If you look at websites, blogs, or Facebook pages about things like alternative medicines, organic/all-natural foods, or conspiracy theories you will almost undoubtedly find people talking about “the medical conspiracy”. The idea here is that there are natural cures for many (some say all) diseases, and the medical and pharmaceutical industries know about them but are suppressing the information. They do this because they make more money from treating but not curing diseases than they would from curing them. In some cases, the conspiracy also says that “Big Pharma” has created cures but they’re also being suppressed for the same reason. (Of course, nobody explains why Big Pharma would spend the time and money working on creating such cures if they’re going to suppress them.) The alternative medicine industry is all over this idea, because otherwise they have no good answer to “If <whatever> works, then why doesn’t every doctor advise their patients to use it?”

At first blush, this sounds like it could make sense – would you rather charge someone $25,000 once for a very expensive cure, or $1,000 a month for treatment that will be required for the rest of their life? You probably would make a lot more money keeping people sick and therefore dependent on your treatment. But we need to think deeper. What would be required for such a conspiracy to exist and succeed?

Here are five reasons why this idea is ludicrous. Throughout these answers, we’re going to assume that the conspiracy does exist, that natural cures for diseases do exist, that the people running it would like it to continue, and that they’d like to keep it quiet from the general public. Then we’ll examine the ramifications of those assumptions.

1. The number of people involved would be immense.

Surely there are some medical professionals out there who are more interested in the health of their patients than in making money. What would happen if one of them didn’t know about the conspiracy and unwittingly started telling their patients about the natural cures that really work, rather than giving them the expensive drugs and invasive surgeries that are part of the conspiracy? Even worse, what if they started telling their fellow doctors about the cures? It would spread like wildfire! But the whole conspiracy would then be exposed or unraveled. People would be cured and no longer have to pay for expensive medication! We can’t have that! So the conspiracy would have to include almost all doctors, nurses, nurse practitioners, pharmacists, medical researchers, professors, even dentists, dental hygienists, and veterinarians. We’re talking about the entire medical and pharmaceutical industries as well as every non-alternative medical school in the world.

Since this is a massive cover-up, there would have to be non-medical people involved as well. So not only would this include the medical professionals, scientists, and professors but also post-doc and graduate medical students, company executives, lawyers, actuaries, accountants, admin people, you name it.

The entire insurance industry would have to be part of the conspiracy as well since they’re footing the bill for lots of expensive medications for their customers. You’re delusional if you think they’re just going to take the word of doctors and scientists that this super-expensive medication (that they’re paying for!) is the best option – they’re going to do (or at least fund) their own research. What happens if they come up with a different conclusion than the corrupt medical researchers? The people running the conspiracy can’t take that chance.

But of course, it’s all about the Benjamins. If the conspiracy is true then the insurance companies have undoubtedly figured out what would happen if the public found out about the natural cures for everything. First, they’d save a ton of money by not having to pay for expensive medication. Second, they’d lose a ton of money because a lot of people wouldn’t bother paying for health insurance anymore. They’ve done the math. I don’t know which but one of these must be true:

1. They’d lose more money through lost revenue than they’d save by not paying for expensive medication. This wouldn’t benefit them at all, so they can’t let the public find out. It’s in their best interest to be in on the conspiracy. Or…
2. They’d save more money than than they’d lose in revenue. This would cost them millions, and so they’d waste no time in exposing the conspiracy.

Since #2 hasn’t happened, we know that the insurance companies must be in on it.

And don’t forget the FDA in the US, and its equivalents in all other countries. They absolutely must be involved – what if the expensive drugs don’t get approved for use and the cheap natural ones do?

With all the medical, pharmaceutical, educational, insurance, and government people involved, this would have to involve at the very least millions of people, possibly tens or even hundreds of millions, in every country in the world. This would be by far the most massive and complicated conspiracy in human history. And yet with those millions of people involved, there’s no concrete evidence of it.

2. Success in corrupting the people involved would have to be near 100%.

Most of the people involved in the conspiracy would be doctors, nurses, pharmacists, etc. But none of these people knew about the conspiracy before they got into those professions. Almost all of them are people who originally chose to get into the medical profession because they wanted to spend their lives helping sick people. For the conspiracy to succeed, all of them must have:

• been informed of the conspiracy, and
• abandoned their ethics and their reasons for getting into medicine in the first place, and
• been corrupted to the point of either joining the conspiracy and saying nothing, or not joining the conspiracy but somehow keeping quiet about it.

The number of people who were informed of the conspiracy and were outraged and immediately went public is near zero. I can’t say it is zero because I have seen people on various alternative medicine sites claim that they were in the medical profession but got out because it was, in their opinion, ineffective or corrupt. But the number of people who were outraged and went public with compelling evidence of the conspiracy is zero. None. Nobody.

3. Most of the people who would have to be involved in the conspiracy have no incentive.

Obviously, for this conspiracy to be successful, all of the people involved in it must be willing to sacrifice their ethics – letting patients die, allowing them to suffer in pain and discomfort for years, allowing their friends and family members to suffer both emotionally and financially, and all for the promise of big money. There are certainly leading medical professors and doctors that make boatloads of money. But what about your average nurse in a hospital? She’d have to be involved, or she’d be curing people left and right instead of keeping them sick. But how many nurses do you know that are rich? According to this survey, the median annual wage for a nurse is about $65,000 in the US. That’s pretty decent money, but would every nurse sacrifice their ethics for only $65k a year?

Maybe the $65k is just their salary, and they get other secret kickbacks from the conspiracy. In that case, not only would all the nurses need to be involved, but their families as well. Otherwise the nurse’s spouse might wonder where that extra few million dollars or the Porsche in the driveway came from. If that’s the case, then it’s true for most of the other people involved as well, and we just doubled the number of people who’d have to be complicit in the conspiracy.

4. The whistleblowers are still alive.

According to the conspiracy, all medical professionals are willing to let patients suffer and die needlessly. So why are the whistleblowers still alive? Mike Adams from NaturalNews.com talks about the conspiracy every day, as do people on hundreds of other web sites. There are many people running natural medicine practices that by their very existence threaten to expose the conspiracy. If doctors are willing to let millions of people die from already-cured diseases, it stands to reason that they wouldn’t be above killing people who are exposing the conspiracy and threatening their substantial profits. But this isn’t happening.

5. There’s more money to be made in providing cures than in suppressing them.

Say you’re a medical researcher and you discover something (natural or otherwise) that kills only cancer cells, or stimulates the pancreas to continuously produce more insulin, or cures Alzheimer’s or AIDS or something else. (Let’s just gloss over the huge question of why your job even exists – again, why Big Pharma would spend tons of money and time researching for such cures only to suppress them. It’s not like the first person to find a cure prevents others from finding it.) In your job, you obviously know about the conspiracy to keep it suppressed, so you’d have to report your findings to your superiors and not tell anybody about it.

But say you don’t.

Say you know a few other researchers and you have them replicate your tests and then you all go public and create a company to sell this new found cure. You tell the world “We have a cure for cancer, and we’ll sell a dose to anyone who wants it. For $1000, you can be free of cancer forever.” Such a company would be swimming in money and the discoverers would be world famous – the Nobel Prize, cover of Time, money for nothing, chicks for free, all that good stuff.

Could this company make more money by having people pay them $1000 a month for life rather than $1000 once? Yes, but once again that assumes that every medical researcher would sacrifice their ethics for even bigger money. Would many sacrifice their ethics for $10 million? Sure. But would they sacrifice their ethics and $10 million for $50 million? $100 million? Maybe but I’m sure there are a few who would take the $10 million and keep their ethics intact.

To avoid their researchers going public, the overseers of the conspiracy would have to bribe them with immense amounts of money that would keep them from going public. They’d have to make sure they do this before the big breakthroughs are made and somehow guarantee the researchers’ loyalty. The researchers would then have to explain to their friends and family members why they are multi-gazillionaires but none of their research has even been published.

Oh wait, I know how this could be explained! And it explains the nurse problem described in #3 above!

Theory: Lotteries like Powerball are actually run by the people running the medical conspiracy. It’s their way of bribing people involved in the conspiracy to keep quiet in such a way that it’s easy to explain to their friends and families why they’re suddenly rich.

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So basically, if we assume the conspiracy exists, then we find a number of inconsistencies with what we’d expect and what we see in the real world. If the conclusions are wrong (that all doctors and nurses in the world are rich and corrupt, and everyone who tries to expose the conspiracy is silenced), then our initial assumption must be wrong. There is no conspiracy. Reductio ad absurdum.

Some of the people who believe in this supposed conspiracy do so because they’ve had a bad experience of some kind. Perhaps they or a loved one was misdiagnosed and got sicker instead of better. Perhaps someone they know even died from such a misdiagnosis. Are there incompetent doctors who prescribe the wrong medication or the wrong dosage, misdiagnose patients, and so on? Of course there are. Remember the old joke: what do you call the person who finished last in his medical school graduating class? You call him “doctor”. But it’s a huge stretch to assume that all doctors are this bad and also to assume that any errors that are made are actually part of the conspiracy and not simply mistakes made by fallible human beings.

Are there unscrupulous doctors, nurses, etc. who would take place in such a conspiracy? Almost certainly. But again, it’s a massive stretch to extend this to all or even most doctors.

None of this addresses whether these natural cures exist or if alternative medicine actually works (better than placebo). If not, then the idea of the conspiracy is moot since there’d be no point. But we can see that the likelihood of the conspiracy existing is virtually nil, and so if alternative medicine really is the cure-all miracle that it claims to be, we come back to the question I mentioned at the top: why don’t the majority of doctors recommend reiki, homeopathy, faith healing, or other naturopathic techniques to their patients?

Now, what’s more likely? That this incredibly complex and vast conspiracy actually exists and is functioning perfectly (and yet they are doing nothing about the people trying to expose it), or that the medical community really does have humanity’s health as their primary goal and it’s just a very difficult and expensive process?

 

Shout out to my brother-in-law Stephen, who’s currently at Sunnybrook hospital in Toronto fighting liver cancer. He asked me to post something interesting for him to read – I hope this will suffice. Hang in there, buddy. We’re all thinking about you.