Things modern medicine has been certain about, in chronological order, since 1900:
- That cigarettes were healthy.
- That margarine was healthy.
- That asbestos was inert.
- That lead in petrol was inert.
- That thalidomide was safe in pregnancy.
- That radium was a tonic.
- That DDT was safe to spray on children.
- That lobotomies cured depression.
- That morphine was non-addictive.
- That OxyContin was non-addictive.
- That mercury in dental fillings was inert.
- That cholesterol caused heart disease.
- That saturated fat caused heart disease.
- That eggs caused heart disease.
- That red meat caused cancer.
- That seed oils were heart-healthy.
Modern medicine has, in each case, eventually been forced to reverse the previous certainty.
It has not, in any of the above cases, apologised.
The certainty was, in each case, supported by the published consensus of the time.
The consensus of the time was, in each case, wrong.
The certainty currently in force, on the same model, is, on a longer view, statistically very unlikely to be entirely right.
The doctor reading the next reversal, in 2045, will be the one prescribing the current consensus today.
He will not call you.
He will not write to apologise.
He will, in most cases, have retired by the time the reversal is published.
The reversal will be in the journals.
The damage will be in the patients.
The patients, by then, will be your children.
Begin reading the journals yourself.
In 1910, an educator named Abraham Flexner, who held a bachelor's degree in classics and had never studied medicine, was sent by the Carnegie Foundation to inspect every medical school in the United States and Canada.
He visited 155 of them. His report recommended closing most.
What happened next is the foundation of every health system you know today.
John D. Rockefeller, the founder of Standard Oil and at the time the richest man on Earth, saw an opening. Standard Oil's refining produced vast quantities of coal-tar and petrochemical byproducts. Those byproducts were, conveniently, the raw material from which most early synthetic pharmaceuticals could be made.
Through his General Education Board and the Rockefeller Foundation, Rockefeller directed approximately $50 million, around $10 billion in today's money, into American medical schools. The money came with a condition. The schools had to teach allopathic, drug-based medicine. Anything else was defunded.
Within twenty-five years, more than half of America's 155 medical schools had closed. By 1935, only 66 remained. The schools teaching homeopathy, naturopathy, herbalism, eclectic medicine, and what we would now call nutrition and lifestyle medicine were starved out of existence. Five of America's seven Black medical colleges were closed. Most of the women's medical colleges were closed. The surviving schools all taught one paradigm. They still do.
The petroleum byproduct became the medicine. The medicine became the curriculum. The curriculum became the doctor. The doctor became the prescription pad.
The model that emerged has one structural feature no regulator can legislate away. The pharmaceutical industry earns its revenue when you take a pill. It does not earn revenue when you stop needing the pill. A cure is a one-time transaction. A chronic condition is a subscription.
This is not a conspiracy theory. It is on the income statement. From 2017 to 2024, the average net profit margin of pharmaceutical manufacturers was 23.2%, roughly ten times higher than every other sector of the drug supply chain. The system is performing exactly as designed.
A century after Flexner, the population of the wealthiest country on Earth is fatter, sicker, and on more medication than at any point in human history.
The grass-fed beef, the egg from a hen you can name, the butter, the morning walk, the eight hours of sleep, are all unpatentable.
That is why no oil baron funded a hundred medical schools to teach them.
Most people do not realize that many of our hospitals began as homeopathic institutions. Not only did they shut that down, they ridiculed it into near oblivion. There is more than one useful system of medicine. We should have reasonable access to them all.
The important takeaway is probably not “everything modern medicine says is false,” but understanding how incentives, funding, institutions, and dominant paradigms shape what gets taught as unquestionable truth.
