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