“Nobody should be victim. Everybody should be winner.”

“I’ve been at MIT for a long time, so both my wife and I know a lot of the medical staff. They say they’re now spending maybe 40 percent of their time filling out forms. They’re under constant supervision and control. They’re wasting huge amounts of time doing tons of paperwork that isn’t necessary. And those are all costs.”

“Traditionally, when you become a hospital patient you are expected to abrogate many of the rights you enjoy and have come to expect as a healthy person. You tend to lose your identity and become a number, a nonthinking blob of protoplasm to be transported, poked, purged, bled, tested, serviced, occasionally poisoned, often assaulted, and sometimes cut into.”

“Medical hegemony, or what Ivan Illich calls the medicalization of the lifespan, is an aspect of the present-day technological medical ideology which is found as strongly in some socialist nations as in the capitalist West. The phenomena arises from two sources: the growth of technology in medicine and the continuing power, status, and profit motive of physicians. Medical hegemony is found in its consequences: a way of looking at oneself and at the organization of health-care institutions that legitimates the present position of the profession. One of these methods of self-perception is the mechanical self-image, the person viewing himself as a machine. Illich comments: ‘People are strengthened in their belief that they are machines whose durability depends on visits to the maintenance shop. This leads, in turn, quite naturally, to permanent doctor dependence, because of the need for annual checkups.’”

“Western doctors abused drugs for the treatment of diseases with which native populations had learned to live. As a result they bred new strains of disease with which modern treatment, natural immunity, and traditional culture could not cope. On a world-wide scale, but particularly in th USA, medical care concentrated on breeding a human stock that was fit only for domesticated life within an increasingly more costly, man-made, scientifically controlled environment. One of the main speakers at the 1970 AMA convention exhorted her pediatric colleagues to consider each newborn baby as a patient until the child could be certified as healthy. Hospital-born, formula-fed, antibiotic-stuffed children thus grow into adults who can breathe the air, eat the food, and survive the lifelessness of a modern city, who will breed and raise at almost any cost a generation even more dependent on medicine.”