Family
Rather than giving the family tools for repairing relationships, stock definitions freeze the thinking processes in which people can come to understand each other. - Mendelsohn
As soon as you allow a single-natural process to be corrupted or "improved' by treating it as if it were a disease, the whole organism of living processes can begin to rot. - Mendelsohn
The prostitute replaces the wife, as the doctor replaces the entire constellation of the family. The weaker the family the greater the opportunity for professionals. - Mendelsohn
The more Mendelsohn I read, the more I realise I need to read more Mendelsohn.
He’s another one of those special beings that left us too soon.
The chapter below from Confessions of a Medical Heretic was published in 1979. It’s frankly unbelievable how clearly he saw things, over 40 years ago.
The direction of all the trends he identified has not changed.
The rot within the institution of Medicine has further metastasized and spread.
It is indeed a Theology.
The foot soldiers of this war machine have all been given more authority and power by the State.
The priests of this Church all demand and receive lower bows.
For me, the chapter below, among other things, is a reflection and meditation on my own journey as a parent and how I fared as an enemy combatant. Battles won; battles lost.
Mendelsohn is acutely aware of The Church’s masterful use of language to hypnotize and create self-doubt.
The assault on the family is an assault on the mother, made easier by assaulting the father and getting him out of the way.
Separation is a strategy repeated at every opportunity.
I suspect this chapter could, in fact should, be read and reread each year and you would learn and “get” something new and different from it each time.
For the teacher arrives when the student is ready.
With thanks to Dr. Robert S. Mendelsohn.
[Reminder: You can listen to these articles using the audio option in the Substack App.]
Chapter 5 - Holy War on the Family
If you were set on destroying the family, you couldn't do a better job than Modern Medicine. That the family is disintegrating has been common knowledge for years. One child out of every six is now raised by a single adult. Every other marriage is doomed.
We've even debased the word 'family" itself. When I say family, I mean the entire collection of blood relatives: children, mothers, fathers, grandparents, aunts, uncles, and cousins. By referring to this as the "extended" family, we attempt to ignore the harm done by having only one family in twenty living with more than two adults under the same roof. On the other hand, the experts gave us the term "nuclear family" to evoke all the positive images once associated with nuclear energy. That image never was any good. What's supposed to be at the core of the atomic family?
The parents? The children? Nothing? Calling the family "nuclear" prepares us for the explosiveness and instability that characterizes atoms in nature. When the nuclear family starts spinning off its individual members we can feel that it's actually fulfilling its destiny rather than frustrating it.
Schools and teachers are sometimes blamed for the destruction of the family, but although teachers and educators are surely part of the army of professionals attacking and crippling our families, the generals are the doctors. The doctors are the real leaders because without their sanction, without the blessings of Modern Medicine, none of the family destroying agencies could exist, let alone succeed. Furthermore, Modern Medicine's own Holy War on the family is more devastating and vicious than the schools ever could be.
Family medicine, for example, should mean the healthy influence of the family. To the doctor, however, family medicine is the necessary intervention in the family by the doctor for sacramental purposes. Any influence the family might have is less than secondary: it's useless and to be avoided. Most people think doctors stopped making house calls because they could see more patients in the office. The real reason is that doctors don't want to meet the family on its own turf. Not only can you cram more patients into an office, but you can isolate a person from the family's influence. It's that much harder for a doctor to control the situation and dissolve family ties when he's a guest in your house.
For his "medicine" to succeed, the doctor must impose his ethics and beliefs in place of the family's. He has to take over roles traditionally played by family members. Not only don't doctors share feelings, cultural traditions, and loyalties of family members, they also don't care what happens. If the patient dies, it's not a tragedy, because he or she is a patient -- not a son or daughter or mother or father or uncle or aunt or cousin. Doctors are carefully taught to distance themselves from their patients.
This distancing comes in handy when the doctor has to step in at times of crisis or stress and "take over." All religions institute sacraments or rituals at certain stressful moments in life that overwhelm us with mystery and tease us with hints of what life's all about, moments such as birth, coming of age, marriage, and death. Where other religions design these rituals to support the family, the Church of Modern Medicine aims only to disrupt.
I've already talked about what a dangerous place the hospital is. Modern Medicine has such arrogance that the hospital platoon is called the hospital "family!" No other modern religion gets away with what the Church of Medicine does routinely. No modern religion requires blood sacrifices, yet to get married with the doctor's sanction you have to give blood. Blood tests before marriage have little more than ceremonial value. As soon as any process becomes routine, nobody pays any attention to it. Labs make so many mistakes most doctors don't even bother to check the results. In one study, a lab intentionally sent back positive reports for venereal disease. Very few doctors repeated the test.
That blood sacrifice before a family is even allowed to begin is only a relatively innocuous symbol of the sinister rituals to come. When the third member of the family enters the picture the campaign intensifies. Now, where other religions are satisfied with reasonably unobtrusive ceremonies, Modern Medicine mounts a full scale attack by inventing a crisis out of a normal situation. By treating childbirth as a disease, the obstetrician makes his intervention indispensable. If obstetricians acknowledged the fact that more than ninety-five percent of births proceed entirely without complications, more than ninety-five percent of their services would be recognized as unnecessary. That would mean a lot fewer obstetricians -- as well as heathier families.
Instead, what we have is childbirth taking place in an operating room. Of course, it may not be a bad idea to have all hospital births occur in an operating room, since hospital births are a lot more dangerous. Babies born in the hospital are six times more likely to suffer distress during labor and delivery, eight times more likely to get caught in the birth canal, four times more likely to need resuscitation, four times more likely to become infected, and thirty times more likely to be permanently injured. Their mothers are three times more likely to hemorrhage.
Whereas primitive cultures make birth an event for the whole family to share in some useful way - even to the point of allowing the husband or the mother to assist at the delivery - modern medicine allows only the doctor and his assistants to attend. "Reforms" such as birthing rooms, husbands in the delivery rooms, and prenatal discussions of what the mother-to-be wants and doesn't want are little more than marketing come-ons. Once the obstetrician has you on his turf, he's in control. He demonstrates -- or flaunts -- his control by putting the woman through a series of debasing maneuvers. First she must have her vaginal area shaved, though it's been known since the 1930s that doing so prior to delivery in no way decreases and may well increase the number of bacteria present. Then the woman must put her feet in stirrups and assume a supine position again only to satisfy the doctor's will. The intravenous fluid connection to the woman's body ensures that the doctor can rapidly administer anesthetics when he decides they're necessary.
Already separated from her family and her control over her body (the doctor may even have decided when the event is to occur), the mother-to-be may be denied the experience of the event by being drugged senseless and memoryless. Of course the doctor may be forced to put her to sleep in order to perform his coup de grace: the Caesarean delivery.
One of the side effects of a Caesarean delivery sometimes doesn't show up for weeks or months after the birth: babies delivered this way seem to be more likely to become victims of child abuse. Mothers who give birth this way usually are unable to be with their babies during the earliest hours and days of life because it sometimes takes that long for the effects of the anesthesia to wear off. They're also uncomfortable from the surgery itself. Not only are the first important periods of maternal-infant bonding mangled by the procedure, but whatever feelings the mother does come away with are sullied by her disappointment and pain.
Of course, mothers who give birth normally or to premature babies also are entitled to have their first few vital hours and days with their new babies unsullied. Unless a new mother puts up a hell of a fight -- something not too easy to do after labor, delivery, episiotomy, and anesthesia -- her baby is immediately swept away to that concentration camp known as the newborn nursery.
Hospital regulations further isolate the family from the birth experience. Visiting restrictions break up the family by allowing the new mother only one or two visitors at a time. I don't know of a more divisive situation than having to choose among husband, mother, mother-in-law, father, father-in-law, aunts, uncles, and cousins. In addition, the hospital almost never permits sibling visitors, and when it does, it's from the other side of a glass partition. So much for togetherness!
Pediatricians are as determined as obstetricians to weaken the family. They start by making the new mother feel absolutely unequal to the task of looking after the welfare of her baby. Before the doctor even appears on the scene, the stage for submission is set by a platoon of pediatric nurses who incessantly badger the mother with dos and don'ts regarding every aspect of the baby's care. Of course, they're only following orders.
The first broadside the pediatrician delivers to the new mother-child relationship is his "advice" regarding the feeding of the infant. As if God made a mistake in not filling her breasts with Similac, the new mother is told that man-made formula is every bit as good for the baby as her own breast milk. Early in my own pediatric training I was taught that if a mother questioned whether she should breastfeed or bottlefeed, the proper answer is: "The decision is strictly up to you; I will assist you in whatever method you decide to use."
Of course, that answer is an outright lie. Bottlefeeding -- the grandaddy of all junk food -- wasn't then, isn't now, and never will be "as good as" breastfeeding. Human milk is designed for human babies, cow's milk for calves. The structure and composition of each is suited to the particular need of the intended recipient. Among animals switching milk sources -- say, for example, giving a calf sow's milk -- results in sickness and, often, death for the newborn.
The bottlefed human baby is substantially more likely to suffer a whole nightmare of illnesses: diarrhea, colic, gastrointestinal and respiratory infections, meningitis, asthma, hives, other allergies, pneumonia, eczema, obesity, hypertension, atherosclerosis, dermatitis, growth retardation, hypocalcemic tetany, neonatal hypothyroidism, necrotizing enterocolitis, and sudden infant death syndrome. From a scientific, biological standpoint, formula feeding cannot be considered an acceptable alternative to breastfeeding -- especially since more than ninety-nine percent of new mothers are perfectly capable of doing it.
Even premature infants should get breastmilk. When I had my pediatric training more than twenty-five years ago, I was strongly (and thankfully) influenced by one of the great nurses in the field of premature babies, Evelyn Lundeen. Miss Lundeen not only encouraged but insisted, that mothers supply breastmilk to their premies, even to those who weighed only two pounds. I can remember watching husbands deliver the bottles of milk their wives had pumped. There's no doubt in my mind that the premature infant fed breastmilk does much better than the premature infant fed formula. In my own practice I have discharged from the hospital many babies who weighed less than five pounds, all breastfed, of course, since now I won't accept a child as a patient unless the mother is determined to breastfeed.
Telling mothers that breastfeeding is superior to formula feeding is my recipe for eliminating a pediatric practice. If a pediatrician tells a mother the truth that breastfeeding is good and bottlefeeding is dangerous, it will lead to feelings of guilt on the part of the mother who chooses not to breastfeed. The guilty mother then will scurry off to a pediatrician who's willing to relieve that guilt by telling her that it makes no difference whether or not she breastfeeds. On the other hand those women who do breastfeed will have babies that never get sick. There goes the pediatrict practice!
You won't find many pediatricians who insist that a woman breastfeed her baby. Instead, you'll find what I call Pediatric Doublethink, the statement that breastfeeding is best, but formula is just as good. You'll find pediatricians who hand out free sample six-packs of infant formula to new mother's; you'll find pediatricians who insist that newborns waste their sucking reflex and energy on sugar-water bottles; you'll find pediatricians who push free "supplementary formula" kits on mothers who are breastfeeding; and you'll find pediatricians who discourage a mother from breastfeeding if her baby doesn't gain as much weight as the manual provided by the formula company says it should. You'll find pediatricians neglecting to inform mothers that infant formula can contain from ten to 1000 times as much lead as breastmilk; neglecting to tell a mother that breastfeeding protects her infant from all infectious diseases she has had or fought off through her immune system; neglecting to tell mothers that breastfeeding promotes better bone maturation and intellectual development; and neglecting to tell them that breastfeeding will help protect the mothers themselves from cancer of the breast.
Breastfeeding is better for the family, too. The bond between a mother and her child is secure and healthy when the mother breastfeeds. Not only does the sucking of the infant stimulate hormones that reduce postnatal bleeding and discomfort and cause the uterus to shrink back sooner, but it also gives the mother sensual pleasure as well. Bottlefeeding, however, gives the mother no such pleasure. It does make possible -- indeed necessary -- the sacred four hour feeding schedule, which does untold damage to all involved, in the name of "regularity."
Leaving the hospital and going home with her new baby doesn't protect the mother and family from the divisive onslaught of doctors. The parting advice of the pediatrician and nursery staff is likely to be something like, "Remember, if the baby cries, let him or her cry it out because crying will strengthen its lungs, and besides you want it to learn not to cry when it wants something." Now this piece of advice -- besides flying in the face of common sense -- ignores the instincts not only of the baby but of every mother I've ever talked to. God apparently made another mistake in having babies cry when they want something!
All the way down the line the doctor uses his authority to put the family at odds with its own instincts and traditions. Instead of trusting in the wisdom of accumulated experience, the family loses confidence in its own feelings and submits before the doctor's "education," his "certified wisdom" signified by his diploma and specialty papers. If you ask the doctor where it's written that a male pediatrician who may never have fathered a child and certainly never mothered one is a better source of information about the needs of a crying baby than the baby's own mother or grandmother, he'll most likely point to the framed diplomas on the wall.
Even though the young mother may spend only a few minutes a month with the pediatrician, a gang of experts endorsed by the doctor -- such as Doctors Spock, Salk, Ginott, and Bettelheim -- are prepared to confuse her thoroughly through the varying opinions in their books and articles. The young mother is totally without a defense against this barrage of advice since she has no confidence in her own thoughts and feeling and since she has been taught by the doctor(s) to reject her mother's and grandmother's advice as "old wives tales." Instead, she turns to the old doctors' tales and is left with her head spinning!
Since few American families live with or close to other relatives, the mother is physically removed from the solace and support her mother or grandmother could provide. My recipe for making a mother at least neurotic and at worst crazy is to put her in the house alone eyeball to eyeball with a new baby with only a gaggle of disagreeing experts to guide her through the crises of her first few months as a mother. This situation -- which is the most common one in this country -- can make a woman neurotic before the baby's a year old. (A father in the same situation wouldn't last a month.) Since there's no one to help her in the home, the woman tries to save herself by escaping from the home. In many cases, the strain on the husband and the wife is so great when they have only each other to look to as both the cause and the solution of their problems, that the marriage ends in divorce. Or, less drastically, the woman wastes no time finding a "fulfilling" job outside the home. Either way, the child is shunted off to a day-care center.
A woman's vision of fulfillment in a job outside the home is more often than not an illusion. Most jobs -- including those performed by men -- are not fulfilling in the least, but rather are dull, routine, mechanized tasks that mean only one thing: a paycheck. Few jobs are as fulfilling as homemaking and childrearing. Women do need and should cultivate activities inside and outside the home that will help them fulfill their personal identity. But precious few paying jobs do that. Even with the best of jobs, a working woman often finds herself juggling her many roles and finds that she has little or no time left for the things she cares about most. Not only must she work, but she also must adopt the goal-oriented attitude of men who compete for success, an attitude which in itself is unhealthy -- for men or women.
The goals of working outside the home may be illusory, but the effects on the family are real. Whereas children used to leave the home at age six, with day-care centers sprouting and mothers filling them as soon as they're allowed, we now have children "starting school" as early as age one! By day-care center I don't mean the old fashioned nursery school in which a child spent only a few hours. Meals were not served in nursery schools, and the child spent most of the day at home. Not so in today's day-care center.
In Europe day-care centers often are located in the same factories, shops, or offices as the mothers' jobs, or at least close enough so the mother can lessen the impact of separation by visiting the child and sharing meals. In this country, however, day-care centers are located too far away for mother and child to share any more than a quick goodbye before mother hustles off to get to work across town and returns tired and grouchy eight, nine, or maybe even ten "fulfilling" hours later.
At the day-care centers, the child is fed by strangers, not by its mother. What is meant by nature to be a subtle mechanism in which a child is nurtured by his or her family becomes instead a situation where the child is influenced at a crucial period in its development by strangers. Of course, to apply the veneer of education to the child s separation from the family, we now have academic departments dedicated to certifying experts in "early childhood education."
Many day-care centers provide breakfast, lunch, and dinner. I can remember most elementary schools twenty years ago had no facilities for feeding their students, but today school lunches are now a matter of course in every school district. Since lunches are now served on the premises, lunch periods have been shortened to prevent even the children who want to go home for lunch from doing so, even if mom is home. What we end up with is a situation in which the child spends more and more of his or her time with people who most likely don't share the same values, traditions, or ethics as the family. Since the children spend less and less of their most important developmental time with their family, they grow up truly "independent" of all, for better or worse, that their family holds dear -- and of the family itself.
All of this wouldn't be possible if doctors didn't sanction and encourage unhealthy notions of "independence." I'm reminded of the story of a young New York family. The husband told me that his wife had gone back to work when he had lost his job, but that be had just gotten another job. His wife was going to continue to work, but in a new job as director of a seven-story day-care center. Their three-year-old son was attending the same center. I told the father that I thought this was a good arrangement, since the child would have his mother reassuringly close to him all day. "Oh no," gasped the father, "I don't want him to be reassured. I want him to be independent." The father and mother had ensured their son's independence to the point of mapping out separate bus routes for mother and child on the way to the center.
I can't help wondering whether that father may not someday regret making his son so independent. After all, isn't dependence the proper business of a three-year-old? Behind that foolish young man I see a pediatrician somewhere, urging him to encourage independence among family members -- starting with the "let him cry it out" admonition -- while discouraging his independence from the doctor's intrusion in the family's responsibilities. The dependence between a mother and her child is the core and the model for a family's health-producing interdependence. Family members are supposed to depend on one another! We should celebrate a Family Declaration of Dependence every day.
When a child goes off to school, Modern Medicine enlists the help of teaching professionals to keep the family at bay. Not only is the parent's role as teacher usurped, but the parents are shunted off into meaningless activities such as PTA bake sales and carnivals. Parents are removed from the arena where the real battle for their children's minds is taking place. Clever tactics such as changing styles of teaching -- new math for one generation, old math for the next -- keep parents from playing a significant role in their children's education. They can't even help with the homework! Sex education the children receive in school more likely than not conflicts with the family's values. PTA meetings take the parents away from the family in the evenings. The kids start staying away more and more to attend extracurricular activities. Little by little, the gap between parents and children is widened.
When it comes time to deal with problems, parents are too confused and distant from their children to be effective. They've been robbed of any confidence they might have had at the beginning. Off to the psychiatrist! They've been successfully recruited for psychotherapy or the ministrations of some other chamber of the Church of Modern Medicine. This new team of experts gives the family just what it needs to solve its problems: a vocabulary. Parents are given a bag of words with which to describe their children: irresponsible, immature, hostile, resentful.
Children are given a bag of words to describe their parents: inhibited, repressed, over-protective, rejecting. Needless to say, these words are tossed about between family members like brickbats. Rather than giving the family tools for repairing relationships, stock definitions freeze the thinking processes in which people can come to understand each other.
By nature, psychiatry is family-divisive. Psychiatrists encourage people to say bad things about their relatives. If conducted properly, such therapy can release tensions between and within people and allow greater emotional mobility and health. But very little of it that's going on is very well conducted, because I see a lot of people going in for therapy and very few people coming out any better. How can you come out any better when the psychiatrist has you pegged even before you open your mouth? If you arrive for your appointment late, he'll say you're hostile. If you are early you must be anxious. And if you're right on time, you're compulsive! You can't win! When I see a married couple go to a psychiatrist for family counseling, I can predict with pretty good horse racing odds that they will end up getting a divorce.
The platoons of "helping professionals" that gang up on the family are disabling. They offer few tools to help a family stay together. Because they rob the family of its own tools, the family is left with no effective resources. It's no wonder that by the time the children reach college age they can't wait to get away from the house. Who would want to live in a house where the people were virtually unequipped to relate to one another in any way other than the mechanized, subject-to- the-whims-of-psychiatry fashion advised by magazine experts?
Nowadays, a college education is somehow less than it should be if the student doesn't attend a college at least a day's travel from home. Everybody, ideally, goes to school on the opposite coast. Midwesterners have two coasts to choose from. This wide separation between family members removes any vestiges of influence and leaves the child totally "free" to be influenced by peers and professors. If someone could show me how this does any good for either parents or children, I'd let the subject drop. In my experience, I see a higher rate of illness among first-year college students than almost any other social subgroup. They are more prone to depression, hypothyroidism, tuberculosis, rheumatic fever, infectious, mononucleosis, and menstrual disturbances. And, small wonder, their suicide rate is second only to that of American Indian children sent away from the reservation for high school.
None of this would be possible without the sanction of Modern Medicine. From one end of life to the other, the Church interferes and substitutes its empty ceremonies for the bonds and traditions of the family. Life is debased. As soon as you allow a single-natural process to be corrupted or "improved' by treating it as if it were a disease, the whole organism of living processes can begin to rot. Children once performed useful functions within the home. Nowadays their usefulness is related entirely to outside activities. The same fate awaits people when they reach old age. Older people are treated with contempt and swept out of the home into retirement "resorts" or rest homes. Why should they stay around the house? Their advice isn't respected, nor are their special talents and skills developed over a lifetime. Modern Medicine would much rather have old people separated from their families, their talents, and their respect. That way they provide a much better potential patient population. They get sick more often under the voodoo curse propagated by the Church," the curse of unavoidable debility in old age, the curse of the long steady decline to death. Not only is the person isolated from the family at the last moments of life, strapped and wired into the Intensive Care Unit, but sedatives and tranquilizers handed out by the family doctor at the funeral rob mourners of any emotional release they may get from crying. Even there, Modern Medicine, ever on guard against disruptive behavior, dulls the senses to rob participants of precious moments in their lives.
As Modern Medicine gets stronger, more forceful methods are used to attack the family. You have to submit to the Church in order to go to school. They won't let you in the door unless you can prove that you've received all the sacramental immunizations. Sooner or later doctors and some school districts are going to get really rough and go after people who refuse to have their children immunized. They'll simply declare the children victims of child abuse and remove them from the home.
This sort of violence already is going on. Lately, I've been involved in more and more cases in which my function as a physician has been to spring children from hospitals. The usual story is this: the child has a temperature of 103 or 104 and may have a throat or ear infection. He's taken to the hospital where the doctor sees that he's got a couple of bruises on his body. The social worker is called in, and after a few questions the finger is aimed at the parents. The child is hospitalized, presumably for his own protection. Then the parents have to find somebody who will testify that there is no possibility of child abuse and that the bruises are from some other cause.
At one time, child abuse was obvious to doctors. It consisted of children who came in with multiple broken bones. Today, that definition has been extended so that if you take a child into the emergency room and he or she has a few bruises you're immediately questioned by a social worker. With the thousands of empty beds in hospital pediatric units, it's to everybody's advantage -- except the family's -- to try to establish a charge of possible child abuse.
A mother I know had a baby and decided to leave the hospital right away because she didn't like the hospital and she wanted to breastfeed her baby. She went home and about a month later came back for a checkup at the hospital outpatient clinic. Her baby hadn't gained enough weight. The doctor said this was because of the breastfeeding and told her to stop breastfeeding immediately and put her baby on formula. She decided she didn't want to do that, so she continued to breastfeed. At the next month's checkup -- I don't know why she went back -- the baby had gained more weight but not as much as the doctor thought the baby should. He said it was a possible case of child neglect and ordered the baby hospitalized.
The mother called her friends in the La Leche League who had been advising her with her breast feeding. They got in touch with me, since I am a medical advisor to the League. I looked into the case and found that the woman had been doing a very good job of breastfeeding. What she was most concerned about now was that they wouldn’t let her stay with the child. By the time I was contacted, the child had been away from the mother for five or six hours. Her breasts were filling up. She was getting uncomfortable, but the hospital didn't care. They were feeding the infant formula. Things were reaching an urgent point, so I got in touch with the State's Attorney and within an hour the mother was allowed to go upstairs and nurse the baby. Next morning an emergency hearing was held and the child was released.
This sort of thing is not a rare incident. As long as Modern Medicine aids the State by sanctioning the State's attack on the family, the State lets Modern Medicine have all the power it needs to enforce its laws. I now warn parents to be extremely careful when they bring their children to a hospital emergency room because you never know what can happen once a doctor starts to examine a child.
I wonder whether certain elements of American society haven't always been out to kill the family. The very existence of America split millions of families around the world as the great waves of immigration filled our cities. Many of these immigrants, however, depended on relatives already here to help them over the difficult first months in the New World. The pioneer families certainly had to stick together, too -- although, once again, the initial leap into the wilderness generally split young parents and children from their older relatives who stayed behind. Since older relatives -- bearers, as well as symbols, of traditions carried over from "the old country"-- weren't around to maintain the traditions, subsequent generations lost touch with the "old ways" of doing things. The melting pot wasn't a melting pot at all: it was a sterilizing cauldron in which family ties and traditions were boiled away. When immigration was cut off after World War I, the stage was set for the war against the family to begin in earnest. Without fresh supplies of immigrants to maintain ties with families and their traditions, people could at last start not only to escape those traditions but to forget that they ever existed.
Modern Medicine took advantage of this situation to boost the development of pediatrics, my own specialty. During the first four decades of this century pediatrics had no more than a few thousand practitioners. But when World War II started, the country need women in the factories to take the place of men who had to go and fight. There was no way these women were going to be able to do that and take care of their children the way they had before the war. Oh, nurseries could have been set up in the factories to allow the mothers to do their patriotic duty and their biological duty as well. But instead, doctors simply denied the biological duty. The words baby- sitter," "nuclear family," and "mother surrogate" came into fashion during the war. Instead of saying that every child needed a mother, doctors said that every child needed a mother or a mother surrogate. That way, millions of Rosie the Riveters could join the war effort without a twinge of guilt over leaving their children in the care of strangers.
Since these mothers couldn't be with their babies for more than a couple of hours at the end of each day, breastfeeding became impractical. It didn't become any less biologically necessary or superior as far as the baby's health was concerned. But since it was impractical, doctors pronounced formula feeding to be not only the answer to a dilemma, the better of two evils (the alternative evil being not feeding the baby at all), but the equal of the only scientifically sound alternative.
Like the priest who blessed the hot dogs to save parishioners from the moral bane of eating meat at a Friday night church carnival, doctors gave their blessing to bottle feeding. Had they told the truth they would have advised women that all studies showed a higher mortality rate among bottle-fed babies. They would have told women the benefits of breastfeeding over bottle feeding. They might have, patriotically, thrown up their hands and admitted the dilemma while giving women the opportunity to make an informed choice, But they chose instead to subvert biology in favor of politics and power; They, in effect told women they didn't have to be responsible to biology, to nature's laws. While pediatrics grew in popularity and power, manufacturers of infant formulas -- some of whom also make drugs --grew into multinational super-corporations.
Modern Medicine has teamed up with these corporations to export the technology of infant nutrition all over the world. Actually, what they're doing is carrying on human infant sacrifices among vast numbers of people who have no way of defending themselves. In 1952, ninety-five percent of Chilean mothers breastfed their children beyond the first year. By 1969, only six percent did, and only twenty percent of the babies were being nursed as long as two months. This decline in breastfeeding -- and similar declines across the world -- has been brought about by doctors allowing salesmen from the formula manufacturers to go into the maternity wards and sell mothers on the "modern" way to feed your baby. Of course, free samples are distributed. Doctors carefully advise mothers that formula is as good or better than their own milk. No mother wants to be accused of being old-fashioned when her baby's health is at stake, and especially when the formula salesperson wears the same white coat that the doctor wears.
Many of these new mothers -- in fact most of them -- can't afford the extra cash to pay for infant formulas. They also may not have facilities for preparing the formula correctly. Nestle's baby book says, "Wash your hands thoroughly with soap each time you have to prepare a meal for baby." Formula also has to be mixed with clean water. Now in the United States or Europe, where every household has three or four sinks connected to a reasonably clean water supply, these directions present no problem. But in the underdeveloped countries where formulas are most aggressively marketed, it's a different story. In one investigation in Chile, eighty percent of the bottles examined bad high bacterial contamination. In Malawi's capital city, sixty-six percent of the households have no washing facilities at all. Furthermore, by the time the free sample runs out, the mother's breasts are dry and her pocketbook empty. She can't buy more formula so she may end up feeding her infant worse food. When we brag that our infant mortality rate is among the best in the world (which, for all our bragging, it isn't), we should stop and think about the role Modern Medicine plays in keeping infant mortality rates in underdeveloped countries artificially high.
Modern Medicine attacks the family for the simple reason that if you want to convert someone to a different religion, you first go after his family ties. Don't listen to your mother or your grandmother. Those are old wives tales. Listen to us. We are taught not to depend on anyone but the professionals -- the doctors. With the family influence gone, what I call the vertical transmission of values from one generation to the next is gone, too. All you're left with is horizontal transmission of values through the influence of peers and other contemporary sources of information such as research studies, news media, and the entertainment-advertising industry. And doctors.
Health maintenance organizations (HMOs) are a good example of the kind of medical institution that thrives on the breakdown of the family. In an HMO, people pay a set fee every month and have virtually unlimited use of the Church's "health maintaining" facilities. Besides the fact that those facilities' ability to maintain health is most doubtful, the fact is that the family itself is the best health maintenance organization there is! Where do HMOs flourish? Where families have little influence. Ask Henry Kaiser, who set up his Kaiser-Permanente HMO in California, where there are no families because everybody's moved there from somewhere else. If you want to set up an HMO elsewhere in the country, you've got to go to a university where, again, people have no families because the students and, the faculty, are all from elsewhere. Or you set one up in a slum neighborhood, where family stability and trouble setting up an HMO in an area where family ties are strong. Not only do family members find the best doctors and stick to them, but families tend to keep their members healthier without the benefit of a gaggle of professionals, thank you.
Of course, Modern Medicine is out to destroy the family for precisely that reason. Strong families obviate the need for doctors and other "helping" professionals. It's no accident that prostitution is called the oldest profession rather than the oldest business. Unlike business transactions, which are characterized by an exchange of commodities, professionals give themselves in the performance of a service in return for a fee. More often than not, that service is one which ideally would be performed by a family member, friend, or by the person himself. The prostitute replaces the wife, as the doctor replaces the entire constellation of the family. The weaker the family the greater the opportunity for professionals. A healthy society is characterized by strong, positive family relationships and subsequent minimal need for doctors. Modern Medicine's Holy War on the family is a battle for survival against a competing system of health and healing. As long as the enemy is anything that can build, maintain, or restore health, the casualty will be the individual welfare of every defenseless person who goes to a doctor.
To protect your family against the attacks of doctors and other "helping" professionals, you first should recognize that experts seldom have a better idea of what's "right" than you do. This becomes quite plain when you look at what the experts were claiming was gospel truth in the past. For example, the standard pediatrics texts during the early 1920s advised: "The practice of playing with infants and exciting them by sights, sounds, and motions until they shriek with apparent delight is often harmful and should be condemned. Never hug and kiss them. Never let them sit on your lap. If you must, kiss them once on the forehead when they say goodnight. Babies under six months old should never be played with. And of kissing, the less the better.
Rocking is forbidden. So are pacifiers. Should the child attempt to pacify himself by sucking his thumb, pasteboard splints must be applied to his elbows to prevent him from bending his arms. At night, his arms must be tied to his sides."
Of course, we "know" now that this advice was ridiculous. But I wonder how many mothers went against their natural inclinations to entertain and stimulate their babies and as a result raised families of dullards.
If you are thinking about starting a family, you can begin by deciding for yourself how many children you want to have. Don't accept the advice of zero population growth advocates, or any other self proclaimed expert on the ideal size of a family. I know of no evidence that suggests that children from large families are any less successful than children from small families. You shouldn't allow political considerations to determine the size of your family.
When you do start your family, find a doctor who is qualified to deliver your baby at home. Home birth eliminates all the risks of a hospital stay and allows you to spend the time immediately following your family's addition enjoying yourself rather than defending yourself against the intrusions of the hospital staff. If you find your obstetrician trying to talk you out of home birth by listing dangers before he's examined you, he's obviously not qualified. A qualified home birth doctor or midwife will support your desire to have your baby at home and will carefully examine you to determine whether you are subject to any special risks that make home birth especially dangerous. For the vast majority of families, there is far less risk in a home birth, than in a hospital birth.
If you are unable to find a doctor who will perform a home delivery (at the end of the book I list resources for this search), you should go for the next best thing, which is a hospital delivery followed by quick exit for home. Barring any serious complications, there is no reason why you and your baby can't leave the hospital as soon as you feel able -- which can be any where from twenty minutes to a few hours. My favorite story regarding a family's reaction to a doctor hostile to home birth involves a former student of mine. When his wife told the obstetrician she wanted her husband present during the delivery, the doctor said he felt the delivery of a baby was far too personal an event for a husband to be there. She shot back that if it was that personal she wasn't so sure she wanted the doctor to be there either! They did go ahead and have their first baby in the hospital, but they left twenty minutes after the baby was born. Their subsequent babies have been delivered at home, and the husband has become a specialist and a leading authority on home birth.
Since Modern Medicine begins its assault on the family by separating husband from wife during the birth of the baby, you should insist on a delivery in which the husband is present. Of course, he should not merely suit up and stand around. He's there to assist, support, and protect his wife and child.
At all points along the way you should learn to identify and question rules that separate families. After the baby is born, for example, the nurse will take him or her away unless you make known before, during, and after the birth that you want the baby in your arms or your husband's immediately. Your baby is yours, not the hospital's. Keep him or her close to you for those important minutes after birth.
Even if the hospital promises rooming-in, you should be aware that hospitals sometimes revoke the privilege without warning. At one hospital, rooming-in disappears every year when the hospital's regular pediatric nurses leave for the summer!
Next you must protect yourself and your baby against your doctor's' prejudice against breastfeeding. Here, again, you are going to have to learn to lie to the doctor. When he says bottle feeding is just as good as breastfeeding you won't get anywhere by arguing with him, and you might make him especially vindictive against your particular effort. The best thing to do is to just nod ambiguously and ignore him. An acquaintance of mine was told by her doctor that her baby wasn't gaining weight fast enough. He gave her a free six pack of formula and told her to supplement her breastfeeding with it. She didn't argue with him, but on her way home the formula ended up in the first trash can she came across.
More than twenty years ago, when a Chicago area woman named Marian Tompson had her first baby, she could find no one to go to for advice about breastfeeding. Her doctor didn't know the first thing about breastfeeding. So she and six other women started a group called La Leche League whose purpose is to teach mothers how to breastfeed their children. Since its founding, La Leche League International has helped hundreds of thousands of women throughout the world, not to mention the children of these mothers. For support and encouragement in breastfeeding, join La Leche League.
There are a number of "little" things that doctors tell women they should do with their babies which I believe are detrimental to the family. First they tell them breastfeeding is OK but that solid food should be given after six weeks. This is nonsense. There is no need to give a baby solid food before six months. The six-week rule results in a daily slapstick routine, in which the mother tries to jam, ram, or cram something, anything, that faintly resembles "solid" food into the baby. There is no better food for the baby than mother's milk.
Don't be afraid to pick up your baby when it cries. If he or she didn't need you, he wouldn't be crying. The idea that a baby should be "trained" not to cry for its parents by ignoring it is patently absurd, and it ignores instinct. If the baby wakes up during the night perhaps it needs the extra security that sleeping in the same room -- or even the same bed -- as mom and dad would give. The rule that children and parents must sleep in separate rooms is one of those rules that separate families for all the wrong reasons. I don't know many adults who are really comfortable sleeping alone. How can you expect an infant who has known the warmth and intimacy of its mother's body to adjust to the cold, empty dark of "its own room."
When you do start to feed your baby solid food, ignore the propaganda of the baby food manufacturers -- who never seem to run out of university research centers that will run a study proving that home-prepared food is less healthy than the processed stuff they put in jars. If the food you eat at home is truly less healthy than baby food in jars, your whole family is in trouble. Feed your baby what you eat. Chop it, grind it, puree it, or blend it. Be careful to introduce only one new food at a time, however, so as to catch any developing allergic reactions as soon as they begin.
Try to make mealtimes a shared experience. This means getting the whole family at the table at once. When family members are together for a nice meal, they are automatically encouraged to talk and share themselves with one another.
Stay as close to relatives as you can. Try especially to keep elderly relatives close by, because they need you and you need them. Invite relatives to babysit. The more relatives a child is close to and comfortable with, the better.
Avoid separation whenever possible. Mothers and fathers should insist on staying with their children in the hospital. Also, consider alternatives to day-care. A job at home, when all factors are considered, may be more fulfilling than work outside the home. If a full-time or part-time job outside the home is necessary try to set up an arrangement with relatives or with neighbors. You might be able to start up a cooperative nursery school among your neighbors. A home-type environment is superior to the institutional setting of the day-care center. If your job or school keeps you and your children separated during the day, don't participate in organizations that meet in the evening when you should be spending time with your family.
Spend holidays with relatives, friends, and neighbors. Psychiatrists almost never take vacations around Christmas, because the season is marked by great depression and a heightened suicide rate among their patients. Holidays were made for people to get together and celebrate and renew the bonds that have supported them throughout their lives. People who have allowed the war against the family to keep them apart from their family are natural victims of frustrated legitimate needs.
Visit your college-age children who are away from home. Encourage them to come home when their schedule permits and sometimes when it doesn't. Make sure they know that you're there when they need you, because they will need you. Colleges are becoming increasingly competitive, lonely places.
All along the way you have to learn to deal with professionals. Sometimes this means. you have to be practical rather than pure. For example, assume that your doctor will bully you if you let him, especially if you are a woman. Now this is certainly not the way things should be. But as long as things are that way, I advise people, especially women, to go to the doctor in pairs. Wives should go with their husbands, since a doctor will pay more attention to a woman's problem if the husband is along. Sure, doctors shouldn't treat women as second-class humans; but they do and you shouldn't sacrifice your health for an abstract principle. We need successful heretics, not martyrs.
A more humorous -- and less politically charged -- situation where you have to be more practical than pure is when your child goes off to nursery school. I remember a mother phoning me at 11:00 one night to tell me she had an emergency. When I asked her the nature of the emergency, she said her three-year-old boy wasn't toilet trained yet and couldn't enter nursery school until he was. When I asked her why this was an emergency, she told me she lived on the eighteenth floor of a high-rise apartment and was going to jump out the window if I couldn't give her any advice. I agreed it was an emergency.
I have long advised mothers to send their non-toilet trained children to nursery school after lying to the school and saying the child is trained. Many children do, quite mysteriously, become toilet trained on the first day of school. In the case of the others, the teacher usually calls the mother after a week of frustration and says, "I thought you told me the child was toilet trained!"
The mother's reply should be: "What have you done to my child?"
Sometimes in dealing with doctors, nurses, and other professionals, you have to be down- right indomitable. Or immovable, as the case may be when a nurse tries to remove you from the bedside of a hospitalized relative. First of all, terminally ill relatives should be allowed to die at home. Hospitals don't own people at either end of life. If a relative is in the intensive care unit you have to buck the ten minute rule to remain with him or her. Your first move should be simply to stand still. Don't enforce the hospital's rules for them. When the nurse asks you to leave, ask why. If she says your presence is too much of a strain on the patient, tell her that you are a better judge of whether your relative is strained by your presence. Then challenge the nurse to produce evidence. She may then retreat to a new position: the rules say you have to leave. Ask for a copy of the rules in writing. Her next move will be to summon the doctor. Ask him the same questions. How do you know my presence here causes a strain on my relative? How do you know that the presence of hospital staff is automatically good and the presence of family members automatically bad for the patient?
While you're protecting your family against Modern Medicine's Holy War, recognize that besides being protected, the family should be used as a health resource. At times of crisis, seek out the advice and support of family and friends. When other members of the family need help and support, be there. Because if not, you can be sure that the doctor will, soon enough.
Here are the main strategies used against the family as outlined in the chapter above:
"Chapter 5 - Holy War on the Family"
Devaluation of the Family Concept: Mendelsohn argues that the traditional concept of the extended family has been devalued, replaced by the more nuclear model, which he sees as detrimental.
Medical Professional Dominance: Doctors, particularly in modern medicine, are seen as taking over roles traditionally played by family members, often undermining the family's influence and ethics.
Intervention in Family Affairs: Mendelsohn suggests that medical professionals intervene unnecessarily in family matters, often to the detriment of familial bonds.
Separation of Family Members: There's a critique of practices that separate family members, such as hospital policies and certain medical procedures, which prevent family involvement.
Undermining Breastfeeding: The promotion of formula over breastfeeding is seen as an attack on a natural and beneficial practice that strengthens the bond between mother and child.
Encouragement of Independence Over Family Bonds: Mendelsohn criticizes the encouragement of independence in situations where family interdependence would be healthier.
Influence on Childbirth Practices: The medicalization of childbirth is seen as an intrusion into a natural process, often involving unnecessary medical interventions.
Educational System's Role: The education system, in tandem with medical institutions, is accused of usurping parental roles and distancing children from their families.
Promotion of Professional Advice Over Familial Wisdom: There's a concern about the preference for professional advice over traditional family wisdom, which can erode family bonds.
Day-Care and Early Schooling: The rise of day-care centers and early schooling is seen as a mechanism for separating children from their families at a young age.
Isolation of the Elderly: Modern practices that isolate elderly family members, rather than valuing their role within the family unit.
Hospital Policies and Regulations: Critique of hospital policies that isolate patients from their families, especially during critical moments like childbirth and terminal illness.
Promotion of Formula Feeding in Developing Countries: The push for formula feeding in places where breastfeeding would be healthier and more economical is seen as destructive.
General Medicalization of Life Events: The medicalization of various life stages and events, such as childbirth, aging, and death, is viewed as an intrusion and a weakening of family roles and bonds.
Psychiatric Influence: The influence of psychiatry in family matters, often leading to further distancing among family members.
Immunization Policies: Mendelsohn critiques compulsory immunization policies as a form of control over the family.
Child Protection Policies: The interpretation of child protection policies in ways that can unjustly separate children from their families is mentioned.
Encouragement of Women to Work Outside the Home: This is seen as a strategy that disrupts traditional family roles and leads to reliance on external care for children.
Let’s end with this great short Australian news story reminding us how much they care for the family (thanks Steve).
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When I see young mothers pushing a pram with a crying baby in it, I want to scream "pick up your baby!!" at them. I believe the horrible "let them cry it out" advice is one of the factors that has led to the epidemic of mental illness in young people today. What a betrayal to deal with in your first weeks of life.
Mendehlson is brilliantly insightful. He was not caught up in the rhetoric of modern medicine, which insinuates itself into our lives while only sometimes delivering on the inflated promises it makes. We recently made a major move and shed much of our library in the process, but this gem remains on our bookshelf.