Smaller country hospitals are beyond hopeless, places of amateur hour, second-rate doctoring, misdiagnoses and a systemic, under-resourced lack of care.

The bigger ones, I have found, too, to be dangerous to one’s health. The word “dangerous” is not used lightly.

PROBLEM

They are all under-resourced. But money isn’t the cause of the problem, and more won’t fix it.

This should be of profound concern to all Australians, not just the third of the population that resides in the regions.

Over at Unbekoming, the indefatigable Frank has been on the case for a long time.

A recent post led off with this: “Dr Andy Kaufman stands out as a pivotal figure courageously questioning the bedrock of modern healthcare. As a psychiatrist by training, Kaufman’s journey into medical scepticism was perhaps inevitable, given the field’s reliance on pharmaceutical interventions with questionable efficacy and significant risks.

“Kaufman has become a cornerstone voice in the movement against the lies of virology and the pharmaceutical paradigm, offering a critical perspective that resonates deeply with those seeking truth in medicine.”

His interview with Alec Zeck is a testament to his invaluable contributions, blending sharp critique with a call to reclaim the body’s innate healing intelligence.

In this conversation, Kaufman unravels the intricate web of institutional conditioning, flawed research methodologies, and profit-driven motives that underpin much of modern medical practice.

He exposes how medical education, steeped in pharmaceutical propaganda, produces professionals ill-equipped to question the science they’re taught.

The key phrase is emboldened (unlike most doctors). Let’s start with them.

Doctors lack critical thinking skills. I have concluded that many doctors are dumb.

But, you ask, don’t they have to score very high ATARs to get into medicine? Well, you have to be good at maths and science. This isn’t the same as being intelligent.

Critical skills can be defined to include questioning, finding patterns, looking broad and deep for problem solving, making connections, being eternally sceptical, including of ideology and settled systems.

To which might be added, “imagination”. A much-underrated skill, especially in medicine.

After a year’s close observation of public health doctors, I have found only one single instance of critical thinking and hundreds of hours of simply, and often catastrophically, accepting what is on a screen. Or “in the notes”.

Notes written by glib, accepting medicos creating a narrative of patient care history.

CRITICAL

Critical skills are not taught in STEM education. They are taught through disciplines like literature, philosophy (especially), history and political science. The liberal arts.

The education of doctors is inherently superficial. It predisposes them to accept what is in front of them, without reflection. The outcomes are entirely predictable.

In many cases, the wrong people are becoming doctors. And, it seems, in at least some instances, for the wrong reasons.

It is a crisis, and Dr Kaufman is onto it. He calls it a lack of “healing intelligence”.

UKI psychiatrist Iain McGilchrist says: “I am a great believer in educated doubt.

“It isn’t only lacking in our medical profession. It is discouraged everywhere. See under climate change. But in medical practice, it matters. It may mean life or death. Doctors are ‘trained’, not ‘educated’.”

Our doctors haven’t yet grasped that if you keep doing the same thing and expect different results, then you are not being wise.

A pathway forward for a becalmed profession must start with a unification of the arts and the sciences.

For example, every single intending doctor in Australia should undertake a course in the liberal arts.

A few years back, Melbourne University developed its own model along these lines. The problem was, the last place you would want to do an arts course would be ib Melbourne!

An arts degree these days at an Australian university does not provide an integrated understanding of the arts, nor a pathway to wisdom. But a major in philosophy somewhere would be better than nothing, for these medicos.

Wisdom, says McGilchrist, can only come from a combination of explicit knowledge and implicit knowledge, distilled through experience. Medical graduates only have explicit knowledge, and it is greatly limited at that.

It is even distorted. And in most graduates, from my observation, it is seldom developed over the course of their careers, which feature merely linear learning at best.

“Learning” here is putting it at its kindest. Their knowledge is atomised and fragmented. It is a microcosm of our contemporary, siloed learning world. (If left brain is analytical and right brain is creative, where does that leave our struggling doctors, who are neither analytical nor creative?)

Which brings us neatly back to Australian medical practice and its discontents.

Of course, the COVID non-pandemic revealed much about our public health system and about Australian doctoring. We found it to be riddled with Pharma-worship and Pharma-dependence, misdiagnosis, technocracy, doctors willing to go along to get along, false narratives, fear-mongering, capture of the bureaucracy, infected medical research in the universities, weak butt-covering politicians.

The sad thing is that COVID medical management wasn’t an exception.

Poor doctoring isn’t the end of the crisis in public health, unfortunately. There is a crisis in nursing.

Good nurses leave bad wards and bad systems. They head to the big cities. Bad (as in ignorant or lazy) nurses get placed on tasks for which they are inadequately trained. This I have witnessed on a regular basis.

Many nurses are forced to do double shifts. That would be sixteen hours straight, with short breaks.

Sixteen hours in which they may be called upon to address acutely ill patients with complex medical problems.

INEFFECTIVE

Middle management in our public hospitals knows all this. Oh, they know this, all right. Nothing gets done. The money goes on expensive new equipment and on expensive drugs that are often dangerous and ineffective.

There is a weird combination of under and over-servicing.

There are patients in hospital who are there only because their million-plus dollar annual NDIS package of care has run out. Or because of a lack of aged care facilities.

The taxpayer is paying for the in-hospital nursing care of patients who should not even be there. Real patients, sometimes in a very bad way, are missing out on beds because these other people are there. Then there are the crazies, the special needs patients, in some cases simply abandoned by their families.

There is massive under-resourcing of areas of health care not thought of as sexy. Or areas not ripe for research grants.

Linking hospitals to universities is, therefore, a two-edged sword. It embeds the control that Big Pharma has over the entire health system. It gets them while they are young, embeds medication-driven thinking and practice, and dulls the sceptical instinct, the inquiring mind.

America has its potential public health saviour, RFK Jr and the MAHA movement, intent on weeding out corruption and incompetence. What do we have in Australia?