Hippocrates and Modern Medicine's Hippocratic Oath

The old medical tradition goes back to 400 A.D. to the young Greek medic Hippocrates who established his practice in Cos. At that time sanatoriums existed which were dedicated to Aesculapius, the god of healing, and medical procedures involved praying to gods and various superstitions.

Hippocrates learned his trade from his father and expanded his knowledge by traveling to Egypt to learn their medical practices of the time which included novelties such as having a clinical observation chart/sheet of the patient, using white and clean linen for babies and patients, watching closely the nutrition of newborns and toddlers, exercise and play in fresh air.

Upon his return from Egypt, Hippocrates realized that Greek medicine had to be revised from the priestly medicine to a new medicine based on rigorous experience and proper rationalization. This new medicine would become the Hippocratic medicine.

The island of Cos (Kos)

The classical Hippocratic Oath stated that a future physician, swearing by Apollo the physician, and Aesculapius the surgeon, Hygeia, and Panacea, and all the gods witnessing his oath, will engage in ethical treatment of patients, to his utmost power and judgment.

In healing the sick, the doctor would order the best diet for his patients, and made sure that they suffered “no hurt or damage.” The physician promised not to give poison to anyone, nor medicine to a pregnant woman, with “a view to destroy the child.” The doctor promised to behave and use his knowledge in a “godly manner,” referring to the gods listed above. The Hippocratic Oath: The Original and Revised Version - The Practo Blog for Doctors

At the young age of 22, Hippocrates established his medical school in Cos, based on the close relationship between theory and clinical practice, theory and experience obtained by taking care of the sick. The therapy side of medicine included hygiene, baths, physical exercise, diet, plant-based medicines, minerals, and animal-based cures. The Hippocratic medical school practiced medical investigations as well.

It was said that Hippocrates did not believe that diseases were connected to gods, but that they had an actual material reason, thus incantations and offerings to the gods were not helpful.

Hippocrates established the foundation of modern medicine during his 47 years of medical travels to care for both famous and ordinary patients. His fame and medical practices had spread around the world of antiquity and eventually made their way across the centuries into modern medicine.

After his death in 377 B.C., Hippocrates became the hero of many legends and medical traditions. Even in death, it is alleged that a tree by his tomb in Larissa had a bee hive which produced honey with an emollient effect on children’s skin problems.

Hippocrates left in his Corpus Hipocraticum, the combined 73 volumes of knowledge and experience of his practice, a trove of cultural, educational, philosophical, and scientific knowledge for centuries to follow. The Hippocratic writings were published in Alexandria, Egypt, a century after his death.

A Latin manuscript found in the National Library of Paris talked about Hippocrates and his discovery that Athenian black smiths who worked with fire and forges, did not get sick with the plague so he recommended “purification” of the city air. The text concluded that the grateful Athenians erected a statue to Hippocrates when the plague ended. However, Thucydides, who described at length the period of the Plague of Athens in the second year of the Peloponnesian war in 430 B.C., does not mention Hippocrates at all. Close to 100,000 people died from the plague which entered Greece through its city port of Piraeus.

The profound thinking of the genial doctor is expressed in one of his famous aphorisms with which he instructed his students, “Life is short and Art is long; opportunity is fleeting, experiment treacherous, and judgment difficult.”

Hippocrates was saying that a physician’s life is short when compared to the vast art [of medicine], art which depends on how quickly the doctor chooses the right moment to intervene, an art hindered by its two enemies, empiricism and dogmatism.

Fast forward to the twenty-first century and medicine appears to be preoccupied more with biopolitics and biopower exerted by the New World Order, more specifically transgenderism and transhumanism, instead of healing the sick and treating those suffering as has been the case in the twentieth century.

I was amazed in 1978 at the level of medical care Americans could receive, the potential for healing with modern medicines, tools, and surgical skills, and how caring and doting many physicians, surgeons, nurses, and other medical professionals were when compared to the awful socialized medicine we had received under the socialist dictatorship of the communist party where I had fled from.

In 2023, after three years of Covid-19 lockdowns and other detrimental developments, we are way past Kafka’s “Metamorphosis” in which Gregor Samsa wakes up one morning and is transformed into a huge cockroach.

We humans of any age are suddenly a huge burden and a “plague on the planet” and our numbers must be culled to a billion as repeatedly uttered by globalists and eugenicists.

Klaus Schwab of the World Economic Forum fame said that “A systemic transformation of the world will lead us to a fusion of our physical, our digital, and our biological identities.”

Yuval Noah Harari, chief advisor to the World Economic Forum (WEF) explained that “We will use nanotechnology and a direct brain-computer interface to upgrade Homo Sapiens into beings who are much more different from us than we are from animals – into gods. We will replace natural selection with intelligent design—by us.” (AAPS News, Vol. 78, no. 12, December 2022)

Medical care has taken a huge hit during and after the Covid-19 pandemic, distrust and fear keeping many potential patients from seeking medical care for chronic conditions and sometimes emergencies.

Doctors and nurses feared their own death and it drove them to remake their clinics, pretending that they practiced care via tele-medicine. Some doctors, even foot doctors, became irrational and to this day, are still requiring their patients to wait in the parking lot until the office deems it safe to call the patients to come up one at a time. It is not a very efficient way to run an office as there is nobody else in the waiting room. Everyone is heavily masked, including the patients.

We saw the doctors who took the CDC hard line. They failed miserably their Hippocratic Oath and potentially harmed their patients by sending them home to a certain death in some cases, without any treatment until such time that ventilators became their final destiny and eventual death.

It seems that corporate America and especially universities are expanding into healthcare for profit in the march towards the Sovietization of America. Doctors spend more time updating their computer charts in the ten minutes they spend with each patient than they talk to patients, look him/her in the eyes, and touch their bodies.

The virtual medical appointments were generally a waste of time and resources for a percentage of patients. Some sick people stayed away from ERs for fear that they would be put on ventilators. Other people resented the masks and the constant Covid-19 testing and chose to stay home instead of having elective out-patient surgery or a direct visit with their doctor.

Hippocrates thought of means to heal his patients quicker, better, easier, and with the least amount of suffering. Modern medicine should seek the same.

In his “About the Proper Behavior,” Hippocrates wrote that medicine should be guided by simplicity, modesty, good reputation, sound and logical judgment, peace, caring, moral purity, knowledge of usefulness, and of life’s practices. Doctors should be of good moral character and with a largesse of the soul and mind.

Hippocrates wrote, “When there are more procedures, a doctor should choose the least showy. He, who is not trying to deceive the eyes of the ignorant through a false demonstration, is truly an honest man and a real doctor.”

Hippocrates stated that “honest doctors must give the patient the assurance that he/she is not abandoned. When the illness is serious, the doctor must neglect his own interest, applying the treatment even though he may risk getting nothing after the patient heals.” (On the Articulations, written in 400 B.C.)

Modern medicine does have honest doctors like Paul Marik, Robert Apter, and Mary Bowden who have sued the FDA, CDC, and the Health and Human Services (HHS) for interference with the doctors’ ability to treat Covid-19, more specifically the “FDA’s disparaging, misleading statements to many influential organizations about ivermectin.” Ivermectin could have saved lives, but the “FDA broke with both law and traditions by interfering with the practice of medicine, i.e. with the authority to prescribe drugs approved for human use for an ‘off label’ indication.” https://tinyurl.com/3y9x4ubd

The American Association of Physicians and Surgeons wrote in its amicus brief: “Defendant FDA has improperly exploited misunderstandings about the legality and prevalence of off-label uses of medications, in order to mislead courts, state medical boards, and the public into thinking there is anything improper about off-label prescribing.” https://tinyurl.com/28ukattt

“In ruling against patients seeking access to ivermectin to treat Covid-19, as recommended by their physicians, multiple courts have relied on the misinformation and improper interference by the FDA as a basis for denying access now.” https://tinyurl.com/28ukattt

Hippocrates would probably be shocked about most doctors today who ignored their Hippocratic oath and chose the path of least resistance to deal with the onslaught of Covid-19 patients who were sent home to recover on their own without treatment until such time that they were too far gone and went to the ER.

 

 

 

 

 

 

Tattoos, Artistic Expression, Fashion Statement, or Self-Mutilation

Tattoos used to represent gang affiliation, prison time, or brotherhood in the military. Hollywood’s narcissistic behavior has changed that; imitation has become a misguided form of flattery.

Tattoos are a billion dollar industry. Considered now a form of self-expression, my body is my canvass, tats are not cheap. Tats are so desired that unemployed and partly-employed youth go into debt to pay for tattoos.

Tattoos and body piercings are considered a rite of passage in primitive cultures, and are more painful and more expensive to remove in western cultures. Some Christians object to tattooing because it defaces the perfect body that God has created.
On any given day, it is hard to scan any crowd without finding more and more people of all ages with visible and huge tattoos, body piercings, hooks, horns, chains, facial holes, gauged piercings, and other forms of body enhancement. There has been an explosion of young people covering their arms, their legs, their backs, necks, faces, and hands with colorful tattoos and body piercings in painful places.

A few tats are beautiful, masterfully done by skilled artists, some are ugly caricatures or stretched blotches of black ink, others picture words in foreign scripts the wearer does not understand, some represent kinship or brotherhood with an organization, a few make delicate or indelicate fashion statements, some are obscene, others represent prison time, the number of people murdered and gang affiliation, and others pay homage to a place, a person, a special date, a life-altering event, or a decision made while inebriated. No matter what the reason, tattoos become an indelible part of how that person is perceived for a lifetime regardless of their good, imperfect, or bad character.

Pirates had only one ear pierced because they believed it improved their visual acuity.

Holocaust victims at Auschwitz had numbers tattooed on their forearms by their jailers and torturers, a vivid expression of the utter brutality of Nazism and its attempt to dehumanize Jewish people.

When I first saw Otzi, the Iceman, the well-preserved mummy of a man who lived about 3300 B.C., in Bolzano, Italy, I focused on many details besides his belongings. Discovered in 1991 on the Austrian-Italian border between Bolzano and Innsbruck, Otzi had 57 tattoos. Scientists revealed that some tats were located near modern acupuncture points and they may have treated his degenerative arthritis. If that is indeed true, tattooing for medicinal purposes, a form of rudimentary acupuncture, occurred way before acupuncture was known to be in use in China around 1000 B.C.

“Otzi had several carbon tattoos including groups of short, parallel, vertical lines to both sides of the lumbar spine, a cruciform mark behind the right knee, and various marks around both ankles.” http://www.crystalinks.com/otzi.html

Two mummies, a man and his wife, from 2,500 years ago remained frozen in Pazyryk on the Altai steppes near the Mongolian border and western Siberia until it was found by Russian archeologist Sergei Rudenko in 1948. The man’s body was covered with tattoos, his arms, legs, and trunk – “monsters with wings and cats’ tails, lion-griffins with snakelike bodies, deer with huge antlers and eagles’ beaks.”

The Scyths (Scythians), Iranian equestrian tribes, who lived in central Asia from 7th to 3rd century B.C., were famous for their tattoos. The Greek physician Hippocrates (460-370 B.C.) wrote, “the whole mass of the Scyths, as many as are nomads, cauterize their shoulders, arms, and hands, chests, thighs, and loins, for no other purpose than to avoid weakness and flabbiness and to become energetic.”

Tattooing then was a painful status symbol for Scythians. Skilled tattooists punctured deeply into the flesh of their customers elaborate designs of real and imaginary creatures and then “filled the holes with a black liquid.”

Another Pazyryk people discovery was made in 1993 in Novosibirsk, a 25 year old blond princess preserved in the Siberian permafrost. The Ukok Princess had perfectly preserved 2,500 year old tattoos on both arms. Dr. Polosmak postulated that tattoos were a means of personal identification, status and position in society, as well as the ability for the people of the same clan to find each other in the afterlife. “The more tattoos were on the body, the longer it meant the person lived, and the higher was his position.”

Other bodies found in 1929 in the Siberian permafrost, such as that of a man, exhibit animal tattoos from head to toe:  mountain sheep called argali, griffons with vulture beaks, winged snow leopards, and fish.

(Photo: The Siberian Times reporter, August 14, 2012)

 

 

This is the photograph reconstructing a warrior’s tattoos, warrior found on the same plateau as the Ukok Princess. The drawing of tattoos was made by Elena Shumakova of the Institute of Archeologyand Ethnography, Siberian Branch of the Russian Academy of Science.

The princess’ tattoos were highly intricate and artistic, representing mythological animals and fantastical creatures: “a deer with a griffon’s beak and a Capricorn’s antlers. The antlers are decorated with the heads of griffons. And the same griffon’s head is shown on the back of the animal. The mouth of a spotted panther with a long tail is seen at the legs of the sheep. She also has a deer’s head on her wrist, with big antlers. There is a drawing on the animal’s body on the thumb on her left hand.” http://siberiantimes.com/culture/others/features/siberian-princess-reveals-her-2500-year-old-tattoos/

Tattoos are as old as our civilization and, for whatever complicated reasons humans seek and get tattoos today, they appear to be an outer expression of the inner self screaming to be noticed.