Rockefeller Shaped Medicine

Calley tells a story about how Rockefeller shaped modern medical education and pharmaceutical industry through strategic funding.

"Flexner, who wrote the guiding law in 1909 that's still active today, was a paid lawyer of Rockefeller who invented the pharmaceutical industry as byproducts of oil production. He figured he could make them into pharmaceutical cures. He's the father of the modern pharmaceutical industry and the funder of our top med schools like Johns Hopkins.

He saw economic opportunity in professionalizing medicine, siloing conditions, and making money by treating rather than making people healthy. There was a clear economic opportunity to name and silo conditions and then profit from the intervention.

At Johns Hopkins, William Halstead, who started the school, denigrated nutrition and any type of holistic thinking. To this day in medical education, when my sister brought up that somebody with migraines might need a dietary intervention, her attending surgeon said 'Stop being a pussy, we didn't go to nutrition school.'

First day at Stanford Med School, Casey was told by her professors that American patients aren't going to stop eating their Big Macs, that they're going to be sedentary, and that the best thing we can do is stand with serious medicine - with the prescription pad and with the scalpel. That is viscerally ingrained into the medical system, and that's a lie."