology completes cleanly and can cause retained fragments that hemorrhage later.

None of these interventions is birth. Each opposes what the body is doing, delivered by a professional trained to consider the intervention a positive contribution.

Childhood

The body of a child clears through fever, discharge, rash, mucus, cough, vomiting, diarrhea, and skin eruption. Every acute episode is the terrain restoring itself. What passes through the child is the accumulated burden the child was carrying: dietary residue, environmental exposure, emotional load. The episode is not the disease. The episode is the resolution of the disease.

Training installs two responses. The first is injection: the introduction of foreign material, including heavy metals, industrial chemicals, and animal-derived proteins, into a body that has developed no method of eliminating them through the digestive tract, because the injection bypasses the digestive tract. The second is suppression: antipyretics for fever, antihistamines for discharge, topical steroids for skin eruption, antibiotics for whatever the acute episode has been diagnosed as.

The pediatric schedule delivers dozens of dose-equivalents of injected pharmaceutical products before the child reaches eighteen. The American schedule has risen from fewer than ten doses in the early 1980s to roughly seventy today. The Australian, British, and continental European schedules are broadly comparable, differing in specific brand names and timing but tracking the same trajectory over the same decades.¹⁵ Each addition is approved by national regulators who move between industry and agency.

The substrate has been photographed. Antonietta Gatti and Stefano Montanari, materials scientists at the Italian National Council of Research, examined forty-four injectable vaccines under electron microscope in 2017 and found tungsten, lead, stainless steel, bismuth, gold, silver, cerium, and rare earth alloys. Nothing on any package insert declared any of it.¹⁶ Pediatric injections had the highest particle counts: Varilrix at 2,723 particles per twenty-microliter drop, Infanrix hexa at 1,821. The body has no enzymatic machinery for breaking down these metals. The particles do not biodegrade. They lodge.

Stanley Plotkin, called an indispensable authority on vaccines by Bill Gates, testified under oath in 2018 that his early vaccine trials had used orphans, mentally disabled children in institutions, and the babies of women in prison.¹⁷ Asked whether he had ethical concerns, he indicated that this was how it had been done. The Nuremberg Code, established after the war to prevent this specific category of medical practice, was not mentioned as a limiting factor in his career.

Roman Bystrianyk pulled the mortality data from archives that had not been digitized.¹⁸ Between 1850 and 1940, measles mortality in the industrialized world fell by 98 percent — the measles vaccine was introduced in 1963. Whooping cough deaths fell from over 1,000 per million children to fewer than 10 per million between 1850 and 1950, before the pertussis vaccine was in widespread use. Scarlet fever, for which no vaccine was ever deployed, declined at the same rate. The mortality collapse was driven by sanitation, nutrition, and clean water. Medical students see charts that begin in 1950, after the decline was complete.

The child is being loaded with substances the body will spend years attempting to sequester and eliminate. When acute episodes arise as the body attempts to clear the burden, the pediatrician suppresses them. The suppression drives the material deeper. Chronic conditions emerge. What is called childhood asthma, eczema, allergy, autism is in significant part the wake of this process. This is the substrate driving Garner’s gradient: 2.64 percent is what a child’s baseline looks like when the loading does not happen. 60 percent is what happens when it does.

The Pipeline

The man at fifty-five is asymptomatic. He walks into his annual checkup because his wife asked him to. He has no complaints. The physician orders a standard panel.

The cholesterol comes back at 225. The blood pressure reads 134/82. The fasting glucose is 108. Each number crosses a threshold. Each threshold has been progressively lowered by guideline panels whose members hold financial relationships with the manufacturers of the drugs used to treat the redefined condition. In 1988, a cholesterol of 240 was considered elevated; by 2001, the threshold was 200.¹⁹ In 2003, the American Diabetes Association lowered the pre-diabetes fasting glucose threshold to 100.²⁰ In 2017, the blood pressure threshold was lowered to 130/80, converting roughly thirty million Americans into hypertensive patients overnight.²¹ British, European, Australian, and Canadian panels typically adopt the American thresholds within a year or two.

The healthy man leaves the office with three prescriptions: a statin, an ACE inhibitor, metformin. Each drug produces the next diagnosis. The statin causes muscle symptoms in 7 to 29 percent of users;²² the aches are attributed to aging, the man walks less, his bone density declines, and a bisphosphonate is prescribed — a class linked to atypical femur fractures and osteonecrosis of the jaw. The ACE inhibitor produces a persistent cough in 10 to 15 percent of patients; it is switched to an ARB, which produces dizziness, which elevates fall risk. The metformin causes gastrointestinal symptoms in up to 25 percent of patients; these are addressed with another medication or attributed to irritable bowel syndrome, which becomes its own diagnostic pathway.

Every number the man’s body produced was information. Cholesterol delivers repair material to damaged blood vessels; blocking the delivery does not repair the vessels. Elevated blood pressure indicates the body is working harder to move blood through compromised tissue; blocking the pressure does not repair the tissue. Elevated glucose indicates the terrain is not processing carbohydrates effectively; blocking the glucose does not restore the processing. Each intervention addresses the signal, introduces new material the body must now cleanse, and produces effects that become the next diagnosis. The man is progressively poisoned by his own care.

The screening industry that generated the initial three thresholds operates continuously alongside the pharmacy. The distinction it buries is between disease-specific mortality and all-cause mortality: a screening program can reduce deaths from breast cancer while total deaths remain unchanged, because the treatment kills as many people as the disease prevented. Across the major screening programs, when all-cause mortality is calculated, the benefit largely disappears.²³

Behind the arithmetic sits a reservoir. Approximately 70 percent of men in their seventies have prostate cancer at autopsy, while only about 3 percent die from it. Up to 39 percent of middle-aged women show evidence of breast cancer at autopsy; lifetime risk of dying from it is under 4 percent. Polyps sit in half of older colons. Every screening test dips into this reservoir. Every person pulled from it becomes a patient who cannot benefit from treatment, because they were never at risk.²³

PSA testing has been called a public health disaster by Richard Ablin, the researcher who discovered the antigen.²⁴ For every man whose life is extended by PSA screening, estimates suggest 30 to 100 are overdiagnosed and treated with surgery or radiation. Impotence and incontinence are the price of the overtreatment. Mammography follows the same pattern: the Cochrane review found that for every 2,000 women screened over ten years, approximately one has her life extended and ten are treated unnecessarily for conditions that would never have progressed.²⁵ The colonoscopy case was decided in 2022 when the NEJM published the NordICC trial, the first randomized controlled study of colonoscopy screening ever conducted. It followed over 84,000 people for ten years and found no significant reduction in deaths from colorectal cancer.²⁶ The CT scan produces the cancers it looks for: a 2025 analysis in JAMA Internal Medicine projected that the 93 million CT scans performed in the United States in 2023 will cause approximately 103,000 future cancers, roughly 5 percent of all new cancer diagnoses each year.²⁷

The system is sustained, in significant part, by the people it overdiagnosed. Every woman treated for a non-progressing DCIS becomes, in her own telling, a survivor. Every man whose indolent prostate cancer was cut out becomes a testimonial at the next fundraiser. They believe the screening saved their lives, and they say so — to their families, their neighbors, and their parliaments. The screening programs’ most effective advocates are the people who never had the disease being screened for. They are not lying. The framework that taught them to be grateful cannot acknowledge the mistake without dismantling itself.²³

The pipeline captures the healthy adult and converts him into a chronic patient by treating the body’s signals as the malfunction.

The count is not small, and it is not confined to one country. Approximately 40 million Americans take statins; global prescriptions run to hundreds of millions. Approximately one million prostate biopsies are performed each year in the United States alone; between 0.5 and 2 percent produce sepsis.²⁸ Nearly 500,000 American women have been diagnosed and treated for DCIS since widespread mammography began, with proportionally similar figures from the UK, Australia, and continental Europe; the majority of those cancers would never have progressed. Peter Gøtzsche estimated prescription drugs to be the third leading cause of death in the industrialized world, at approximately 200,000 attributable American deaths per year. Barbara Starfield’s broader iatrogenic estimate ran to 225,000 American deaths when unnecessary surgery, medication errors, hospital-acquired infection, and adverse drug effects were combined. Neither figure includes the deaths from heart disease and cancer whose upstream causation is the profession’s own framework. At the Gøtzsche rate, American medicine alone kills more Americans every year than the country lost in Vietnam, and more every two years than in World War II. Since 1910, at any defensible average of the annual rate, American medicine has killed more Americans than the country has lost in every war it has ever fought, combined. Applied globally, the iatrogenic death total across the century since Flexner runs into figures that no single war or genocide of the modern era approaches.²⁹

Chronic Illness

Multiple sclerosis is labeled autoimmune, incurable, and progressive. The words function together. Autoimmune assigns cause to the body itself, a self-attack whose origin cannot be investigated because it is defined as intrinsic. Incurable forecloses investigation of resolution. Progressive tells the patient what to expect and enrolls them in a lifetime of pharmaceutical management.

Hal Huggins found that MS patients who had mercury amalgams removed from their teeth showed elimination of specific protein bands in their cerebrospinal fluid that had been present before removal.³⁰ The bands were the establishment’s own laboratory markers. Their disappearance corresponded to clinical improvement. The finding was not integrated into treatment protocols. Herbert Shelton described the mechanism a century ago.³¹ The body attempts to expel accumulated toxic burden through acute symptoms; pharmaceutical intervention suppresses the symptoms and adds new toxic material; the new material triggers new symptoms, which are suppressed in turn. What medicine calls progressive disease is the predictable consequence of continuous poisoning combined with continuous suppression.

The financial architecture rewards the labeling. Chronic Care Management billing codes provide recurring monthly reimbursement for conditions expected to last at least twelve months. MS drugs cost fifty-seven to ninety-three thousand dollars per year. A 2025 JAMA Network Open study found pharmaceutical companies paid $164 million to doctors treating MS patients between 2015 and 2019, and physicians who received these payments prescribed the paying companies’ drugs at higher rates.³²

The words the doctor uses are physiologically active. A 1983 British trial divided over 400 cancer patients into three groups; two received chemotherapy, the third received saline. Among the 130 patients who believed they were receiving chemotherapy but were actually getting salt water, 31 percent developed hair loss, 35 percent nausea, and 22 percent vomiting.³³ The side effects they expected produced themselves. A meta-analysis of 130 studies covering 8,219 participants found the nocebo effect clinically significant across somatic and affective outcomes.³⁴ In 1992, a man diagnosed with metastatic esophageal cancer died within weeks of his prognosis. His autopsy found a single two-centimeter nodule on his liver. There was no metastatic spread. His doctor stated the pathological cause of death could not be determined.³⁵ The expectation killed him.

When a doctor tells a twenty-five-year-old that his condition is incurable and progressive, the doctor is administering an intervention. It has no informed consent form, no adverse event reporting system. It is delivered with authority to a patient trained since childhood to trust that authority. It measurably worsens outcomes. Neither the doctor nor the patient recognizes it as an intervention at all.

The Specialties

The inversion runs across every branch of medicine. Two specialties demonstrate it with unusual clarity.

Psychiatry invented the diseases it treats. The chemical imbalance theory of depression, offered as biological fact to millions of patients, was never demonstrated in the research literature. Kenneth Kendler, coeditor of Psychological Medicine, wrote in a 2005 editorial that the search for neurochemical explanations of psychiatric disorders had failed to produce the biological markers the field had promised.³⁶ Robert Whitaker’s investigation of American disability data found psychiatric disability rose sixfold between 1955 and 2007 — a curve that inverts what any real treatment would produce. Martin Harrow’s fifteen-year NIMH follow-up of schizophrenia patients found 40 percent of those who stopped taking antipsychotics were in recovery at fifteen years, against 5 percent of those who remained on medication. The FDA’s 2004 meta-analysis of pediatric antidepressant trials found children on the drugs showed twice the rate of suicidal thinking and behavior compared with placebo.³⁶

Dentistry runs the same inversion on the mouth. No dental school in the United States has a preventive specialty; the American Dental Association has been asked to establish one and declined. Weston Price, who chaired the ADA’s research section from 1914 to 1928, documented in the 1930s that fourteen isolated populations on traditional diets showed decay in less than one percent of teeth examined, and that the same populations one generation after the introduction of refined flour and sugar showed decay in thirty to sixty percent. Ralph Steinman’s laboratory work at Loma Linda established that teeth are hydraulic systems governed by an endocrine signal from the hypothalamus, and that sugar reverses the fluid flow, pulling debris inward through microscopic tubules. The bacteria on the tooth surface are not the cause of the cavity; they are pulled in by the reversal of the flow that should have carried them out. Silver amalgam fillings are approximately fifty percent mercury by weight and release vapor for the life of the filling. Ninety-two percent of American adults have had caries. The specialty that could prevent it does not exist because the profession that repairs it cannot fund itself by graduating dentists who advise patients to eat liver and pastured butter.³⁷

Death

Dying used to happen at home. Within living memory, most people died surrounded by family, in their own beds. The process was understood as natural — not comfortable, not painless, not medicalized.

The condition that brings the person into the ICU is often the accumulated wake of substrate delivered by the same profession decades earlier. The terminal cancer at eighty-three is not the natural end of a long life. It is the destination of a trajectory that began with the injection at age two and was compounded across the decades by pharmaceuticals administered for signals the body was sending.

Roughly half of Americans now die in hospitals or nursing facilities.³⁸ The proportions in the UK, Australia, Canada, and continental Europe are comparable. End-of-life spending absorbs between 13 and 25 percent of Medicare program costs, with equivalent audits of the NHS and Australian and Canadian systems showing similar concentrations.³⁹ Chemotherapy administered within two weeks of death — treatment that cannot extend life meaningfully and almost certainly worsens its quality — happens to a measurable percentage of cancer patients across every industrialized nation with a functioning oncology system.

The system does not have a protocol for stopping. It has protocols for doing. Intubating, resuscitating, monitoring, medicating, scanning, testing. The treatment produces complications. The complications produce further treatment. The question “should we continue treating?” is structurally difficult to ask in an environment designed around the assumption that treatment is always the answer.

The dying body is completing a process. The training the ICU physician received teaches indefinite postponement of the ending, not comfort, not honest acknowledgment, not permission to stop. The final weeks of a life become the most medically intensive and most expensive weeks of the lifespan. What is billed for is not the extension of life. It is the extension of dying.

The Tell

If the inversion were ignorance, healers would be welcomed. They are punished instead. The system’s behavior toward its healers is what distinguishes ignorance from inversion.

In 2023, Myhill was suspended for nine months for recommending ascorbic acid, cholecalciferol, iodine, and ivermectin for the condition attributed to COVID-19. The Tribunal stated that her recommendations undermined public health. Erasure from the register was rejected on the grounds that it would “deprive the public of an otherwise good doctor with over 30 years’ experience.”⁴⁰

A doctor whose patients improve. A protocol that addresses cellular metabolism rather than suppressing symptoms. Recommendations that cost pennies compared to pharmaceutical management. Investigated more than thirty times, not for harming patients, but for undermining the paradigm that requires her patients’ conditions to remain incurable.

The pattern is not new. Semmelweis was destroyed in 1847 for observing that his colleagues were killing patients. Lown was met with Nazi salutes in the 1950s. Myhill’s case is contemporary. If the training were simply incomplete, healers would fill the gap. If the pharmaceutical approach were the best available given current knowledge, alternatives would be welcomed as data emerged. Neither is what happens. Terrain medicine schools were closed by Flexner, terrain practitioners are stripped of their licenses, and the doctors whose patients improve most reliably become the doctors most reliably prosecuted. The system knows the right answer well enough to recognize its practitioners and exclude them.

The Kitchen

Every ordinary childhood illness that now fills pediatric waiting rooms was managed at home by mothers and grandmothers for centuries before the pediatrician existed. What they used is still on the shelf. Honey for the cough — in a University of Pennsylvania trial, honey outperformed dextromethorphan for nighttime cough in children over one.⁴¹ Salt water gargles for the sore throat. A warm compress on the ear; four out of five acute middle ear inflammations resolve on their own within three days, per Cochrane review.⁴¹ Ginger and garlic. Broth. Sunlight, water, rest, warmth, sleep. The kitchen holds most of the toolkit. What the toolkit does not hold, the yard and the sun do.

The mechanism is single. The terrain is the patient. The interventions are supportive: they give the terrain what it needs to complete the clearing that the symptoms represent. Fever is metabolic heat that speeds the clearing; give water and rest. Cough is the airway expelling debris; give honey and warmth. Vomiting and diarrhea are the fastest routes the body has for emptying itself; give broth and time. Skin eruptions are the terrain pushing outward; keep the skin clean and let the clearing happen.

Recovery times have not changed. A cold takes about a week. The flu takes ten days. What the pharmaceutical era added to these timelines was not speed. It added the toxicity of the intervention on top of the illness that was already going to resolve.

The kitchen table works the other way as well.

The Kitchen Table Again

The parent’s hand goes to the cabinet. The bottle is red and white. The child’s fever is 102.4. Behind the parent’s hand stands the doctor. Behind the doctor stand the medical school, the Flexner Report, the Rockefeller money that funded it, and the pharmaceutical industry that has become one of the largest industries on the planet.

The parent does not need to understand any of this in the moment. The parent needs to know one thing. The fever is the operation. The intervention interrupts the operation. Leave the child alone. Offer water. Offer rest. Do not administer the drug that opposes what the body has decided to do.

Every choice a parent makes for a child eventually becomes a choice the child makes for themselves. The child learns whether the body is trustworthy or whether the body is the enemy. That lesson accumulates across a childhood and shapes every medical decision the child will make as an adult. Multiplied across the pediatric schedule, the annual physical, the first prescription, the first surgical referral, the first diagnosis of chronic illness — by the time the person arrives in the ICU at eighty-three, the pattern is complete. The final capture is the destination of a trajectory that began with the red and white bottle.

The parent chooses. The neighbor does not. The pediatrician down the street does not. Every industrialized country’s institutions are now hostile in essentially the same way, because the training that produced those institutions came from essentially the same source. The choice remains available. It has never been popular. It is the difference between the 2.64 percent and the 60 percent. It is the difference between the profession that heals and the profession that has become the first leading cause of death.

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The One-Minute Elevator Explanation

The doctor is trained to do the opposite of what heals. When the body raises a fever to clear an illness, the doctor gives a drug to lower the fever. When cholesterol rises to repair damaged blood vessels, the doctor gives a statin to block it. When the body signals distress through blood pressure or blood sugar, the doctor blocks the signals without addressing what produced them.

This is not a gap in the doctor’s education. It is the doctor’s education. In 1910, the Rockefeller and Carnegie foundations funded the Flexner Report, which closed the American medical schools teaching how the body heals and standardized every surviving school on the pharmaceutical model. The Rockefeller Foundation then exported the same template across Europe, Asia, and Latin America. Every industrialized country’s medical schools now train on essentially the same curriculum. Rockefeller himself kept homeopathic doctors for his own family.

The result runs across a lifetime. In childhood, the pediatric schedule injects dozens of doses of products that contain undeclared tungsten, lead, stainless steel, and rare earth alloys the body cannot break down. In adulthood, the annual checkup pulls asymptomatic people into pharmacy pipelines that produce the very conditions the next round of screening will identify. In chronic illness, the same profession that produced the damage names it autoimmune. In dying, the ICU postpones the ending until the bills exhaust the estate.

Joy Garner’s Control Group Survey found chronic disease in the fully unvaccinated at 2.64 percent. In the vaccinated it runs at 60 percent.

If this were ignorance, healers would be welcomed. They are not. Semmelweis was destroyed in 1847 for observing that his colleagues were killing patients. Sarah Myhill has been investigated more than thirty times, not because her patients complained but because they got better.

The doctor is not the third leading cause of death. The doctor is the first.

If you want to follow this, read Malcolm Kendrick on heart disease, Thomas Cowan on cancer and the water body of the cell, and Suzanne Humphries and Roman Bystrianyk on the mortality data.

How to Explain This to a Six-Year-Old

Your body knows how to get better when you are sick. When you get a fever, your body is making itself warmer to fix what is wrong. When you cough, your body is pushing something out. When your skin gets red and itchy, your body is sending the bad stuff outside where it can leave.

Doctors go to school for a long time. But most of what they learn is how to make the fever go away, how to stop the cough, how to make the itchy skin stop being itchy. When the body is working to get better and the doctor stops the body from working, the sickness cannot finish. So it stays.

Doctors also give shots. The shots have tiny pieces of metal in them, too small for your eyes to see. Your body knows how to clean up food and dirt. It does not know how to clean up metal. So the metal stays inside, and where it stays, the body gets sick.

Most doctors are kind people who thought they were going to help. But their school did not teach them how the body heals. They are doing what they were taught. What they were taught is not what makes you better.

When something bad happens to your body, the best thing is usually to let the body do what it knows how to do. Rest. Water. Warm blankets. Good food when you are ready. Time.

There are some doctors who know this. But the other doctors get very angry at them and try to take away their license. That is how you know the other doctors know these good doctors are right. If they were wrong, no one would care.

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References

1. General Medical Council. Records of investigations against Dr Sarah Myhill, 2001–2023, obtained by Freedom of Information Act request and compiled at drmyhill.co.uk. The Tom Kark QC statement is drawn from the 2010 Interim Orders Panel hearing transcript.

2. Garner, J. Health versus Disorder, Disease, and Death: Unvaccinated Persons Are Incommensurably Healthier than Vaccinated. Control Group Survey, 2020. See also thecontrolgroup.org for methodology and state-level breakdown.

3. Unbekoming. “The Primary Cause: An Essay on One Impost, Three Shadows.” Lies are Unbekoming, July 2026. The attributable-fraction calculation is developed in the section titled The Numbers.

4. Kendrick, M. The Clot Thickens: The Enduring Mystery of Heart Disease. Columbus Publishing, 2021. Kendrick, M. The Great Cholesterol Con. John Blake Publishing, 2008. Ravnskov, U. The Cholesterol Myths. NewTrends Publishing, 2000.

5. Unbekoming. “The Mechanics of Stable Falsehood: An Essay.” Lies are Unbekoming, December 2025. The convergent-opportunism framework is developed in Sections IV and X, drawing on Paul Collits. The Bernard Lown case is drawn from Malcolm Kendrick’s account, cited in that essay. The Sinclair maxim is from Sinclair, U. I, Candidate for Governor: And How I Got Licked. University of California Press, 1935.

6. Case, A., Deaton, A. Deaths of Despair and the Future of Capitalism. Princeton University Press, 2020. See also National Center for Health Statistics, “Mortality in the United States, 2018,” NCHS Data Brief No. 355, 2020, and subsequent NCHS annual updates documenting the American life expectancy decline that began in 2014 and continued through the pre-COVID period.

7. Semmelweis, I. P. Die Ätiologie, der Begriff und die Prophylaxis des Kindbettfiebers [The Etiology, Concept, and Prophylaxis of Childbed Fever]. C. A. Hartleben, 1861.

8. Flexner, A. Medical Education in the United States and Canada: A Report to the Carnegie Foundation for the Advancement of Teaching. Carnegie Foundation Bulletin No. 4, 1910.

9. Brown, E. R. Rockefeller Medicine Men: Medicine and Capitalism in America. University of California Press, 1979.

10. Brown, E. R. Rockefeller Medicine Men: Medicine and Capitalism in America. University of California Press, 1979, Chapters 5-7 for the international export of the Flexner model. See also Farley, J. To Cast Out Disease: A History of the International Health Division of the Rockefeller Foundation (1913-1951). Oxford University Press, 2004; and Bu, L. Making the World Like Us: Education, Cultural Expansion, and the American Century. Praeger, 2003, for the China Medical Board and the Peking Union Medical College. The Carnegie Foundation commissioned Flexner’s European survey, published as Flexner, A. Medical Education in Europe. Carnegie Foundation Bulletin No. 6, 1912.

11. Bealle, M. A. The Drug Story: A Factological History of America’s $10,000,000,000 Drug Cartel. Columbia Publishing, 1949. Rockefeller’s use of homeopathic physicians is discussed throughout, drawing on the diaries and correspondence of the Rockefeller family physicians.

12. Campbell, E. G., et al. “Institutional academic-industry relationships.” Journal of the American Medical Association, 298(15): 1779–1786, 2007.

13. Adams, K. M., Kohlmeier, M., Zeisel, S. H. “Nutrition education in U.S. medical schools: latest update of a national survey.” Academic Medicine, 85(9): 1537–1542, 2010.

14. Begley, C. M., Gyte, G. M. L., Devane, D., McGuire, W., Weeks, A. “Active versus expectant management for women in the third stage of labour.” Cochrane Database of Systematic Reviews, Issue 2, 2019.

15. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. Recommended Child and Adolescent Immunization Schedule, current year, compared with 1983 schedule. Historical comparison compiled by the National Vaccine Information Center. Dose counts vary by counting methodology; the figures here reflect the NVIC compilation counting all recommended pediatric doses including boosters and annual influenza injections through age eighteen.

16. Gatti, A. M., Montanari, S. “New Quality-Control Investigations on Vaccines: Micro- and Nanocontamination.” International Journal of Vaccines and Vaccination, 4(1): 00072, 2017.

17. Deposition of Stanley A. Plotkin, M.D., taken in Doe v. Doe, Court of Common Pleas, Michigan, January 11, 2018. Transcript widely available; excerpts published by Robert F. Kennedy Jr.’s Children’s Health Defense.

18. Humphries, S., Bystrianyk, R. Dissolving Illusions: Disease, Vaccines, and the Forgotten History. CreateSpace, 2013. See also dissolvingillusions.com for the underlying mortality graphs drawn from U.S. Vital Statistics and UK historical mortality records.

19. National Cholesterol Education Program. Third Report of the Expert Panel on Detection, Evaluation, and Treatment of High Blood Cholesterol in Adults (ATP III). National Institutes of Health, 2001. Compared with the 1988 ATP I guidelines.

20. Genuth, S., et al. “Follow-up report on the diagnosis of diabetes mellitus.” Diabetes Care, 26(11): 3160–3167, 2003.

21. Whelton, P. K., et al. “2017 ACC/AHA/AAPA/ABC/ACPM/AGS/APhA/ASH/ASPC/NMA/PCNA Guideline for the Prevention, Detection, Evaluation, and Management of High Blood Pressure in Adults.” Hypertension, 71(6): e13–e115, 2018.

22. Bruckert, E., Hayem, G., Dejager, S., Yau, C., Bégaud, B. “Mild to moderate muscular symptoms with high-dosage statin therapy in hyperlipidemic patients — the PRIMO Study.” Cardiovascular Drugs and Therapy, 19: 403–414, 2005. Higher-end figure from patient-reported outcome studies including the STOMP trial and USAGE survey.

23. Unbekoming. “The 12 Screenings That Manufacture the Patients They Claim to Find: An Essay on Threshold Manipulation, Overdiagnosis, Cascades, and the Markers That Aren’t What They Claim.” Lies are Unbekoming, June 2026. The disease-specific vs all-cause mortality distinction, the autopsy reservoir data, and the survivor-as-advocate mechanism are developed across the essay’s four groups. Primary sources for the autopsy reservoir figures include Welch, H. G. Should I Be Tested for Cancer? Maybe Not and Here’s Why. University of California Press, 2004; and Welch, H. G., Schwartz, L., Woloshin, S. Overdiagnosed: Making People Sick in the Pursuit of Health. Beacon Press, 2011.

24. Ablin, R. J. “The Great Prostate Mistake.” The New York Times, Op-Ed, March 9, 2010. Extended in Ablin, R. J., Piana, R. The Great Prostate Hoax: How Big Medicine Hijacked the PSA Test and Caused a Public Health Disaster. Palgrave Macmillan, 2014.

25. Gøtzsche, P. C., Jørgensen, K. J. “Screening for breast cancer with mammography.” Cochrane Database of Systematic Reviews, Issue 6, 2013.

26. Bretthauer, M., Løberg, M., Wieszczy, P., et al. “Effect of colonoscopy screening on risks of colorectal cancer and related death.” New England Journal of Medicine, 387(17): 1547–1556, 2022.

27. Smith-Bindman, R., Chu, P. W., Azman Firdaus, H., et al. “Projected lifetime cancer risks from current computed tomography imaging.” JAMA Internal Medicine, published online April 2025.

28. Loeb, S., Vellekoop, A., Ahmed, H. U., et al. “Systematic review of complications of prostate biopsy.” European Urology, 64(6): 876–892, 2013. See also Unbekoming, “The 12 Screenings That Manufacture the Patients They Claim to Find,” Lies are Unbekoming, June 2026, for the fuller catalog including statin utilization (Centers for Disease Control and Prevention), DCIS overdiagnosis figures (Bleyer & Welch, NEJM 2012), and the harm arithmetic across the major screening programs.

29. Gøtzsche, P. C. Deadly Medicines and Organised Crime: How Big Pharma Has Corrupted Healthcare. Radcliffe Publishing, 2013, for the ~200,000 US annual iatrogenic death estimate. Starfield, B. “Is US health really the best in the world?” Journal of the American Medical Association, 284(4): 483–485, 2000, for the 225,000 estimate covering combined iatrogenic causes including unnecessary surgery, medication errors, hospital-acquired infection, and adverse drug effects. US war death totals compiled from US Department of Defense casualty statistics and Congressional Research Service reports: American Revolution (~4,435), War of 1812 (~2,260), Mexican-American War (~13,283), Civil War (~620,000), Spanish-American War (~2,446), World War I (~116,516), World War II (~405,399), Korean War (~36,574), Vietnam War (~58,220), Persian Gulf War (~383), Iraq War (~4,431), Afghanistan War (~2,459). Total US war deaths across the country’s history: approximately 1.35 million.

30. Huggins, H. A. It’s All in Your Head: The Link Between Mercury Amalgams and Illness. Avery Publishing, 1993. The CSF protein band findings are discussed in Chapter 4.

31. Shelton, H. M. Human Life: Its Philosophy and Laws. Health Research, various editions from 1928. The acute-to-chronic progression mechanism is developed across Shelton’s collected works, particularly The Hygienic System series.

32. Bove, R., et al. “Financial Payments from the Pharmaceutical Industry to Neurologists Treating Multiple Sclerosis and Prescribing Patterns.” JAMA Network Open, 2025. Chronic Care Management billing figures from Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services data compiled by AAFP practice analysis.

33. Fielding, J. W. L., Fagg, S. L., Jones, B., et al. “An interim report of a prospective, randomized, controlled study of adjuvant chemotherapy in operable gastric cancer: British Stomach Cancer Group.” World Journal of Surgery, 7(3): 390–399, 1983. See also Roytas, D. Can You Catch a Cold? Untold History and Human Experiments. Independently published, 2024, for the placebo/nocebo cancer-trial data compiled from this and related studies.

34. Petersen, G. L., Finnerup, N. B., Colloca, L., et al. “The magnitude of nocebo effects in pain: a meta-analysis.” Pain, 155(8): 1426–1434, 2014.

35. Meador, C. K. “Hex Death: Voodoo Magic or Persuasion?” Southern Medical Journal, 85(3): 244–247, 1992.

36. Unbekoming. “The Top 10 Myths of Modern Psychiatry: An Essay.” Lies are Unbekoming, December 2025. Primary sources include Whitaker, R. Anatomy of an Epidemic. Broadway Books, 2010; Breggin, P. R. Toxic Psychiatry. St. Martin’s Press, 1991; Harrow, M., Jobe, T. H. “Factors involved in outcome and recovery in schizophrenia patients not on antipsychotic medications.” Journal of Nervous and Mental Disease, 195: 406–414, 2007; the FDA 2004 meta-analysis of pediatric antidepressant trials; and Kendler, K. S. “Toward a Philosophical Structure for Psychiatry.” American Journal of Psychiatry, 162: 433–440, 2005.

37. Unbekoming. “12 Things Your Dentist Was Trained Not to Tell You: An Essay on the Profession Trained for Repair, Not Prevention.” Lies are Unbekoming, June 2026. Primary sources include Price, W. A. Nutrition and Physical Degeneration. Price-Pottenger Nutrition Foundation, 1939; Meinig, G. E. Root Canal Cover-Up. Bion Publishing, 1998; Nara, R. O., Mariner, S. A. Money by the Mouthful. Oramedics International Press, 1979; Steinman, R. R., Leonora, J. “Relationship of fluid transport through the dentin to the incidence of dental caries.” Journal of Dental Research, 50, 1971.

38. Cross, S. H., Warraich, H. J. “Changes in the Place of Death in the United States.” New England Journal of Medicine, 381: 2369–2370, 2019. Institutional deaths (hospital plus nursing facility) accounted for approximately half of American deaths in 2017 (29.8% hospital, 20.8% nursing facility).

39. Lubitz, J. D., Riley, G. F. “Trends in Medicare payments in the last year of life.” New England Journal of Medicine, 328(15): 1092–1096, 1993, for the higher end of the range. French, E. B., et al. “End-of-life medical spending in last twelve months of life is lower than previously reported.” Health Affairs, 36(7): 1211–1217, 2017, for the lower end. The range reflects genuine methodological disagreement about how end-of-life spending is measured and attributed.

40. Medical Practitioners Tribunal Service. Determination on Dr Sarah Myhill, 2023. Full text available through the MPTS decision archive.

41. Paul, I. M., et al. “Effect of honey, dextromethorphan, and no treatment on nocturnal cough and sleep quality for coughing children and their parents.” Archives of Pediatrics & Adolescent Medicine, 161(12): 1140–1146, 2007. Venekamp, R. P., et al. “Antibiotics for acute otitis media in children.” Cochrane Database of Systematic Reviews, Issue 6, 2015. Rovers, M. M., et al. “Antibiotics for acute otitis media: a meta-analysis with individual patient data.” Lancet, 368(9545): 1429–1435, 2006.

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This essay draws on the framework developed across the Unbekoming library, including The Unvaccinated (2026), Medicalized Motherhood (2026), The Screening Trap (2026), Chronic Conditions (2026), Heart Disease Reconsidered (2025), and The Architecture of Deception (2025). Readers who find the argument here compelling will find the evidence developed in greater depth in those volumes.

Truth Be Told: I’ve Accepted an Invitation to Speak on The Unvaccinated

On September 17th, I’ll be giving a one-hour presentation titled The Unvaccinated as part of a six-hour livestream called Truth Be Told. This is the first time I have accepted an invitation to an event, and I have been honoured with the opening act. The livestream begins at 12pm EST.

Vaccination is the subject closest to my heart, and this is another opportunity to spread the word. The format will preserve the pen name.

Jamie Andrews (Decentralized Science Projects) and Agent131711 (Dinosaurs) will also be presenting. Jamie’s Virology Control Studies work led to an interview here last year. Agent’s research shaped my essays on vitamin D and dinosaurs. Tickets are here. The code UNBEKOMING is $5 off and applies automatically at that link. Replay available afterwards. Hope you can make it.