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.

 

 

 

 

 

 

The Right Man for Healing and a Rare Find

Hippocrates of the Hippocratic Oath

I was not sure my ENT specialist was a good fit for me even though I read the glowing praises framed on his office walls, praises coming from his patients, colleagues, and other doctors. The young man seemed to know what he was doing but his bedside manner was brief and rather cold.

I attributed his demeanor to his introverted personality, his professionalism, and to his respect for his patients’ time. Very punctual, he very seldom made anybody wait to see him, he was always on time.

One day I realized that he was much more caring on the inside than he let people see. A young woman with her mom and a three-year old in tow had an appointment to see the doctor. The receptionist, Lupe, asked her if she was prepared to pay for that day’s visit. The young woman had a grief-stricken look on her face and wondered how much the visit was going to be. The receptionist told her that she did not know because each patient was different, depending on the problem. The prospective patient replied in a sad and disappointed voice that she will reschedule until such a time that she would have enough cash on hand to pay for the visit.

Lupe kindly explained that her insurance, Obamacare, had a huge deductible, and unless she met this deductible for the year, it will not pay the doctor anything. She offered to ask the physician, left the young woman waiting, and returned to tell her that the good doctor will see her anyway.

I decided then that this man was the right person to see in an ENT medical emergency or a problem requiring a caring specialist. His humanity, in addition to his medical professionalism, punctuality, and his education in the U.S., made him, in my opinion, an exceptional doctor, a rare find.

At the other end of the spectrum was the endocrinologist’s office in Fairfax who told me, they are no longer taking any new Medicare patients, just the already established ones who were in transition to Medicare. The receptionist’s explanation was that Medicare does not allow their patients to be seen every three to six months as needed.

I was told previously by a doctor friend that Medicare made low and very slow reimbursements to physicians because of Obamacare; therefore I did not believe the office’s explanation. Personally, I would not want to be seen by a doctor who put her profit motive above the care for a patient, any patient.

But I pressed on. What if I paid in cash, could I then see the doctor? The answer was again no because, she said, they had a contract with Medicare and thus could not accept cash payment.

Having read the pertinent section of the law, I knew this was part of the Affordable Care Act as well, the euphemistically named piece of legislation Obama’s administration and Nancy Pelosi’s Congress forced down middle class America in the middle of the night, “pass the bill to find out what’s in it.”

We did find out all right, and we did not like the price we had to pay for it in order that the Democrat Party could unilaterally force an entire nation, one fifth of the economy, to become a socialized medicine nightmare for decades to come.

More insultingly, members of Congress have their own subsidized and separate health care insurance and can see whatever doctors they wish to see.

It used to be the case in America once when patients could pay cash for doctors’ visits and the fees were affordable. But that gradually changed thanks to modifications in health insurance, new cafeteria health insurance plans, in-network and out-of-network type of employer insurance, and health savings accounts that disappeared at the end of the year if unused.

If you lost your job or quit, the insurance terminated, and you were at the mercy of Cobra insurance for a while, at confiscatory monthly premiums, but nothing as expensive as Obamacare premiums today that can easily exceed a family’s mortgage and car payments combined.

Lack of insurance portability across state lines had always been a problem for Americans seeking affordable insurance. Aggressive law suits against doctors and medical malpractice awards by the courts, forced doctors to drastically buy more and more expensive malpractice insurance, making care more expensive for the average patient who did have insurance. The infamous $50 aspirin in a hospital setting was legendary.

As a student without insurance in the early 1980s, I paid $10 cash per visit to my children’s pediatrician. Once we could afford and bought insurance, each visit was $85. The pediatrician made a comfortable living, had a thriving practice, but he was certainly not a millionaire.

If you ask most doctors today what they spend a good portion of resources and time, it is not patient face to face care time but electronic documentation, record keeping, and staff to handle insurance justifications and payments – bureaucracy.

Primary medical care, day-to-day healthcare, is now provided by a general practitioner, a family physician, a gerontology, pediatric, or family nurse practitioner, a physician assistant, a registered nurse, and even a pharmacist who coordinate and triage specialist care that a patient may need.

Secondary and tertiary care is harder to find as physicians are cutting their losses and focusing on accepting private insurance rather than Medicare and Medicaid.

We are headed to a single payer socialized medical insurance which will limit doctor visits and access to procedures based on rationed care. The entity that will hold the key to your ability to pay for and receive medical care when you need it will be the federal government, the same bloated, out of control entity that spent your Social Security lock-box savings and has doubled the national debt in eight years of the Obama’s administration.