Medical Journal

Since I retired from medicine to do air charters and what medicine came along in Alaska, I’ve been impressed by the disappearance of medical journals. About the only medicine that came along for me were a couple of terms on the local hospital board of directors.

In that capacity, I could not get the administrator to subscribe to even the most basic scientific medical journals. The administrator provided an online Internet access to the so called latest and greatest medical references. To me such was not science, but a subordination of academic inquisitiveness and individual patient case research into a guided protocol defined by the state or worse yet the drug or insurance industry.

Robert Frost in one of his poems said, “Things are of the snake, and they ride mankind.” I think of this poem when considering the sad state of the medical caduceus. We have infused the special interest of big pharmaceuticals, big insurance and HMOs into the Health Care System. It is no longer a profession. Medicine has suffered the regulations prohibitions and imposed structures of opposing political, legislative and bureaucratic ideas with unintended consequences.

The two postings below from traditional academic journals are heartening for their significance and because they arise from traditional state medical schools not big pharmacy or the government.