The Medicine Merchant's Game

There's a particular horror in realizing that the system meant to heal you might be designed to keep you sick. Not through malice necessarily, but through the cold logic of profit. A healthy customer is a lost customer. A cured patient stops paying. The real money is in management, not resolution.

I've watched this machine from both sides—as a patient passed between specialists and as someone who's studied the older ways. The pattern is too consistent to ignore: create the problem, sell the solution, then discredit anyone who points out the obvious.

Before pharmaceuticals became the only legitimate answer, people knew things. They knew which plants grew for which ailments. They knew how to read the body's signals, how to support its natural healing processes. My grandmother could identify a dozen medicinal plants in her backyard and knew exactly when to harvest them for maximum potency.

"The physician should not treat the disease but the patient who is suffering from it." — Maimonides

This wisdom wasn't perfect, but it was holistic. It understood that health isn't just the absence of disease, but a state of balance. That the body has its own intelligence, and sometimes healing means getting out of its way rather than overwhelming it with chemicals.

There was a time when healers used their hands as their primary tools. Bonesetters, massage therapists, acupuncturists—they understood the body as a physical structure that could be adjusted, balanced, and supported. Now we've medicalized everything, turning subtle imbalances into diagnosable disorders requiring pharmaceutical intervention.

The laying on of hands has been replaced by the writing of prescriptions. The personalized assessment has been replaced by the standardized protocol. The art of healing has become the business of disease management.

Step one: convince people they're sick. Normal life processes become disorders. Sadness becomes depression. Restlessness becomes ADHD. Menopause becomes a disease. Aging becomes a condition to be fought rather than a process to be embraced.

Step two: sell them the "cure." The cure doesn't actually cure, of course—it manages symptoms. Often while creating new ones that require additional medications. The customer becomes a permanent patient.

"It's difficult to get a man to understand something when his salary depends on his not understanding it." — Upton Sinclair

Step three: discredit the skeptics. When people notice the pattern, call them conspiracy theorists. Dismiss their observations as anecdotal. Remind them that only "evidence-based" medicine counts—and carefully control what counts as evidence.

I've been called a conspiracy theorist for pointing out that pharmaceutical companies have financial incentives to keep people sick. This isn't a theory—it's basic capitalism. A business's purpose is to make money, and recurring revenue models are more profitable than one-time cures.

The label "conspiracy theorist" has become the modern equivalent of "heretic." It's a way to dismiss uncomfortable truths without engaging with them. To maintain the illusion that the system is purely benevolent despite overwhelming evidence to the contrary.

I'm not arguing for abandoning modern medicine entirely. Emergency medicine, surgery, antibiotics—these are miraculous advances. But we've thrown the baby out with the bathwater in our rush to medicalize everything.

The recovery begins with small acts of rebellion. Learning to identify a few medicinal plants. Understanding basic nutrition. Recognizing when our bodies are asking for rest rather than medication. Questioning whether every discomfort requires professional intervention.

The answer isn't to reject modern medicine completely, but to restore balance. To use pharmaceuticals when necessary but not as a first resort. To value both clinical trials and centuries of traditional wisdom. To remember that healing is an art as much as a science.

We need a medical system that sees patients as whole people rather than collections of symptoms. That values prevention over treatment. That respects the body's innate wisdom while intervening when truly necessary.

Until then, we navigate this broken system as best we can—using its benefits when we must, but never forgetting that our health ultimately belongs to us, not to the merchants of medicine.