First, do no medicine

Occasional Hump author Eddie Robinson has drawn my attention to a medical matter of concern, and suggests I’m in a better position to comment, as a physician, than he is. He has sometimes lived in Canada, as do a number of our readers, several of my cousins and a good number of friends. I’ve always viewed the country as a kind of rugged British outpost peopled by lumberjacks and policemen with Baden-Powell hats, apart from Quebec which consists of French speakers in blackface, with interesting accents and a cluster of great musicians. Yes, I know that stereotyping is incompatible with the fact that one of my friends is a Professor of Latin in Calgary. But now it’s becoming harder each day to get my head round the fact that my contacts seem to be living in a nation that looks increasingly like the Third Reich.

This story concerns British Columbia, where some of my relatives live, and a state bill called “Bill 36” that has just been rushed through its legislature, despite opposition attempts at greater scrutiny. The bill is about the regulation of the medical professions, and is the project of Health Minister Adrian Dix, whose medical and scientific qualifications are only slightly less than our own Matt Hancock’s were when he was the UK Secretary of State for Pfizer.

There’s a good overall summary of the legislation here. Here’s a quotation:

Bill 36 contains provisions, which if enacted, will permit the Health Minister to appoint College Boards who must unilaterally establish vaccination requirements on all health practitioners for any illness the government deems requires vaccination, and to impose proof of up-to-date vaccination status as a condition of licensing. College registrars would be empowered to dismiss any application for licensing or renewal of license that does not contain proof of vaccination without notice or without a regulatory hearing. The legislation contains provisions that would allow the College to discipline any dissenters; those who speak out against the College policies or who fail to comply, with loss of license. It further enables the College to make “without notice” applications to the court to obtain orders of compliance, orders for entry into premises to search, seize or copy property, orders to secure premises and prevent an owner from entry, to order fines for non-compliance of up to $200,000, as well as to order jail time for up to six months if a healthcare worker is deemed to have made a false or misleading statement.

So, as you see, the idea is to amalgamate the various self-regulating professional bodies into just six generic ones, appointed by government rather than elected by professional colleagues. These will impose vaccine mandates on all staff – not just for COVID, but for any other condition that government deems necessary on whatever political or financial grounds. Offenders regarding this may be dismissed without a hearing, and any who question these Colleges’ decisions – any of them – can simply be struck off. As if that were not all, fines and jail time are in the mix, not for killing or seducing patients, but for having been “deemed” (by political appointees), to have made “false or misleading statements.”

It has been pointed out that this last provision would cover giving individual professional advice to a patient that is non-compliant with what the State-appointed bodies have been told to impose by the State, and of course we have recent bitter experience of just what that means in terms of professionals being sanctioned. Point a patient to scientific evidence of mRNA vaccine harm and not only will you lose your job, but you may end up in jail.

Presumably the same would apply if, speaking with a slur and a neurological tic, you were to tell your patient of the side effects you have suffered yourself from the vaccine you were forced to take. It would still be misinformation, because the State, and the Colleges, decree that the vaccines are safe and effective.

Presumably the same sanctions would apply to a doctor who didn’t enforce, say, erroneous dietary guidelines like those longstanding dogmas on fats that have recently been overturned. A patient who was able to show her endocrinologist that her diabetes had disappeared by an improved diet and stopping drugs would have to be ordered, on pain of her doctor being fined $200,000, to get back on the pills and cut out the butter. There would no longer be any mechanism for revising health policy, because new insights would be punishable misinformation.

So as the writer of the linked piece says:

In passing Bill 36 into law, the BC Government would create a further service shortage in the already struggling BC healthcare system. This is about more than just practitioners and the government: the public will be harmed if Bill 36 is enacted.

Since then, it has been enacted, so the die appears to be cast.

As a letter in the press from one professional summarises:

In essence the 24 healthcare licensing bodies, who are all currently independently operating, will be amalgamated to six. The board of directors for each body will be dismantled, and the B.C. government will take over the governance of all healthcare licensing and regulation.

Current boards are elected individuals whose merits and qualifications are based on the candidate’s expertise and experience within their profession, not an appointed ministerial title.

Bill 36 will remove the important independent and profession-specific oversight of regulated professionals.

Others have pointed out further worrying ramifications that were brought into sharp focus by the COVID pandemic:

Former Newfoundland premier Brian Peckford has also conveyed his concerns with Bill 36 in his blog posting on Nov. 21….“It also allows the College to determine who has good character and who doesn’t and to define informed consent. This is legislation you would typically see in a communist or a police state, not in a democracy.”

Informed consent, then, will now mean telling the patient only what the government wants them to hear, and we are all well aware that recently this has meant telling them what Big Pharma or Bill Gates wants them to hear. It’s not irrelevant, in the light of Canada’s forthcoming liberal Euthanasia bill, that British Columbia’s health department has already been implicated in abuse of “Medically Assisted Dying.” At what point might a government decide it is unethical for a doctor not to advise some category of patient to accept the fatal injection?

Dix himself, like so many politicians nowadays, crows about the magnitude of the changes, and totally fails to consider that medical independence has existed for millennia for reasons other than self-interest:

“Our government is making the most significant changes to oversight of regulated health professions in British Columbia’s history,” Dix said in a press release on Oct. 19 announcing the changes.

Now, the title of this blog is based on “First, do no harm,” which is actually not in the Hippocratic Oath despite being quoted by a number of worthy dissident doctors who have evidently either forgotten the oath or, more likely never swore it, as has been the normal case since before my day. But nevertheless the ethic of medicine, which has always been the strength of the profession against corruption from within and pressure from without, has long been Hippocratic.

The Oath is essentially a solemn covenant between the practitioner, his teachers, the gods of healing (for which read God, or at least medical ethics), and the individual patient. It is less widely appreciated than it should be that the German medical profession was one of the first institutional floodgates to fail during the Nazi years. This was partly due to allowing the State to get in on the Hippocratic Oath, and partly because that State supported eugenics and human experimentation, which seemed to many doctors to be “scientific.”

But the Hippocratic Oath mentions no duty of care either to the State, or to Science, but only to the patient. For most of history the earnest of this duty of care has been the financial relationship between doctor and patient. Chaucer’s Doctour of Physick may have been unduly acquisitive:

For gold in physic is a cordial,
Therefore he lovèd gold in specïal.

But the transfer of money was a reminder even to him that not even “the public good” took priority over using his knowledge for the best outcome for the person before him. In State-funded systems like the NHS this individual bond is less clear, but is still perfectly practicable – until the point where a third party like Mr Dix or Mr Hancock decides that their second-hand knowledge, largely gained from the pharmaceutical or food industries, takes priority over the doctor’s first-hand experience and training. At that point, medicine dies, as it has done spectacularly in BC – or will do once the changes come home to roost.

Well, what of it? I guess my readers in Vancouver, Delta and Surrey will be troubled about this new law, and the rest of BC may eventually come to regret it. But that’s only five and a half million people, for whom the rest of the world may or may not feel sympathy. But across the Western world, we have seen decisions during COVID that resonate with what BC’s state legislature has just done. This crude political power-grab against the medical professions may well prove to be a pilot for the same ideas across Canada. And Canada may well set the trend for “governments safeguarding patients from their doctors” in Australia and New Zealand, the USA, in Britain, and across the EU. Our governments have already agreed to transfer legal power for health policy to the WHO: whoever controls that over in Geneva will control government policy, which will control the professional bodies, which will control the doctors, with patients lowest in the pecking order. Even the Soviet Union granted its doctors more autonomy than that.

What that means in terms of individual loss of power is illustrated by the fact that only 28 people in Britain have, until now, been given government compensation for vaccine damage in the UK; it will take 300 years at that rate to deal with even the claims already lodged. You can shout at your doctor – what can you do about a politically corrupted WHO on another continent?

Where then will the ordinary citizen find independent medical advice that puts his interest, and not some abstract (and often corrupt) good, at the centre? I could close this without answering that, but maybe a note of hope will be appropriate. Modern medicine has become so focused on patented pharmaceuticals and vaccines (because that is where the Big Money directs it) that it is conceivable that nobody in power will bother much about anything else. With prescription drugs as the third commonest cause of death in the US, going outside that system may not be that much of a penalty for patients or healers.

Maybe people trained in medical sciences, but not troubling to register, could offer a wealth of other advice without calling it “medical care.” Could a layman really be jailed for suggesting vitamin D and a healthy diet to people? Would the recipient be penalised for offering him in return a financial gift or, at least, some eggs from the back-yard hens?

That may be too rosy a prospect – governments have ways to criminalise whatever they can’t control. In the case of British Columbia they appear to be taking control in order to criminalise.