I concur. Most while thinking they are helping are more concerned with masking apparent symptoms as opposed to trying to actually trying to heal. The more drugs they push, the more kickbacks they get. The more they mask, the more the disease migrates to another locstion. It assures that they have a steady stream of willing customers.

Most doctor in my experience work on the dictums of Renewable Descarte. They reduce the body to a vlockwork, and treat each organ as just a gear or coh in a machine. If it gets broken, cut it out. Don't treat the whole person and distill it down to what is really happening in the body. Everything is inter-related and not an independent gear or spring.

I totally agree that the US medical systems has lost it's way. I remember as a child our family doctor came to our house when I was sick.

Last month I had a standard procedure done. I arrived fifteen minutes prior to my appointed time and completed paperwork including waivers. There were over a dozen people stacked up waiting. They took us in on about 5 minute intervals. More people were arriving at the same pace as people were called through the door into the operation area. After forty or so minutes they called me back. I walked through the door and saw eight stalls with curtains. I was herded into one of them and processed through changing clothes, IV insertion, and signing more waivers. Within minutes I was wheeled into another stall where I was given a general anesthesia. I woke after the procedure in another room with eight stalls where I was given my clothes and asked to get dressed. Within a few minutes I was approached by a doctor who said everything was fine then he left. Then someone else ushered me out the back door where my ride was waiting. Total time from entering the front door to going out the back door was about two and a half hours. Total face time with a doctor was about one minute.

Within my lifetime I dropped from being a kid who justified a home visit to being herded through a dehumanizing process built for maximum efficiency and profit.

How much worse can the US medical system get?

I disagree. I have a significant amount of trust in my Doctor and in the doctors at my local hospitals.

But then again, I'm in the UK and we have much less interference from big pharma in our public health service than you do over the water.

Most don't give a damn about helping anyone, they just want customers.

I share your view and contempt. Soon, I think, insurance companies might be able to actually deny paying for a procedure if it was self-inflicted or medical orders were not being followed precisely, If that occurs then Doctors will have even greater control of us. I won’t have it. Frankly, life isn’t that precious to me.

The problems caused by the iron grip of Big Pharma on the medical profession are longstanding, and go far beyond greed by physicians.

In the 1940 Ernst Lubitsch romantic comedy film "The Shop Around the Corner" there is a joke about a doctor being a "pill pusher". So the problem goes back at least that far.

In 1949, 6 years before the Salk vaccine, Duke University Medical School graduate Dr Frederick Klenner published his clinical research in which he described curing all cases of acute polio and other viral illnesses with large amounts of intravenous vitamin C. This momentous publication has been ignored for 69 years now. [nutri.com]

Big Pharma has now categorized the use of their drugs as "evidence-based medicine", and brainwashed the current generation of medical students to believe that prescribing drugs is the only correct way to practice medicine.

I assume that eventually truth will triumph over falsehood in medicine, but I no longer expect it will be in my lifetime.

I work for the NHS (and a university) here in UK as a senior clinical practitioner and really resent this post. Not one of my medical colleagues does their job for money! I earn more than most junior doctors and believe you me they work bloody hard! It takes 13 years of training to become a consultant in the UK and doctors are expected to constantly undertake CPD...I know, I contribute to some of this training. I have sat with more tired, anxious junior doctors who feel unable to meet the needs of their patients than I care to remember. It is illegal for medical staff to receive monetary knock backs...we don't even get nice pens anymore. What I'd suggest is if you don't like your doctors...don't go!

I’ve got so little for everything medical?but even less for insurance!!!

As I age, however, I find I need to go more and more. It sux but I have to consider the alternative (and I’ve finally realized there is no afterlife!)

If anyone needs confirmation about the state of Big Pharma go take a peek at the drugs lined up for pickup at the local Walgreens, Walmart, CVS.....it’s tragic!