The Death of Empathy in Medicine

How Modern Medicine Snuffs the Healing Spark

…despite the obvious vital importance of feelings to the human condition, little can be found on the subject in modern and medical psychology textbooks. 

We are being held back by a structure that is ill-suited to our needs. What is needed is the energy and vision to support the emerging paradigm…It is clear that, as doctors, we need your help. 

–Dr. Robin Kelly, The Human Hologram

Empathy-Based Medicine? You Must be Joking…

Truth Addicts already know that something is drastically wrong with medical education…

Medical students are notorious for having abnormally high rates of illness, both physical and mental. Depression is one problem that is well known.

Dr Robert Mendelsohn stated in Confessions of a Medical Heretic (1979) that he saw a higher rate of illness in first year medical students than any other subgroup. At the time his book was published, medical students’ suicide rates in the US were reportedly second only to American Indian children who were sent away from their reservations to attend high school.

The sheer physical separation of many college/university students from their families and friends leaves them much more vulnerable to the adverse influence of the pharmaceutical industry which controls medical education.

When the going gets tough where is a student’s support network when they are hundreds of miles from home?

The medical system is uniquely insidious in substituting its empty ceremonies and sacraments in the place of the nourishing bonds and traditions of the family (or what is left of the family). We have allowed our culture to devolve and degrade quite far at this point. Family structures are mere shadows of what they used to be.

The looking after of old people is outsourced to for-profit companies, which suits the agenda perfectly. Old people who are “spun off” and ejected from the nuclear family make for a much more profitable population. Full-time care in a hospice generates a lot of turnover. Retirement villages do too.

Who really benefits from all of this? 

It is worth noting that while more and more old people are “managed” in this way, those who choose to hang on and stay at home face an increasingly inhospitable physical environment that is designed for able-bodied consumers of commercial and industrial living, with few signs of real community to be seen.

Yet another noteworthy—perhaps shocking—finding from several decades ago is that when the “best” home care goes beyond house-cleaning, garbage removal, and basic repairs, it accelerates the decline of the elderly. The Rose Institute found in 1974 that two years after intensive home-care delivery began, 39% of the assisted were dead, as compared with just 25% of the randomly selected control group.

As the State and the Church of Modern Medicine have succeeded in undermining the family unit and traditional healing, the intergenerational or “vertical transmission of values,” tradition, and knowledge has been destroyed too.

This is an extraordinarily damaging situation.

Without those vertical transmissions, which, had been held as invaluable by our tribal ancestors, the only information left to navigate the world was derived “horizontally” from contemporary sources such as news media propaganda, the Medical Mafia, mainstream “education,” etc.

Mendelsohn lived in a different era to the one we participate in now, but that is partly where his value lies. He was able to observe that strong families kept unnecessary and dangerous contact with doctors and hospitals to a minimum. Without that support structure, the Medical Mafia have much more scope for bullying their way into someone’s life—or even having someone seek out their intervention, when they have no other meaningful support.

As Illich quipped in his classic critique Medical Nemesis,

“More health damage is caused by people’s belief that they cannot cope with their illness unless they call on the doctor than doctors could ever cause by foisting their ministrations on people.” 

The value of family and community cannot be overstated. Mendelsohn was explicit on the point that, because strong families negate the need for professional assistance, Modern Medicine seeks to destroy families.

The medical professional replaces the family, just as the prostitute replaces the spouse or partner. Not entirely unlike prostitutes, medical professionals give themselves in exchange for a fee. These were the scathing assessments of a doctor (Mendelsohn) who knew very well the dynamics at play.

However, nearly 40 years on from the first publication of Confessions…, the terrain has changed, and the Medical Mafia has insinuated itself into every nook and cranny of our lives, such that we no longer seem able to remember, for instance, that home birthing used to be completely standard and mostly very safe.

Pregnancy now is treated as a disease requiring professional intervention!

We act like this makes perfect sense, but one wonders how the original peoples of the landmass now known as Australia survived (thrived) for many thousands of years without the “benefit” of obstetricians and pediatricians. It does not even occur to us that we might be able to learn something valuable from the traditional custodians of the land, such is our near-sightedness and arrogance.

And yet, until the 1930s in Australia it was public knowledge that the Egyptians used to sail (until about 400 years ago) to Australia to learn from the masters of spiritual esoterica and survival in the wild, so valued was their insight earned from years of intimate contact with the land and close familial and social ties (not to mention a healthy dose of magic).

 Domesticated humans of European descent for the most part fail to see the value of a “savage” people who were so deeply in touch with the land. Before the British invasion the original peoples did not suffer from cancer, botched surgeries, “super-bugs,” vaccine abreactions, social alienation, high suicide rates, an authoritarian medical system (or government), lack of sunlight exposure, sedentary living, lack of free electrons or negative ions, dental fluorosis, obesity, diabetes, widespread depression, lack of empathy, etc., etc.

These are problems of our highly medicalized industrial world.

Thank goodness for “progress.” Isn’t it grand that we have “better living through chemistry”?

If today we doubt the value of the modern medical ethos and the effectiveness of current mainstream medical practice, we have decades of context backing us up. Even as early as 1979, when Mendelsohn was eviscerating the medical profession for its brutality, incompetence, dishonesty, etc., the health status of the medical community in itself was reason enough to doubt its methods.

1 in 20 physicians were deemed psychiatrically disturbed, more than 30,000 were alcoholics, and around 1% were narcotics addicts. A thirty year study concluded by finding that almost half of doctors were either divorced or unhappily married, over a third used drugs such as amphetamines, barbiturates, or others, and a third had suffered emotional problems severe enough to warrant a minimum of ten trips to a psychiatrist.

Suicide rates for doctors were double the average for white Americans. For female physicians, the rate was four times higher than normal for women over age 25. 

Mendelsohn attributed most of this disaster to the cutthroat moral and psychological climate of medicine, its power politics, bribery, and corruption. He believed that by the time students got to pre-medical training, they had already learned the cheating, vying for position, and competitive practices needed for medical school.

He further pointed out that the admissions tests “virtually guarantee” that the students who do make it through will be bad doctors, funneling through personalities that are autocratically leaning, and unable and unwilling to communicate with people, having the drive to succeed but not the integrity or will to rebel when they should.

(My goodness, how prescient was THAT assessment, given the disaster of Convid-1984?!)

Judging by the real-world results, it is clear that medical schools are geared to churn out automata-like Bad Pharma prostitutes with few scruples, little nous, truant empathy, and no originality; who are willing to sell their humanity out to the Church of Modern Medicine.

When you factor in that in 1979 the half-life of medical information/education was regarded as being a mere four years, you have the recipe for an autocratic and severely outdated tyrannical profession (and industry) that is eminently resistant to important new information, morality, truth, and, perhaps above all, effective healing methods.

Ivan Illich

Stress and Eroding Empathy

There has been some research done into the impact of medical training on undergraduates and the results are not flattering.

In White Coat, Mood Indigo, an investigative piece by fourth year medical student Julie Rosenthal and her co-author Dr Susan Okie, we find that medical students are more prone to “depression” than their peers, with around 25% having it. Psychiatrist Laurie Raymond believes that students’ coping strategies and health worsen as they linger through medical school. They are overworked, stressed, socially isolated, and sleep deprived.

Angela Nuzzarello, a psychiatrist and dean of students at Northwestern University's Feinberg School of Medicine in Chicago comments that “all medical students aren't sleeping.”

“They are overwhelmed, they are working hard, and they aren't having fun socially…Of course they are fatigued.”

Is this how to create healers?

In a study by M. Hojat et al. called The Devil is in the Third Year: A Longitudinal Study of Erosion of Empathy in Medical School the question of empathy was investigated.

The results

 …consistently showed no substantial change in empathy between orientation (year 0) and the end of year 2. However, a considerable decline in mean empathy scores occurred in the third year of medical school. No significant trend toward improvement in empathy scores was observed in the fourth year. The decline in mean empathy score from year 0 to the end of year 3 is greater than one-half standard deviation unit (0.54), which is considered substantial and practically important.

Conclusions: It is ironic that the erosion of empathy occurs during a time when the curriculum is shifting toward patient-care activities; this is when empathy is most essential.  (emphasis added)

To repeat: right when medical students really need a good handle on empathy and “bedside manner,” they are reaching a point of stress and burnout that has significantly eroded their empathic capacities.

The coldness of many doctors and nurses has reached almost legendary proportions. The 1980s sitcom The Golden Girls (1985-1992) features a memorable scene in which the character Dorothy rebukes her dismissive ex-physician for not taking her seriously and making her feel like a fool for thinking she was sick, effectively gaslighting her. Seeking answers, Dorothy was eventually diagnosed with CFS (a vague term that acknowledges there’s a real problem, but doesn’t actually explain anything!).

Subsequently she happens upon her ex-doctor in a restaurant and interrupts his dinner to deliver an impassioned and scathing monologue, stating at one point:

“I don’t know where you doctors lose your humanity but you lose it.”

Dorothy giving the doctor a satisfying serve

We can tell Dorothy now that we know doctors effectively have their compassion schooled out of them (and the schooling system also selects for authoritarian personalities who have little interest in listening or incorporating someone else’s point of view, especially if they are lowly peasants without medical credentials).

Whatever embers remain into their professional years are effectively neutralized, in terms of applied medical care, by legal restrictions and the code of practice which prevents doctors from being allowed to advocate the most cutting-edge, intelligent and effective remedies.

Rockefeller medicine studiously avoids permitting CURES from entering its doctors’ repertoires—cures don’t foster repeat business (nor do they help the Globalist cabal cull the herd!).

Aside from profits, the Medical Mafia also apparently cares more for procedural rituals and sacraments than human connections and basic morality. The ethos of “I’m just doing my job” seems to grant medical staff and social workers (child “protection”) carte blanche license to wreak as much havoc as they like and do it with impunity—as many of them do.

Scamdemic 2020 is a sad testament to that.

Clearly a medical education system that undermines such basic human virtues as empathy is a system in need of drastic overhaul.

Doctors disconnected from their humanity are much more use to Big Pharma and the Church of Modern Medicine than they are to living, breathing men and women who need someone to listen, inquire into their lives, and help them restore internal harmony and the broken relationships in their lives.

The highly stressed, highly competitive—and socially alienating—environment of medical education explains a lot regarding the erosion of empathy. It is simply hard to even want to feel and see things from another person’s point of view when you are stressed and dysregulated.

The more stressed you are, the more diminished that basic capacity is. But there are other indicators that show up prior to that third year decrease in empathy.

A recent survey of first- and second-year medical students at the University of California found that about one quarter were depressed.

Laurie Raymond, a psychiatrist at Harvard Medical School said that students

“see themselves going into a very narrow tunnel. A lot of the depression we see halfway through the [first] year — it's a reaction to having constricted themselves down to studying these subjects in a very intense way. It's pretty unidimensional [unbalanced].”

There is a powerful cluster of stressors affecting medical students:

Lack of sleep, chronic stress, living from test to test, academic pressure, encounters with death may trigger previous loss/grief, intense peer competition, no time to nurture the self and recuperate, isolation during residency, student debt, working with constantly changing teams of residents and physicians, intensive time commitment, worry about finding time to start a family, and so on.

 According to Nanette Gartrell associate clinical professor of psychiatry at UCSF the most intense period of distress occurs “during the third and fourth years, when students rotate through the hospitals and clinics.”

The unspoken attitude or code for the students is that since they are the “healers” they should deal with it and just be able to cope. Talking about depression has been taboo for decades—a culture that is only now slowly changing.

There is also the disillusionment that can result from discovering that practicing medicine isn’t quite what one expected it to be.

This, surely, must contribute to the depression rates and general stress of med students, altering their outlook for the future in some dark ways.

One of the students Rosenthal interviewed found herself thinking:

“Man, this life isn't exactly what I imagined it would be, and now I'm stuck and have all these debts. I don't like what I'm seeing in the hospital; that's not how I want to practice medicine.”

Given that Bad Pharma has long had the reigns of the medical system, it is not surprising that students should experience a jarring clash between idealized expectations and the grim reality of everyday allopathic medicine with its perennial allergy to non-toxic, non-invasive EFFECTIVE remedies.

Mendelsohn’s observation decades ago was that fear is the primary psychological attribute of a doctor.

Given what medical students are put through in their training, this now seems unsurprising.

Fears encountered by prospective (and actual) doctors include fear of failure, fear of law suits, fear of missing a diagnosis, fear of misdiagnosis, fear of their authority being undermined, fear of peer disapproval, and fear of having to “find honest work,” as Mendelsohn cynically put it.

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In return for swallowing the bitter pill of fear, doctors—as the Priests of the Church of Modern Medicine—have been given the reward of arrogance, which eventually all too often turns into contempt and disregard for their fellow human beings. Why should a doctor who toiled through medical school for all those years suffer the recalcitrance, rebukes, or suspicions of the uninitiated?

Mendelsohn believed the resentment (based in fear) that doctors feel for each other when they are medical students is eventually transferred on to patients when they do finally secure their own practice. 

Outsiders become the biggest threat to doctors once they are out of the competitive environment of medical school. The entire system of “education” and training breeds a unique complex of neurosis, comprising arrogance and underlying insecurity.

One can only imagine the horror felt by, for example, a medical doctor who has specialised in oncology as the realisation dawns that the “cut, poison, burn” paradigm is essentially a gigantic Rockefeller fraud designed to generate profits off unsuspecting people seeking help, and that far humbler, safer methods are being used by the unwashed masses to heal themselves without a doctor’s intervention (cannabis oil comes to mind).

In at least one survey, some 60 to 70% of doctors said they would avoid chemotherapy if they had cancer. Doctors themselves succumb to cancer with monotonous regularity - their medical theology and applied interventions clearly do not protect them.

While there are measures being introduced by various medical schools to mitigate stress on medical students and assist them in self-regulating their moods (mindfulness training for instance), “sleep hygiene,” nutrition, and other lifestyle factors, they fail to address the underlying toxic and corrupting influence of the medical industry which shapes the basic experience and course of medical education. 

Having student support groups in which people can share their feelings is a small step in the right direction, as is mindfulness training, if we want to have empathic, functional doctors who actually listen to their patients. Courses in listening skills would also be highly recommended. Medical students would benefit for decades after attending, just as an example, a Landmark course, the basic foundation of which is the art of actually listening and genuinely connecting with people through vulnerability.

However, these measures would still do nothing to address the outdated and flawed medical dogmas and rituals in medicine that students eventually are obligated to employ in their professional capacity, nor do they address the overarching process of indoctrination that misleads students into the arrogant attitude that allopathic doctors are not just healers - but the only true healers at that; the Chosen ones who have the answers.

The reality is that most doctors are damaged and/or burned out by their very medical training, a problem compounded by the lack of up-to-date information on the most effective healing methods, and a prohibition against actually using those methods (lest they lose their license).

Real world results tell us this a dangerous and toxic brew not just for doctors but those they will be treating.

Perhaps this is partly why when doctors go on strike mortality rates in hospital DROP, as my colleague and podcast guest Dawn Lester of

Dawn’s Writings

shows HERE.

“Physician, heal thyself.”

Start with thy mind……

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About Me/Brendan:
Host of Truthiverse podcast. Author of the epic, “The Grand Illusion: A Synthesis of Science and Spirituality — Book 1.” Founder of The Truthiversity 📽

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