2023-08-18 15:30:00
TRIBUNE/OPINION – In a book published in 1998 by Éditions Trois Fontaines, Medicine, religion and fearnoted at the time by The Doctor’s Daily, I had shown how modern medicine, Pasteurian, was modeled very closely on the model of the Catholic religion, both in its beliefs, its practices and its structure. Pasteur was indeed a committed Catholic who endeavored to make his medical theories stick with the dominant beliefs of the time… even if it meant taking great liberties with certain convincing scientific facts.
Because of this very close parallelism between Pasteurian medicine and the Catholic Church, in the space of a century:
the doctor gradually took the place of the priest, the search for health replaced the quest for salvation, the hope of physical immortality (by clones, genetic manipulation, etc.) took over the expectation of eternal life, vaccination has acquired the same initiatory status as baptism (and its refusal arouses the same fears), and we even see the hope dawning that a universal remedy will save us tomorrow from all illnesses, like the Savior (for Christians) redeemed all the sins of the world.
Similarly, “charlatans” are prosecuted today like the “heretics” of yesteryear, and the “illegal practice of…healing” too often condemns therapists whose sole fault is to treat their patients successfully by methods other than allopathy (in other words, classical medicine, editor’s note).
“Outside official medicine, no health”is the motto of the mainstream medical faith.
Finally, the alliance between the medical power (council of the order of physicians and pharmaceutical lobby) and the government has also been modeled on that which once existed between the Church and the State, thus no longer leaving individual the freedom to preserve his health or to seek treatment in accordance with his own convictions.
“But medicine is a science and not a religion”some will imagine.
Medicine is an art
In reality, medicine has always been above all an art. It is as much about science and techniques as it is about beliefs and interpretation, since it applies to living beings and not to machines. Proof of this is that if physics and chemistry are the same all over the planet, medicine – like religion – is the subject of extremely different conceptions and practices from one culture to another. Because beliefs, precisely, variable from one place or time to another are mixed in.
Each medicine offers a specific interpretation of the human being, the causes of his illnesses and the care to be provided: each patient must therefore be able to remain free to adhere or not to his system of medical beliefs, and to the practices which result from it, according to their own beliefs and experiences.
In other words, allopathic medicine is only one medicine among many others. It has its logic, its theories, its beliefs and its practices. It has its successes, but also its failures. We owe him many remarkable contributions, from the simple taking into account of hygiene to anesthesia, through the developments of reconstructive surgery or antibiotics.
But it also has its limits, its blind spots, its dogmatism and its rigidity, resulting today in an alarming increase in iatrogenic diseases, allergies, autoimmune diseases and infertility, a weakening of overfed populations drugs (hence the appearance of increasingly resistant microbes) and a worrying increase in disabilities and deaths resulting from the marketing of hastily tested drugs.
Consequently, it is no more justified today that this medicine should benefit from such support from the State (or even dictate to it the decisions to be taken in matters of public health) than to imagine the State still linked to such church or religion as before. Chinese medicine, Ayurvedic medicine, herbal medicine, aromatherapy or naturopathy, to name but a few, are – when practiced by duly trained practitioners – comparable in effectiveness to allopathy: superior in some areas, inferior in others.
Have free choice of medicine
Consequently, each individual must henceforth be able to have the free choice of his medicine, that is to say his medical beliefs, and not be forced to be treated by the partisans of a medical credo to which he does not not adhere.
In the same logic, the reimbursement of medical expenses should also be reviewed. It is in fact unjustifiable that certain allopathic treatments, which are sometimes ineffective or toxic, be reimbursed, whereas the patient is out of his own pocket for treatments in acupuncture, homeopathy, herbal medicine or others, which are often less expensive and whose effectiveness has been widely demonstrated.
It is therefore high time to demand the establishment in France of true medical secularism. It is high time that every citizen could freely choose how to treat themselves, with therapists duly trained in their specialty. Most medicine today has schools with exams worthy of the name. They often have behind them decades, if not centuries of practice to justify their relevance and their results.
Allopathic medicine has no more advantages over other therapies than the Catholic Church had over other religions. After being ridiculed, misunderstood, denigrated, many religious beliefs around the world have ended up getting the recognition and the place they deserve.
Today, each of us is freely Buddhist, Hindu, animist, follower of shamanism, Sufism, spiritualism… or simply atheist. In a similar way, we are witnessing a growing recognition of ethnomedicines, of therapies hastily judged “primitive”, whose complexity, depth and effectiveness we discover belatedly. To say nothing of all the new forms of therapy that are now emerging, drawing their inspiration both from certain cutting-edge developments in science and from a deeper understanding of the subtle causes of disease.
State neutrality
The dominant medical church – this Pasteurian religion that is allopathy – must now take the place that is truly its own, namely a therapy like any other, with its qualities and its defects, a medical obedience to which patients must to be able to freely subscribe if they want to, but that they can also freely leave to prefer another (or practice it jointly), more in line with their convictions, if such is their desire.
As for the State, its role, as in matters of religion, is not to bind itself or to submit to a particular medicine, but to remain neutral and watch over the health of citizens, leaving them free to choose the treatment method(s) that suits them best, from the wide range of proven methods that exist today. (It goes without saying, it should be emphasized, that it is no more for allopathic medicine to determine the validity of other medicines than it was for the Catholic Church to assess the “value” of other religions. )
So today, just as we once managed to separate religion from the state, let us demand in the same way and with the same determination this separation of “official medicine” and the state, which alone can guarantee sustainably our freedom and preserve our individual and collective health: public health.
*Olivier Clerc is a writer, translator, author of numerous books including Medicine, Religion and Fear – The Hidden Influence of Beliefs, ed. Three Fountains, 1998.
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