When I completed eight years of medical school education, pediatric residency, and one year of a pediatric fellowship in 1991, I reflected on a beautiful and successful medical education and training in Western medicine. Children with fevers, headaches, and aches and pains would be prescribed over-the-counter medicines (e.g., acetaminophen, non-steroidal anti-inflammatory drugs (NSAIDs), and pharmaceutical drugs) to make their symptoms go away. Children who presented with ear pain, sore throats, constant runny noses, congestion, and coughs, would get over-the-counter medicines, decongestants, antibiotics, inhalers, steroids, or even surgery, to relieve their symptoms. Children with enlarged tonsils and adenoids blocking their airways, day and night, could be immediately cured with surgery: a surgery that helped improve their persistent symptoms of congestion, mouth breathing, snoring, and sleep apnea, as well. Rashes, eczema, wheezing, and allergies were conditions that required treatment with pharmaceutical medicines, steroids, antibiotics, and allergy shots, to make the symptoms disappear. Families with children with more serious conditions like autoimmune diseases, collagen vascular diseases, endocrine disorders, psychological and psychiatric issues, and neurological disabilities could rely on a myriad of pharmaceutical interventions to help make symptoms go away. And lastly, the growing desire to protect children from serious bacterial and viral infections paved the way for more pharmaceuticals, many more generations of antibiotics, and, of course, injections.
After these eight years, I was well equipped with the tools to become a great medical doctor as I went forth into practice with a summary of the dominant themes from my medical school education and training.
1) Children don’t need to have symptoms. They don’t need to get sick or stay sick for long.
2) Symptoms are bad; having no symptoms is good.
3) Symptoms of illnesses can and should be treated and suppressed.
4) A quick fix to treat symptoms is possible and more desirable.
5) Children do not need to stay home from school for long, and parents don’t have to miss much work. There is no time for children to be sick.
6) The suppression of illness symptoms with pharmaceuticals and injections is the standard of care in Western Medicine, and no other approach to addressing symptoms could be effective.
7) ‘Don’t just stand there, do something’ is how medicine is practiced so children’s symptoms disappear as quickly as possible.
8) Children are sick because they have an infection. Fever means children have an infection.
9) Children are sick because they catch ‘something going around.’ Something from outside their bodies invades them and gives them an infection, requiring pharmaceuticals.
10) Children stay sick because they have a persistent infection resistant to pharmaceutical treatments.
11) Repeated cycles of pharmaceutical treatments are necessary when symptoms of illnesses continue to return.
12) Children get sick because their immune systems are weak.
13) Children need to have their immune systems boosted/strengthened if they are sick.
Children simply develop chronic illnesses. These chronic illnesses just happen. Pharmaceutical treatments are needed to manage their symptoms.