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Medicine in the Stranglehold of Profit
The Threat to the Art of Healing and the Social Fabric, and the New Orientation Needed for Truly Looking After Health
Paperback
September 2023
9781915594006
More details
- Publisher
InterActions - Published
5th September 2023 - ISBN 9781915594006
- Language English
- Pages 96 pp.
- Size 5" x 8"
$15.95
In this book, Dr. Thomas Hardtmuth chronicles the takeover of the medical field by private companies and corporations over recent decades, bringing a profit motive into healthcare—to such an extent that there is growing alienation between the helping professions and their own identity. Human care, attention, and appropriate help are hindered increasingly by the specifications and supposed constraints of economic logic and rationality.
One-sided profit orientation has brought not only greed and corruption into the health field; in addition, Hardtmuth illustrates graphically how the resulting income inequalities and inappropriate application of economic rationality to culture in society is correlated with illnesses in people, as well as “illnesses” in society and nature.
Fear is the fuel in the medical business—a Zeitgeist has us in its grip, against which only one thing can help—independent thinking, courage, and reflection on the cultural value of a civil society based on mutual support.
In the afterword, Dr. House takes this further, describing how the separation in society of economics, politics, and culture (which includes healthcare and education) urgently needs to be established, and how a number of initiatives have recently been started that point in this direction.
This book spares no punches, making an outspoken clarion call to wake up in the face of the horrendous consequences of the unholy politico-economic alliances currently prevailing in society, especially as these manifest within all aspects of medical provision and insidiously pervade a great deal of medical prescribing. Generating, supporting and connecting to new initiatives divorced from insidious and self-perpetuating economic incentives and collusions – as outlined so successfully in this book – offers some hope of re-establishing transparency, accountability and ultimately sanity in civilisation.
Dr. James Dyson
We’ve known for years that something is fundamentally awry with modern medicine: this thought-provoking book sheds much light on why this might be so, challenges taken-for-granted narratives about healthcare, and describes innovative initiatives spawning all over the world that are pioneering a better, post-pharmaceutical approach to human health and well-being. Essential reading.
Dr Christian Buckland, Chair, United Kingdom Council for Psychotherapy
The first half of the book will have you shaking your head in disbelief; the second half vigorously nodding in agreement. Thomas Hardtmuth M.D. accurately diagnoses the problems in our current healthcare system and, thankfully, offers us some cures. With this glorious new book we are inching ever closer to a radical reorientation of healthcare and healing.
Dr. Leah Gray, Founder of Empower. Heal. Nourish.
Thomas Hardtmuth, MD
Dr. Thomas Hardtmuth, MD, born in 1956, is a physician and freelance writer. He studied medicine in Munich and works as a senior physician specializing in thoracic surgery at the Heidenheim Clinic. Dr. Hardtmuth lectures and leads seminars in the field of medical and anthropological issues. His publications include Das verborgene Ich: Aspekte zum Verständnis der Krebskrankheit (The hidden “I”: Aspects of understanding cancer), 2003 and Denkfehler. Das Dilemma der Hirnforschung (Errors in thinking: The dilemma of brain research), 2006.
