Pharmaceutical companies run the trials that approve their own drugs. The journals’ “landmark” studies are written by ghostwriters paid by the companies whose products those studies promote. The FDA takes most of its drug-approval budget from the industry it is supposed to regulate. Screening tests find diseases that would never have harmed you, and then treat you for them. The statistics that justify every piece of this fall apart once you learn the arithmetic behind them.
This is the ground that Butchered by “Healthcare” covers.
Robert Yoho’s book, first published in 2020, revised and expanded for 2026 and released this week under the Unbekoming imprint.
The book
Butchered by “Healthcare” is Robert Yoho’s plain-spoken account of how American medicine stopped being a profession and became an industry. 341 pages. Over a thousand references. Thirty-eight chapters.
“Screening Tests Are Useless”, on tests that find diseases that would never have hurt you. “The FDA Protects the Big Drug Companies”, on an agency funded by the companies it regulates. “The Journals’ Sins Are the Editors’ Sins”, on ghostwritten studies and captured peer review. “Opioids and ‘Pain Management’”, on how a generation was prescribed its way into addiction. “Prozac and Relatives” and “Antipsychotics Are Disastrous”, on what psychiatry does to adults and children. “Surgery: Money Before Patients”. “Failed Cancer Treatments”. “Futile CPR and Overprescribing”. “Billing Scams & Specialty Warfare”. “Hospitals Are Sharks”. Each with a Patient Tips section at the end on how to survive it.
If you have ever walked out of a doctor’s office with a prescription you didn’t ask for, or watched a parent put through a treatment that made them worse, this is the book you want on your shelf before the next appointment.
Then the appendices. Four are new to this edition:
Vaccines. A summary of the case against the childhood schedule, from Robert’s forthcoming Judas Vaccines.
SSRIs, Akathisia, and the Courts. How antidepressants induce the violence and suicides their makers have been sued for denying.
Radiology. Gadolinium, radiation exposure, and the volume trap that drives both.
Dentistry. A summary of the case against modern dentistry, from Robert’s Judas Dentistry.
Three others are brought up to date for 2026:
The 2026 Patient Toolkit. The practical guide to walking into any medical encounter with your eyes open.
The Pediatric Front. What is being done to children in the name of medicine.
Cancer, Reconsidered. The treatments that don’t work, and the ones that do.
Winner of the Best Indie Book Award.
Robert Yoho, MD
Robert Yoho, MD spent three decades inside American medicine. Board-certified in emergency medicine out of medical school, then a cosmetic surgeon in private practice. He made a good living from the system. When he started reading the research behind the drugs he had prescribed for decades, what he found broke him from it. He now writes the Surviving Healthcare Substack and has published eight books on how the medical industry works, with more to come.
Why this book
I first read Butchered in late 2022, early in my own reading on the medical industry. It was one of the handful of books that shaped my understanding of how American medicine actually works, written by a working doctor willing to name what he had seen and been part of. The breadth of it, specialty by specialty, and the detail on the incentive structures behind the corruption, are what made it stick.
Honesty in medicine is expensive. It can cost a doctor their licence and their livelihood. Most do not pay the price. Robert is one of the ones who did.
This edition
When Robert and I started talking earlier this year about republishing Butchered, he thought there was little to change. On closer reading there was more. New chapters on parts of the industry that have shifted since 2021, updated numbers throughout, and a sharper edit for a book that will sit on shelves for years.
On Lulu
Butchered by “Healthcare” is available on Lulu now.
Thank you to the readers who have made this imprint possible, and to Robert for trusting the Unbekoming Edition with a book he spent three years writing.
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