OPINION: Your medical freedom is under renewed assault

Dr. Benjamin Rush was one of the American Founding Fathers and a champion of medical freedom, which is the concept that any individual has the right to determine what kind of medical intervention he or she will permit to be done to their body. It is their God-given right.

There are two main aspects to medical freedom: patient autonomy and freedom for discussion of ideas and differing opinions. The Hippocratic Oath that physicians take is to always have the best interests of the patient first and to be free from outside influences

The erosion of the physician-patient relationship took a huge leap with the passage of President Lyndon Johnson’s Social Security Act Amendments, which created Medicare and Medicaid.

To get enough votes, he promised that the government would not dictate treatment, set prices or interfere with the physician-patient relationship. As is usual with broken or ignored government promises, it now sets the prices it’s going to pay, decides what it is going to cover —which means dictating treatment for Medicare and Medicaid beneficiaries — and dictates what doctors can do.

In January, the government instituted race as the basis for rationing of medical care. It isn’t only the government that does this. In the 1980s, the managed-care model took off. In this forum, administrative bean counters with no medical training intruded into all aspects of medical care by deciding what would be covered, what treatment doctors could provide and how many treatments a patient could receive, resulting in managed non-caring.

We all can identify with the intrusion of these third-party payers, whether government, managed-care companies or private insurance.

The intrusion became worse with the Affordable Care Act of 2010. All of the above were increased and previous anti-kickback statutes that Congress had enacted were exempted.

This allowed pharmacy benefits managers to be paid to deny doctor-prescribed medicines for patients. These pharmaceutical middlemen received a kickback for switching the prescribed medicine to something cheaper, to enhance the middleman profits and still be cheaper for the company. That may sound good for the short run, but it results in physicians having allotted time per patient and directed to practice cookbook medicine with minimal variation for an individual patient’s needs.

This is so evident in the hospital protocols for COVID-19 patients because of huge (up to $100,000) financial incentives for ventilators and Remdesivir.

The other part of medical care freedom is that of free discussion and exchange of ideas.

Those who don’t want patients to have choice in their care have tried to block non-approved ideas by labeling everything as “misinformation.”

An October 2020 email from National Institutes of Health Director Francis S. Collins to National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases Director Anthony Fauci reads: “There needs to be a quick and devastating published take down” to discredit the Great Barrington Declaration and disparage its authors, such as Nobel laureate Dr. Michael Levitt and 60,000 medical and science co-signers.

Within a day of Collins’ email, social media started censoring searches for the Great Barrington Declaration and other information. Fauci’s and Collins’ repeated attempts to control the narrative and punish dissenters traces back to the gain of function research at the Wuhan Institute of Virology.

As I have mentioned previously, it should be very worrisome for patients that many medical doctors and physician assistants, some even retired, are being harassed by state medical licensure boards for discussing alternative treatments with their patients or publishing different ideas. Without free discussion of ideas, the scientific method for determining truth will be blocked.

It is sad to see this happening in the United States. It is easier to discredit a physician challenging the narrative than to debate him or her. There are many physicians and nurses who are speaking up at great risk. God bless them.

As has happened many times and is now continuing in medicine, logical but innovative concepts are ignored or ridiculed. In the mid-1800s, Dr. Ignaz Sammelweis in Europe and Dr. Elizabeth Blackwell (the first American woman physician) in America both were labeled as the problem and ostracized for implementing handwashing between autopsies and delivering babies and other surgical procedures. It took nearly a century before medicine and science endorsed that vitamin C prevented and cured the awful disease of scurvy.

Some political and medical autocrats state that in this modern time of “advanced medical science,” the choice is too important to be entrusted to the individual. People such as Dr. Peter Hotez of Baylor College of Medicine believe the medical freedom movement is fueled by what he labels “misinformation” and is dangerous.

Dangerous to whom? From their viewpoint, it is blocking the imposition of control of individuals. For the individual, it is using information to make informed and consensual medical decisions, as enforced by the Nuremberg Codes and Helsinki Accords.

These have governed medical practice since the atrocities of World War II but have now been discarded. However, a legal filing to the International Criminal Court on Dec. 6 accused Fauci, EcoHealth Alliance President Peter Daszak, Bill and Melinda Gates and 12 others of numerous violations of the Nuremberg Code. These included various crimes against humanity and war crimes as defined by the Rome Statues, Articles 6, 7, 8, 15, 21 and 53.

Previously, medicine has never treated any illness, such as diabetes, cancer or blood pressure, at the end of the illness. Initially patients with COVID-19 were sent home without treatment and told to return if they got worse, such as becoming cyanotic. This process disobeyed basic medical principles of early treatment. When has that ever before been considered good medical care?

(Some of the information for this commentary is from the Sept. 22 Epoch Times article “The Erosion of Medical Freedom,” and other Epoch Times materials published on Dec. 29-Jan. 4, Jan. 5-11, and Jan. 19-23.)

Eggleston, M.D., is a retired ophthalmolgist. His email address is rjegglestonmd@gmail.com.