Thursday, April 07, 2011

Why Mistrust Politics, Religion and the AMA?

Because there is a common failing in the Big Three.

And it’s not because the practitioners are evil bastards out to corrupt humanity, which also may be true.

I was reminded of the nonsense going on in the Big Three when I read Gail Collins’ op/ed column (“Medicine on the Move”) in the New York Times this morning. Collins was commenting on the fact that the medical community has gone from falling down in awe of estrogen therapy for women, to loathing estrogen therapy, and now is back to a guarded love for estrogen therapy for some women, sometimes.

Likewise, the AMA has gone from loving calcium supplements to despising calcium supplements, from castigating eggs to absolving eggs of cholesterol crime, from loving mammograms to suspicion regarding mammograms, from hating coffee to prescribing it for elders.

And why are doctors so vacillating and so drug-therapy happy? Yes, of course, the whole AMA is in bed with the pharmaceutical industry, but that’s not the real reason its aim is to have every man, woman and child in the USA under a doctor’s care and on drugs.

The reason is: The people in the medical community want to make their patients and clients happy. They want to keep their jobs.

Which is exactly the reason you cannot trust anyone in politics--they want to keep voters voting for them.

And religious leaders want you in their religious edifices on the sabbath in order to keep their jobs.

Not that it’s necessarily a bad thing for these providers to want to keep on being providers. Who doesn’t want to keep his job so that the dough keeps coming in, so that the rent gets paid, so that food gets bought so that kiddies and constituents get fed?

But still…most of us have harbored the hope that people in politics, religion and medicine have a higher calling.

Forget about it. It’s not true. Get over it.

Keep fighting the good fight in politics. Keep on believing in God. Go to the doctor when you must.

But don’t for one minute think that the guys who profess to be the loyal messengers of religion, politics and medicine are in any way a cut above the rest of us as far as being vulnerable to lying, cheating, flattery and corruption.
   
These guys simply want to keep their jobs. Just like you and me.