The Privilege of Self-Medication

We are set to think of self-medication as bad, because we see so many problems with it. We should pause and consider a couple of other things, however.

First, the bad outcomes we see do not necessarily mean that the privilege of self-medication should be restricted. To restrict that privilege means that we think of ourselves as more than advisers and assistants. It means that we think of ourselves as controlling authorities. Where in Scripture has God authorized us as having any controlling authority over our patients?

Second, we have no good denominator for the dangers of self-medication. That is, we see those who have problems, but we are not nearly as aware of those who do not have problems. Every treatment has a certain failure rate. That is, we have a numerator of failures sitting over a denominator of all treatments. Unless we know the denominator we cannot know the fraction. If we do not know the fraction, we cannot know the rate. If we do not know failure rates, complication rates, and success rates, we are presumptuous to deny people by law the ability to decide for themselves.

We tend in medicine to practice on the numerator kind of information. We make decisions based on partial information. Patients need to be able to "vote with their feet." It is a check on us "experts." We, too, have fallen natures, with pride and desires for power and money. We want to have our way.


Excerpt from "Pharmacy and Medical Interventions"

Extending Life Expectancy?

I don’t think it’s been shown that the medical profession has had anything positive to do with extended life expectancies in the United States. It’s a definitional matter. It’s an epistemological matter -- how do you know what you know. You start with presuppositions about your view of a human being: a human being is a person conceived. The medical profession, alone, is accountable for a decrease in average life expectancy. From around fifty years around the turn of the century in this country, to around forty-five years today -- probably having passed through a time of greater life expectancy in the mid-forties to early sixties, after which abortion became commonplace. Definitional issues aside, for those people who were allowed to make it to birth, there has been a very substantial increase in life expectancy, which might in part be due to some of the things we do in medicine. It was just done at too high a cost, as we took the resources of those who were not allowed to live and diverted them into many things, one of which was vast medical establishment that now exists.


Excerpt from an interview with Dr. Terrell

The Mistake of Medical Licensure

[Medical licensure] is a mistake. It is only about a hundred and three years old where I live, and similarly, about a hundred years old in other states. So its a very new idea when placed against the backdrop of medicine as a whole. As usual, it was promoted with the idea of the public good. But if you look at it, as usual, it was the physicians who wanted to remove certain kinds of competition that they had disdain for. It is one of the reason for higher costs. It is one of the reasons that orthodoxy has been able to be so militant and stamp out of so much of unconventional treatment by calling it quackery -- and I indeed believe that there is much quackery out there -- and pushing it off the playing field without being able to show that what they do is all that bad, or all that different from what we do. It’s a form of state-granted monopoly which Caesar has granted to certain privileged people such as ourselves.

This authority really resides in God in the family, not in the “experts.” We are tyrannized by the experts. The profession as a whole is a tyranny of experts. Physicians are able to enact their own agenda without sufficient proof that what they do is all that splendid. Licensure is a mistake and it is one that I expect will be remedied, perhaps within my lifetime. It is very radical to propose that licensure is wrong, but there are strong pragmatic reasons for it. In my own state we are seeing an expansion of who is able to do certain things -- there are nurse practitioners who can now prescribe, chiropractors are moving in on the medical turf, and there are physician assistants of various sorts. I am in favor of that, basically, because it is expanding the number of people who are able to do what I do without being arrested for it. And the ultimate end is that after awhile so many people will be empowered to do so many things, that after a while licensure will simply die, and will be of no use to those who promoted it for personal gain.


Excerpt from an interview with Dr. Terrell

Viewing the Broader Outcome

The means [in medicine] are very impressive. But the outcomes sometimes aren’t. Part of that is nature of reductionistic science itself. When we narrow our focus of view to, “Did the patience die of heart disease after this bypass surgery?”, you may get one set of figures that looks really good. But when you look at all causes of mortality after a treatment, you may find that others may increase to balance out the benefit that you got. But the person in the profession who is focusing on the outcome in their little particular part of the world of medicine didn’t choose to look at that because it was outside their field of view. As a generalist, I am one of those who are supposed to called upon to look at a wider array of potential outcomes. When you look at that, you find that medicine, even in some of our cherished areas, has fallen short.


Excerpt from an interview with Dr. Terrell