Healthcare Has a Munchausen by Proxy Problem

They keep us sick so that we need them

Once upon a time …

In 1844, a young Hungarian doctor named Ignaz Semmelweis noticed an odd trend in the obstetric clinic where he worked: doctor-attended births were over twice as likely to result in the mother’s death than midwife-assisted births. Since the mortality rate in the doctors’ ward was over 18%, this was a considerable number of women who were getting infections and dying after giving birth.

Semmelweis developed a theory: doctors often went directly from the morgue to the birthing chamber. Perhaps if they washed their hands in between, it would reduce the risk of infection! Against the objections of his supervisor, Semmelweis persuaded the hospital administrators to require both doctors and midwives to use a chlorinated-lime hand-wash prior to delivering a baby.

In the first year, the mortality rate dropped from 18.27% to 1.27%. In the second year, it dropped to zero. Semmelweis had invented antisepsis. That’s a happy ending, right?

Wrong.

While many independent physicians applauded and embraced Semmelweis’s innovation, the medical authorities did not. Even after ten years of successful had-washing results, the editor of Wiener Medizinische Wochenschrifta, a prominent Viennese medical journal, wrote in 1857 that “it was time to stop the nonsense about the chlorine hand wash.”

For the rest of his life, Semmelweis fought to save patients from needless infection and death. Offended by the suggestion that their behavior was endangering patients, the medical establishment ignored the mountain of evidence and brought their full power to bear against him, turning him into a bitter and broken man. Eventually, a group of doctors had Semmelweis forcibly committed to an insane asylum, where he was beaten bloody and, in a cruel twist of fate, died two weeks later of an infection.

Meet Munchuasen

What happened to Ignaz Semmelweis is deeply revealing of a pathology that is intertwined with the conflict of interest at the heart of medicine: only sick people need doctors.

Not only does this create perverse incentives that discourage permanent cures, it promotes a pattern of behavior similar to what psychologists call Munchausen Syndrome by Proxy.

Named for the jolly tall-tale teller Baron Karl Friedrich Hieronymous von Munchausen, Munchausen Syndrome is a “factitious disorder” in which a person lies about being ill. Munchausen by Proxy (MBP) is when somebody else lies about a person (the proxy) being ill.

In the most extreme cases, the proxy (victim) of MBP endures years of painful, invasive tests and treatment, often becoming truly sick and sometimes dying.

MBP is usually associated with parents, but consider the following attributes of a person with MBP, and consider how many of these apply to the medical profession.

• Observation of new, ill-defined symptoms, or symptoms that do not correlate with any diagnosis.

• Tendency to become upset and evasive when questioned.

• Desire to have extensive and numerous procedures performed on the proxy.

• May actually believe that the proxy is ill, and that the treatment is necessary.

• Receives attention, money, or emotional gratification as a result of “caring for” the proxy.

If you selected “all of the above,” you win the Semmelweis prize. Typical doctor behavior is virtually indistinguishable from Muchausen by Proxy disorder.

This is not an indictment of individual doctors, by the way. Remember, many of Semmelweis’s colleagues had the humility and integrity to recognize the value of hand-washing. It was the medical system itself that opposed accountability and improvement.

Iatrogenic healthcare

Iatrogenic disease is a medical term that means “symptoms induced in a patient by a physician's activity, manner or therapy.” Worldwide, iatrogenesis is the fifth leading cause of death. While medical authorities may argue that developing countries with poor hygeine skew the average, the fact is that over 100,000 Americans die every year from correctly prescribed drugs, and over two million adverse drug effects are reported.

To be clear, we’re not discussing overdoses or incorrect prescriptions. These are 100,000 people killed by the exact drugs, in the exact dosages, that were supposed to help them.

Incidentally, those statistics predate the COVID-era, so they don’t even include the disastrous interventions that started in 2020. Additionally, since reporting iatrogenisis reflects poorly on the physicians and hospitals involved, there is reason to suspect that incidents are substantially under-reported.

In 1975, Ivan Illich wrote, “the medical establishment has become a major threat to health.” Close to 50 years later, that threat has become perhaps the single greatest danger to humanity. Individual doctors may sincerely want to heal their patients, but the healthcare system wants to keep them sick, and resists any suggestion that they are to blame.

Many of us are watching in horror as rates of “Sudden Adult Death Syndrome,” autoimmune disease, mental illness, and virtually every other clinical ailment skyrocket. The direct cause of this wave of misery is almost certainly the COVID pseudo-vaccines, but the indirect cause is the healthcare system itself.

Like a parent with Munchausen Syndrome by Proxy, the biomedical authorities will force us into treatment, even if it kills us. The sicker we get, the more they can justify further treatment, higher payments, more attention and adulation, and greater authority over our lives.

The sad truth is that COVID wasn’t the first step in the destruction of public health by the healthcare system. It was only the latest.

It is now up to us to determine how we make it the last.