Robert Yoho MD [Yoho MD - Butchered by “Healthcare”: What to Do About Doctors, Big Pharma, and Corrupt Government Ruining Your Health and Medical Care

For a podcast introduction, scan this QR code:

Every surgeon carries within himself a small cemetery, where from time to time he goes to praya place of bitterness and regret, where he must look for an explanation for his failures.

Rene Leriche, Philosophy of Surgery, 1951

I n the summer of 2013, when I was 61, I had two women in their 30s die in my surgical center. I sent them to the emergency room, but nothing worked. It was my place, so I was responsible. It was the worst period of my life. I felt guilty and was sleepless, and my wife thought we would have to give up our practice.

I did not learn why it happened until the autopsy reports came back fully six months later. One woman had an embolus of fat blocking her lungs. This occurs unpredictably, and there is no way to prevent it.

The second had a high local anesthetic blood level. We inject this drug into fat to decrease pain, and after liposuction, we sometimes transplant the fat back into breasts and buttocks. This may have raised her levels and caused her death, but there was no way to be sure.

To occupy my mind, I started reading medicine twenty to thirty hours a week. My original training was as a generalist, but for decades I had studied only cosmetic surgery.

I began with the Prozac-class antidepressants, which I had prescribed since their invention. It stunned me to learn that they hardly worked and were often damaging. I read further and found that other psychiatric medications produce irreversible brain and health problems. Doctors have been trained to pass them out like jelly beans.

I learned that many drugs are given for wholly theoretical, even speculative benefits. Many are damaging. I consulted people for cosmetic surgery who were taking ten (10) of these at once. I began to see how medical corporations had done this to us.

I read about back pain. Most of it goes away on its own, but doctors had been thoughtlessly prescribing opioid painkillers and turning many patients into struggling addicts. Low back surgeries are the most expensive and some of the least effective procedures in all medical care, bar none. No one admits this even to themselvesnot the surgeons, the hospital administrators, nor the surgical centers owners. The enormous profits short-circuit everybodys judgment.

I also realized that over the past three decades, younger and younger people had been getting heart disease, obesity, and diabetes. I wondered if healthcare, particularly medication use, might be the cause. I thought about Peter Van Ettens line, In this insanity of healthcare, the patient always loses. I saw that we were breaking them on a medical torture-wheel.