Episode Thirteen: The Flexnerian Biostate

From the seeds of Flexner's Report grew the biostate in which we currently live.  COVID certainly was the biostate on steroids, although the biostate has been part of our lives for decades thanks to Flexner.
What are the ingredients of a biostate?  First and foremost, I don't want it to sound like some conspiratorial James Bond Villainy type of creation.  In fact, the biostate is multifactorial, not controlled by some nefarious government, but rather driven by a health care system constructed under Flexner that encompasses industry, physicians, hospitals, government agencies, private agencies, and all citizen of the nation henceforth called "patients."  

• In the biostate, patients are willing to trade their freedom, their skepticism, and their very bodies to those who promise cure for diseases they are told they have.
• In the biostate, fear is the fuel of everything.  There must be constant fear infused in the air for patients to be willing to trade their souls for a promise of medical salvation.  Fear of catching COVID prompted a large sector of the population to willingly mandate experimental vaccines even on kids who had minimal risk of illness while decrying all pretense of "pro-choice" or "our bodies ourselves," shut down society for almost two years including both stopping and then severely impinging upon education and low wage jobs, allot to Governors and Mayors unprecedented power over people's lives and even people's ability to speak, promote censorship, and engage in medically meaningless but culturally oppressive measures such as universal masking and travel restrictions.  While COVID required an intense and unending flow of fear to enable the biostate to exert such power and influence over the population, Flexnerian medicine has been using the flames of fear to achieve its goals more insidiously during most of our lives.
• In the biostate, all knowledge and data is produced by those agents most likely to benefit from a universal compliance to medical dogma, with physicians, drug companies, and academic medical centers taking the lead in creating medical myths.
• In the biostate, patients are told they must submit their bodies to tests, drugs, and treatments for diagnoses they have been given by numerical testing lest they die or suffer, without any concern for the negative ramifications of such aggressive care.
• The biostate does not distinguish between the old and young, rich and poor; it scares everyone equally and shoves pills and tests and procedures down everyone's throats with a false promise of saving lives.

The biostate has transformed our society into a medicalized dystopia, with everyone leaping from doctor to doctor, taking drug after drug, test after test, procedure after procedure, to "fix" all the abnormalities and address their frightening diagnoses, all done under false pretenses, with drug companies providing the false data, the media using drug company data to scare people into submission, and doctors acting as the pimps of drug companies.

As our biostate spends more and more money tricking people into giving our their bodies and money to robotic swindlers with an MD after their name, as they wear masks and swallow handfuls of pills with a religious-live submission to those who preach medicalized myths, we are living shorter than virtually every advanced nation in the world.  We spend the most, and we do the worst, and even so, all the patients promised cure, those who stent their arteries and suck down pills, those who trust their specialists and believe that their lives are being saved, they are the willing accomplices to the Flexnerian nightmare in which we live.

To understand our dysfunctional, self-serving, and nefarious health care system, you have to understand Flexner and the biostate it created.  We will explore the concept here, and then move on in subsequent podcasts analyzin