Rising from the Dead
By Suzanne Humphries
Here we have a very detailed view of the medical industry from the inside. This book gives us not just a look at one niche but a broad view of Dr. Humphries’ trajectory from medical education to internship to practice—including practice in big cities like New York and Philadelphia as well as smaller cities in Maine and small towns. Dr. Humphries did her internship in the Bronx, where you see everything and lots of it. This book, which is primarily an autobiography, gives us an uncensored account of the medical system.
This system can be very impressive when dealing with emergencies that require surgery and repair of seriously damaged bodies. When you have a chronic illness, on the other hand, an American hospital can be the most dangerous place in the world. Not only is the medical system ignorant and incompetent, it is arrogant and corrupt.
Dr. Humphries gives examples of the different types of people working within the medical industry. A lot of workers (nurses, doctors, attendants) are really doing the best they can. A very small number of them are willing to speak up when bad things happen. Most stay quiet because they know that doctors who try to be different will face medical boards, lose licenses and likely lose their careers. That is bad enough under most circumstances, but when you have a million dollars of debt, that hurts. Then you have the sharks who are simply in it for the money, and they couldn’t care less about anything else. Humphries has entertaining names for some of the characters she had to deal with: Dr. Nosebest, Dr. Pokerface, the Savage, the Thunderbird, Nurse Hatchett and the Racist Bastard From Georgia (RBFG).
Humphries eloquently states that “the medical education system censors and massages information in order to train very bright people into captive automatons.” After they pile up an enormous amount of debt and finally start their practice, doctors notice that every day is spent scrambling from one patient to another, prescribing drugs that don’t work—and few are ever cured. The system harms and even abuses many more than it helps. The health of many is seriously damaged, not improved. This bothers those who still have some conscience, but they are trapped by that big debt hanging around their necks. Between the horrors they see every day in a hospital and their helplessness to do anything about it, a surprising number of doctors commit suicide every year. Half of all doctors want out. Our economic and medical system is very clever at ensnaring slaves through debt.
Dr. Humphries discovered that many hospitals routinely vaccinate every patient who is admitted. This not only complicates diagnosis of what is really going on but can often do significant damage. As a nephrologist (kidney specialist), she noted that kidneys were frequently completely shut down by vaccines. When a health provider brings this up with hospital administrators, they either don’t get it or don’t care.
How did we end up with such a system? This is scientific medicine, right? Science is always objective, always improving itself, right? Well, yes and no. Science well done is a good thing, but scientists and doctors are human beings and are not really any more objective than anyone else. Some of them elevate science to the level of religion (scientism). Some believe that if it can’t be measured, poked, prodded, dissected or vivisected, then it isn’t real. Such scientists can be very intolerant and even hostile to opposing viewpoints that don’t oppose physical science but go beyond the limits of that science.
In the Summer 2017 Wise Traditions, Dr. Tom Cowan wrote a fascinating article called “The Adrenal-Heart Connection.” One particularly interesting point he made concerned the paradigm shift that occurred in the 1600s,after William Harvey declared the heart is just a pump, and that this pump is what drives circulation. Cowan says that this paradigm shift ended vitalism as a theory. Since then, any suggestion of a spiritual reality has met with skepticism among the medical masters. Cowan says, “Nowadays, if you dare to mention something about ‘life forces’ or ‘souls’ or anything of that kind, you will be derided by the medical community.”
Beliefs have consequences. As you think, so you do. If you look at people and see nothing more than biochemistry and physics—nothing more than a complex machine—you will treat them accordingly. You will view each one as a collection of parts that you can repair or replace just like with any machine. There is no need to be concerned about inflicting emotional or physical pain on a machine. Humphries reports seeing that play out many times. Science without any soul is an extremely dangerous beast.
While that attitude is pervasive, not all doctors think that way. Dr. Humphries recognizes that materialist flaw, and a large part of the book talks about her spiritual growth and how important it is in general. She found it is also important to beware of spiritual con artists.
Our culture celebrates diversity until we encounter diversity of thought. Different thinking is then labeled irresponsible or even terrorism. The news media love to overwork the word “extreme” any time they encounter a politically incorrect or unpopular idea. Whenever something is said to be “divisive,” the implication is that independent, different thinking is wrong. We should all be good little sheep and think like the rest of the herd, or at least keep our mouths shut.
Humphries has noticed that the most ignorant are often the loudest and most intolerant of differing opinions. As I was writing this review, a comment came to the Weston A. Price Foundation from someone who even admits in the first sentence, “I don’t have the energy to do a deep dive into all there is on the Internet about vaccines.” This person then goes on to criticize the Foundation’s position on vaccines. When did it become so fashionable to have strong opinions on things you know nothing about?
Dr. Humphries’ stand on vaccines is well-documented elsewhere, including in her book Dissolving Illusions: Disease, Vaccines, and the Forgotten History and on YouTube. She includes valuable insights in this book as well. She observes that most doctors don’t realize that there is a system for reporting adverse vaccine reactions (the Vaccine Adverse Event Reporting System or VAERS). Many doctors who do know about it never use it. Humphries found out why when she started reporting the many adverse reactions she saw first-hand—she was treated like a nut job. So the next time you hear that there is little or no evidence linking vaccines to illness, you will understand. There is a mountain of evidence, but it might be hard to find in official sources when the system actively discourages anyone from reporting that evidence.
There are enough good points in the book for me to go on much longer, but I have to stop somewhere. You may think this is extreme, but this book was riveting and my thumb is UP.
This article appeared in Wise Traditions in Food, Farming and the Healing Arts, the quarterly magazine of the Weston A. Price Foundation, Fall 2017.
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This is an extremely well-written, insightful, and painfully accurate analysis of the medical establishment, which no-doubt includes many hundreds, and thousands of practicing MD’s, who are primarily practicing medicine to maximize their profits (to get out of debt, to begin with) – – – but, if they can survive to the end of that process, to subsequently become filthy rich, often by practicing an utterly distressing amount of “prescription drug peddling” and other, almost equally misguided practices, while rampantly disregarding the entire field of nutrition, which in the old-fashioned view of life, was for many generations, and still is even now, upheld by a goodly portion of practical and well-informed people, as the true foundation for health. What is even more disturbing, is the extremely widespread addiction of a vast majority of humans, to sugar and fast or convenience foods, almost all of which are too often overly-processed, nutrition deficient foods, &/or carbohydrate-based foods, like bread and its many allies: pastries, doughnuts, crackers, cookies, cakes, potatoes, pastas & most desserts.
And to compound the above with a disproportionate dependence on red meat and commercially raised chicken, the overall outlook becomes even more alarming. Not that many of these foods can’t be very valuable, but the downfall is an all too common disregard for a healthy balance.