Dr. Vernon Coleman gives us his thoughts on the corruption of the medical profession by the pharmaceutical industry since the 1970s. This corruption has not only destroyed the medical profession’s reputation but it has also led to doctors doing more harm to their patients than good.
Modern medicines, he says, are not designed to cure. Neither are they designed to kill. They are designed to keep patients alive, but ill. Ill enough so that patients require yet more pharmaceutical intervention.
The traditional commitment of doctors to treat patients with respect and dignity has been lost. Doctors now prioritise money over patient care and make more errors due to a lack of knowledge about their patients.
Let’s not lose touch…Your Government and Big Tech are actively trying to censor the information reported by The Exposé to serve their own needs. Subscribe to our emails now to make sure you receive the latest uncensored news in your inbox…
I have been traversing the sometimes treacherous foothills of middle age for some time now and with my 80th birthday looming I have to admit, at last, that I have arrived on the very threshold of my middle years – the time of life that marks the end of riding a bike with no hands, climbing trees and guzzling six chocolate Easter eggs and a bottle of dandelion and burdock without suffering unpleasant gastro-intestinal consequences. Walking sticks, hearing aids and other aids to survival are barely more than a decade or two away. My hair has largely absconded, and I am so long in the tooth that if I were a horse, I’d be considered for the knacker’s yard rather than the 3.30 pm at Newbury.
And so, although it sometimes seems that I have spent my life sweeping leaves on windy days, it seems appropriate to look back on sixty-odd years of my relationship with medicine and to summarise some of the things I’ve learned.
Today, I confess, I live in a small community called Hope, which is perched on the very edge of a global desert known as Despair. Everyone I know has a horror story to tell about doctors and nurses. Unionised doctors and nurses will doubtless dismiss this article as nothing more than the tiresome ramblings of someone who thinks it was better then. Well, I’ve got news for them: it was better then.
I qualified as a doctor in the early 1970s but by then I had already become aware of the extent to which the pharmaceutical industry had taken control of the medical profession as a whole, and the medical establishment in particular. I had written a number of articles bemoaning this relationship when I was approached by a London literary agent who wanted to know if I was interested in writing a book on the subject.
The book I wrote, `The Medicine Men’, was published in 1975 by a small publisher called Maurice Temple-Smith, who mostly published well-reviewed, slightly academic books. I remember well that he worked out of fairly cramped offices opposite the British Museum. A narrow wooden staircase led up to a few small rooms which were full of teetering piles of books. The offices could not have possibly belonged to anyone other than a publisher. Just a few yards away, there was a shop selling tricks for magicians. It was rumoured that Tommy Cooper was reputed to be a customer and could be found in there trying out new tricks. I peered through the window every time I passed but never saw him. Maybe he was tucked away in a back room.
`The Medicine Men’ caused quite a storm. It was the first book anywhere in the world to draw attention to the unhealthy link between the medical profession and the pharmaceutical industry. The early evening BBC news programme in the UK devoted between 15 and 20 minutes to the book, the Scientific Book Club produced an edition and Arrow published a paperback a year later. There were several foreign editions, including an Italian edition, which I remember only because when I was told what the advance was going to be, it seemed a great deal of money. Sadly, when the lira were converted into pound sterling, the end result was less dramatic than I had first hoped. The Guardian newspaper bought the serial rights (for £100, I seem to remember) and there were reviews everywhere – including in most of the national newspapers. Not surprisingly, the medical journals (reliant as they were, and are, on massive drug company advertising budgets) were less than enthusiastic about `The Medicine Men’. I didn’t expect them to behave any differently. After all, in the book, I had pointed out that a profession which takes its instructions from an industry can hardly be called a profession at all. Medicine is, I argued, merely the marketing department for the pharmaceutical industry. Medications are designed not to cure but to keep patients alive, but ill. A patient who is cured is, like a patient who dies, a profit centre lost.
Not surprisingly, every effort was made to silence me. A representative of a major drug company offered to pay me to go on a massive lecture tour. (The thesis was, presumably, that it would have been difficult for me to attack my sponsor. Moreover, accepting drug company money would have rather damaged my credibility.) In a television studio in Manchester, a doctor representing the British Medical Association told me, with undisguised malice, that my book was so libellous that I would be made bankrupt by all the drug companies I had offended. (I rather spiked his guns by pointing out that I had used my entire royalty advance to buy libel insurance and that the libel lawyer who had insured me had gone through the book line by line to make sure that it was safe to publish.)
Doctors and drug companies have for years claimed that the increase in life expectation which has taken place since the 19th century is due to work done by the medical profession and the pharmaceutical industry. While I was still a medical student, I realised that this was a lie. There has been an increase in life expectancy, but this has nothing to do with new drugs or new surgical procedures.
In the 19th century, deaths among babies and infants were common. Whole families were wiped out by infectious diseases and by malnutrition. Improvements in the provision of clean water supplies, the provision of better sewage facilities (and keeping the two apart) and the availability of more and better food all helped reduce infant mortality rates. (Anyone who has never heard of him should read about Dr. John Snow, who was almost certainly the most significant member of the medical profession since the Renaissance. It was Snow who removed the handle from the Broad Street pump in London and thereby halted a deadly epidemic of cholera, caused by drinking water which was contaminated by sewage. And it was Snow who persuaded Queen Victoria to be anaesthetised while giving birth. Naturally, both incidents were controversial and opposed by the medical establishment.)
And it was the reduction in infant mortality rates which improved life expectation. If a baby dies before its first birthday and a woman dies just after her 80th birthday, then they reached an average age of around 40 years of age before dying. The reduction in infant mortality which characterised the 19th century was the reason for the apparent increase in longevity in the 20th century. Look at the figures and you will see that a young adult alive in 1910 had almost as good a chance of celebrating his 80th birthday as a young adult alive in 2010. Modern medicine, in all its well-publicised glory, has had very little effect on life expectation. Only the ignorant and the dishonest claim it has.
The main single advance in medicine has been the (accidental) discovery of penicillin and other antibiotics. The discoveries of insulin, steroid hormones and a few other pharmaceutical products made a difference. But most of the essential and useful discoveries were made in the first half of the twentieth century. Since then, the pharmaceutical industry has produced very little of consequence. Vaccines have been incredibly profitable for drug companies and a disaster for patients. There has been no heart drug as effective as digitalis (from the foxglove) and no pain killers as useful or as safe as aspirin (from the willow tree) and morphine (from the opium poppy).
On the other hand, the practice and management of health care has become incredibly complex, bureaucratic and expensive, and patients are provided with much poorer care than their parents, their grandparents and their great grandparents. In the UK, the National Health Service (“NHS”) has far too much money but most of it is wasted on administration, meetings, paperwork and pointless regulations. Trade unions and disciplinary bodies seem to me to be little more than outposts of the drug industry and seem to serve their interests rather than the interests of patients.
Those in Britain who think the NHS saved the poor should think again. Health care before the birth of the NHS was better for everyone. GPs charged their richer patients a guinea, their middle-class patients ten shillings or half a crown and didn’t charge their poorer patients at all. I’ve seen old accounts books which prove this. It is a fact which many find difficult to accept but there was far less discrimination before 1948, when socialised medicine was introduced, than there has been since then. (Two things did more damage to Britain than the Luftwaffe: the introduction of the NHS and the destruction of the railway network by Dr. Beeching.)
Today’s doctors work dramatically reduced hours (GPs in the UK work an average of 23 hours a week and claim that this is too much for their work-life balance). And many GPs have become increasingly reluctant to see patients at all. They refuse to take blood samples, to take blood pressure readings or to syringe wax from ears. (I found syringing ears an easy way to make patients happy in moments. Three minutes with a syringe and a bowlful of water, and I could cure deafness. Patients always left the surgery with a smile on their faces. Today, there’s a plethora of ear syringing specialists in business. They charge £60 or even more for the simplest and quickest of procedures. Doctors say they are too busy, but they aren’t. They are, I’m afraid, simply too self-important. They won’t do anything that they can’t do while sitting at home with a telephone on loudspeaker.)
It is difficult to see the reason for keeping general practice and I have no doubt that within a few years it will have gone. Students planning a career in general practice should study plumbing instead. There will always be a call for human plumbers (computers and robots won’t be able to deal with leaky joints and blocked loos with quite the same efficiency as a human plumber).
Both GPs and doctors working in hospitals now insist on practising virtual medicine – with patients being interviewed, diagnosed and treated via the telephone or an internet connection. Despite the fact that there is clear evidence that this type of lazy practice results in serious mistakes being made, doctors remain committed to virtual medicine solely because they find it more convenient. The needs of patients are now always in second place.
The diagnostic skills (and intuition) which used to be so common among GPs have disappeared. Sherlock Holmes was based upon the work of Dr. Joseph Bell, one of the first doctors to display real diagnostic and investigative skills in the practice of medicine. Today’s GPs have completely lost any relationship and understanding with their patients. No longer do patients think of a practitioner as “my doctor” – a part of the family. Today, if patients are fortunate enough to speak to a doctor on the telephone (or to actually see one in the flesh), they have to take pot luck with a trainee doctor they’ve never seen before, who knows nothing whatsoever about them and their medical history. The inevitable result is that doctors are making ever more errors. They know nothing about their patients, nothing about their work or their leisure. And so, medicine has become about money and nothing else. Today’s doctors earn far more than their predecessors and are constantly moaning and demanding more and more money because that is the only reward they get from medicine. There is no pride, no joy, no pleasure in the work they do. (It is salutary to remember that early in his career, while still in his early 20s but already a famous and successful ship’s captain, Horatio Nelson was so seriously ill that he had to convalesce in Bath for a year under the care of a celebrated physician called Dr. Woodward. When Nelson complained that the doctor’s fees were too low, Dr. Woodward replied: “Your illness, sir, has been brought on by serving your king and country and believe me, I love both too well to be able to receive more.”)
There is a bizarre assumption that change equals progress. That is nonsense. In medicine, almost all the changes of recent decades have made things worse.
Doctors used to regard it as axiomatic that they should treat all patients, however ill, however old, with respect and dignity. The traditional commitment was that doctors should be treated in the way that they would like their loved ones to be treated. That simple philosophy is now regarded as out of date and irrelevant. When I worked in a hospital as a junior hospital doctor, patients never starved to death. Today, it is commonplace for the sick and the elderly to die of starvation. The members of staff who distribute trays of food aren’t allowed by the unions to touch patients, and the nurses who are allowed to interact with patients consider themselves far too important to make sure that patients eat and drink. After the tray of food has set in front of the patient for half an hour or so, it will be removed, untouched and thrown away. The result is that thousands of hospital patients die of hunger and thirst. Every day. Doctors and nurses are now responsible for more deaths than all criminals and terrorists put together.
Things used to be very different in hospitals half a century ago. I never once saw a patient left alone if they needed help of any kind – such as dealing with a meal. As a junior doctor, I was even allowed to prescribe a glass of Guinness or a sherry for patients who needed an aperitif to stimulate their appetites. (Patients would enjoy their Guinness with a cigarette in the Day Room. I have no doubt that the Guinness and the cigarette did them far less harm and far more good than the drugs commonly prescribed today. Smoking in hospitals was still allowed after the millennium.) Each hospital had an almoner whose job it was to make sure patients’ worries were dealt with (she would arrange to cancel the milk and feed their cat for patients who were admitted as an emergency). Ward sisters ran their wards with a rod of iron. Cleaners would even clean under the beds in those days. And all the medical records were kept on the ward and supervised by a ward clerk. Staff wore crisp, clean uniforms and badges which clearly defined their roles. Patients could easily tell if they were talking to a Sister, a State Registered Nurse, a State Enrolled Nurse, an Auxiliary, a porter or a doctor. At night, the staff walked quietly and spoke in whispers. When a telephone rang, a light would show. You never heard a ringing telephone at night. If a patient needed emergency care during the night, the screens would be drawn and doctors and nurses would work almost silently so as not to disturb the other patients. Today, it is not uncommon for hospital wards to be as noisy as railway stations. Patients cannot rest and often have to be drugged to get to sleep.
Nursing has changed direction and as a result, the caring and tender, loving care has disappeared from medicine. The caring went when nurses demanded the right to diagnose, to prescribe and operate and to be regarded as faux doctors. Nursing used to be a craft and a vocation but the demand for degrees, diplomas and professional status destroyed the delicate balance which existed between doctors, nurses and patients.
Murdering patients is now a commonplace activity in hospitals everywhere. It is legally permissible to withhold treatment from patients who are considered too old to be bothered with. Staff often put ‘Do Not Resuscitate’ notices on patients’ notes so that they aren’t treated if they develop an infection. And emptying hospital beds is routinely done with the aid of a “kill shot” consisting of a deadly cocktail consisting of a benzodiazepine and morphine.
Just a few decades ago, general practice was very different. In the 1970s, I did not have an appointments system, so patients never had to wait more than an hour or two to be seen. Patients would turn up at the surgery, give their name to the receptionist, sit down and wait. No one had to ring up to make an appointment. A district nurse attached to each practice would attend to dressings and so on. Patients who did not feel well enough to visit their doctor could ask for a “home visit” and their GP would see them in their own homes. It was even possible to arrange for hospital consultants to see patients in their own homes. GPs were on call 24 hours a day, seven days a week and were available on bank holidays (including Christmas Day). It was normal for GPs to admit their patients directly to hospital when urgent treatment was required.
Tragically, decent older doctors (many still in their prime) were forced out of medicine by the General Medical Council’s absurd, bureaucratic, utterly pointless and unpopular revalidation scheme – a scheme which seemed to me to have been designed to drive decent doctors out of medicine and to do nothing for the care and well-being of patients.
Today’s doctors, who do not visit their patients at home and who no longer deal with emergencies of any kind at any time, miss out a great deal. You can learn a good deal about your patients and their susceptibility to illness when you know how they live and what they do for a living. Seeing patients in their living room or their bedroom dramatically improves the relationship between doctor and patient. And doctors can learn a good deal about themselves (as well as their patients) when they visit them at home in the middle of the night and take on the responsibility for making a diagnosis and initiating life-saving treatment. There are no professional joys in a doctor’s life which match that which a GP feels when driving home at 3.30 am, having just saved a patient’s life with an injection of steroid or adrenaline, or having just successfully treated a child with an ear infection and, having arrived to hear a screaming child and anxious parents, left a sleeping child and calmed parents. Modern GPs know none of that. It is no wonder that for them, the practice of medicine is all about money.
No branch of the medical profession, and no profession, used to have a better relationship with the public than GPs. But that relationship has gone forever. The newspapers are full of appalling errors of judgement, missed diagnoses and uncaring, seemingly determined incompetence.
When the covid vaccine was being promoted with extraordinary enthusiasm, doctors lost their medical licences simply for questioning the usefulness and safety of the vaccine. It was subsequently shown that those doctors who questioned the value and safety of the vaccine were absolutely correct to do so, since the covid vaccine is now widely recognised to be one of the (if not the) most toxic and dangerous pharmaceutical products ever marketed. The General Medical Council has still not apologised or reinstated the doctors who were wrongly deprived of their licences.
The end result is that it is quite impossible to see how medicine can be seen to have improved since the 1970s. But I can think of a good many ways in which health care has deteriorated massively. Ambulances used to respond to a call instantly and would be at a patient’s home within five or ten minutes. If I needed to call an ambulance for a patient, I would just wait for the crew to arrive. They would always arrive in minutes. Accident and Emergency (“A&E”) departments in hospitals saw patients within minutes. There were never any long queues. I worked in A&E departments many times. (A&E departments were called casualty departments in the 1970s).
Indeed, it is not difficult to sustain the argument that health care today (in 2026) is worse than it was in the 1950s. There have been few real improvements in dental care, in eye care or in any other branch of medicine. Those who defend the system are usually self-proclaimed experts who live in a parallel universe and think they are entitled to comment because they read an article on medicine in an old copy of Reader’s Digest magazine and watched a YouTube video made by someone with O-level woodwork. The truth is, however, that the great majority of NHS staff now admit that they would not recommend that relatives or friends sought treatment in the place where they work. Indeed, most NHS staff who can afford to do so pay for private health insurance. Most health organisations offer private health care to their employees.
There are many causes for the decline in the quality (and, indeed, the availability) of health care. The sheer, unadulterated greed of medical practitioners; the grotesque ambition of nursing leaders to be credited with controlling (and belong to) a profession with a higher status than that traditionally enjoyed by hands-on nurses; the fragmentation of all the health professions into more and more sub-specialities; the uncontrolled growth in the number (and power) of bureaucrats and, in the UK, the advance of socialised medicine.
But the single most important change has come in the way that the medical establishment, in all its forms, has come under the control of the pharmaceutical industry. It is absolutely no exaggeration to say that the medical profession is now entirely “owned” by the drug industry. I was right to warn of this in my book `The Medicine Men’ in 1975. It is the drug industry which has promoted the use of vaccines and the conversion of large swathes of the population into chronic invalids.
It has long been drug company policy that a patient cured or killed is a profit centre lost. The ideal patient is one who remains ill for life (and, therefore, in need of permanent medication) while the ideal drug is one which never cures, doesn’t kill too often and which produces a number of non-lethal side effects which can be treated with other pharmaceutical products from the company’s range.
The relationship between the pharmaceutical industry and the medical profession has, of course, been sealed with money – vast quantities of it. Medical journals are among the richest of all publications (their advertising rates are absurdly high) and doctors’ organisations are awash with drug company money. Many charities enjoy drug company support, too, and I fear often that their loyalties lie more with their commercial benefactors than with the people they are supposed to be helping.
Under the auspices of the drug company, the assumption is that anything that isn’t perceived as entirely “normal” (whatever that is) must be abnormal and must require treatment.
In a good world, drugs would only be prescribed when the upside of their use exceeded the downside. But that simple rule was ignored long ago. Drugs widely used in the alleged treatment of dementia and depression are often worthless, and a worthless drug, which doesn’t do what it is supposed to do, will, through its side effects, inevitably do more harm than good.
Drug companies and doctors, with the help of patients’ groups (often sponsored by the drug industry), have succeeded in creating a whole new range of illnesses which can, of course, be treated with drug company medication. Psychiatrists make the mistake of assuming that they know what “normal” is and what it looks like. With extraordinary arrogance they have built a professional (and a bonanza for the drug industry) on the assumption that everyone is in some way mentally ill. Patients have aided this massive deceit because they know that if they are labelled as disabled then they will be entitled to receive massive cash payments from their government. The menopause used to be regarded as a normal part of life for women but it is now officially an illness. Women going through the menopause, or simply approaching it, are officially designated disabled and are entitled to all sorts of perks – including, for example, the right to work from home when they wish. (As a result, thousands of hospital nurses are being paid to work at home.) Naturally, drug companies are making a fortune selling often dangerous and lethal products for the “treatment” of menopausal women. And 12% of all children in the UK are now officially disabled and their parents are entitled to claim huge regular payments. Indeed, the new middle class in the UK consists of parents who are both unemployed, and claiming benefits, and who have three children all officially labelled as disabled in some way and all receiving regular financial support.
New diseases, new diagnoses and expensive new treatments are appearing daily. Autism spectrum diseases are endemic and yet experts admit that most of the diseases in this spectrum don’t exist, don’t need treatment or have been wildly exaggerated. Nevertheless, vast mountains of potentially dangerous drugs are prescribed for these conditions. Most adults now take regular medication, though most of them do not need it. And most take additional medication in an attempt to counteract the side effects which have been produced. We are rapidly approaching the point where most children will be taking prescribed medication – often for non-existent disorders.
Asthma and food allergies have been dramatically exaggerated. Colds and flu (which could mostly be prevented if people took supplementary vitamin D in the winter months when there is little sunshine) are so feared that patients line up to be vaccinated. Disappointments and ordinary stresses are now dignified with diagnoses of “depression” and sufferers insist on being given powerful drugs and free money instead of going to work. Vaccines have been developed for every condition imaginable and are being injected without adequate testing nor with any idea of the possible short, medium and long-term consequences. The evidence we have shows that vaccines do more harm than good. The toxic covid-19 vaccine was, and is, the most dangerous pharmaceutical product ever produced and has, without doubt, done more harm than any other prescribed substance. The covid-19 vaccine damages the brain as well as the body and does great harm to the immune system. And yet although the evidence proving that the covid-19 vaccine doesn’t work and does massive harm, the majority of doctors are still giving it to all their patients – including pregnant women and children. (The combination of the damage done by the entirely unnecessary lockdowns, introduced in an absurd attempt to prevent the spread of the annual flu, and the covid-19 vaccine will take millions into early dementia.)
Today’s doctors have deliberately ignored the wisdom they could and should have inherited. Hippocrates, once the Father of Medicine, but now largely forgotten, knew that lifestyle played a crucial part in maintaining health. He knew that “we are what we eat.” The medical profession, led by an unscrupulous drug industry, has persuaded us that health is a matter of luck, genes and environment and that we can only maintain or recover good health with the aid of medication.
I have absolutely no doubt that widely promoted statins, chemotherapy and weight loss drugs will do infinitely more harm than good. The naïve and the innocent may find this difficult to believe but the medical profession has been bought paid to destroy health care as we used to know it. Doctors are following an insane script. You’ll find all the evidence you need in my book `The End of Medicine’.
Infectious diseases often affect individuals with weakened immune systems or those (such as long-term hospital patients) who are suffering from malnutrition. Medical students are taught next to nothing about nutrition, most do not know of the well-proven link between the consumption of red meat and the development of cancer and most have absolutely no knowledge of the importance of vitamins. In autumn and winter months doctors offer flu vaccinations to their patients when they would be far more effective in helping to prevent winter infections if they handed out vitamin D supplements. Studies have shown that the number of people suffering from the flu (and dying from it) is much smaller if vitamin D levels are maintained. Hippocrates advised his patients to understand the effect that the seasons have on health.
The majority of individuals of pensionable age are deficient in numerous essential substances, including and especially vitamin B12. Many are deficient in iron and other vital minerals. And how many doctors understand just how vital a sense of purpose is to an individual’s well-being? Learning, sharing, being creative, showing compassion and enjoying new experiences will all expand the brain and prevent dementia.
What a sorry state medicine is in today. No one wonder doctors are widely regarded as useless and best avoided.
Note: `The Medicine Men’ and `The End of Medicine’ are both available via the bookshop on my website.
About the Author
Vernon Coleman, MB ChB DSc, practised medicine for ten years. He has been a full-time professional author for over 30 years. He is a novelist and campaigning writer and has written many non-fiction books. He has written over 100 books, which have been translated into 22 languages. On his website, HERE, there are hundreds of articles which are free to read. Since mid-December 2024, Dr Coleman has also been publishing articles on Substack; you can subscribe to and follow him on Substack HERE.
There are no ads, no fees and no requests for donations on Dr. Coleman’s website or videos. He pays for everything through book sales. If you would like to help finance his work, please consider purchasing a book – there are over 100 books by Vernon Coleman available in print on Amazon.
The Expose Urgently Needs Your Help…
Can you please help to keep the lights on with The Expose’s honest, reliable, powerful and truthful journalism?
Your Government & Big Tech organisations
try to silence & shut down The Expose.
So we need your help to ensure
we can continue to bring you the
facts the mainstream refuses to.
The government does not fund us
to publish lies and propaganda on their
behalf like the Mainstream Media.
Instead, we rely solely on your support. So
please support us in our efforts to bring
you honest, reliable, investigative journalism
today. It’s secure, quick and easy.
Please choose your preferred method below to show your support.
Categories: Breaking News, UK News