Robert S. Mendelsohn

Robert S. Mendelsohn, MD, (b. 1926, d.1988) was an American pediatrician who criticized his profession, inveighing against pediatric practice, obstetric orthodoxy and the effect of the preponderance of male obstetricians, and vaccination. He also opposed water fluoridation, coronary bypass surgery, licensing of nutritionists, and the routine use of X-Rays. For 12 years, Mendelsohn was an instructor at Northwest University Medical College, and was associate professor of pediatrics and community health and preventive medicine at the University of Illinois College of Medicine for another 12 years.

From 1981 to 1982, Mendelsohn was president of the National Health Federation. He also served as National Director of Project Head Start's Medical Consultation Service (a position he was later forced to resign after criticizing the public school system), and as Chairman of the Medical Licensing Committee of Illinois. He often spoke at NHF conventions and produced a newsletter and a syndicated newspaper column, both called The People's Doctor. He appeared on over 500 television and radio talk shows. In 1986, the National Nutritional Foods Association gave Mendelsohn its annual Rachel Carson Memorial Award for his "concerns for the protection of the American consumer and health freedoms."

Mendelsohn considered himself a "medical heretic." One of his books charged that "Modern Medicine's treatments for disease are seldom effective, and they're often more dangerous than the diseases they're designed to treat"; that "around ninety percent of surgery is a waste of time, energy, money and life"; and that most hospitals are so loosely run that "murder is even a clear and present danger."

Education

Mendelsohn received his medical degree from the University of Chicago in 1951.

Criticism of medical orthodoxy

Mendelsohn asserted issues regarding drug induced nutritional deficits and other 'subtle' drug side effects, such as aspirin's interference with blood clotting factors and its propensity to reduce levels of Vitamin C.

Mendelsohn said that the greatest danger to American women's health was often their own doctors, and contended that chauvinistic physicians subjected female patients to degrading, unnecessary and often dangerous medical procedures. Hysterectomy and radical mastectomy, according to Mendelsohn, were among the most indiscriminately recommended surgical procedures.

Quotes

• "The admission tests and policies of medical schools virtually guarantee that the students who get in will make poor doctors. The quantitative tests, the Medical College Admission Test, and the reliance on grade point averages funnel through a certain type of personality who is unable and unwilling to communicate with people."
• "Medical school does its best to turn smart students stupid, honest students corrupt and healthy students sick. It isn't very hard to turn a smart student into a stupid one. First of all, the admissions people make sure the professors will get weak-willed, authority-abiding students to work on. Then they give them a curriculum that is absolutely meaningless as far as healing or health are concerned."
• "I don't advise anyone who has no symptoms to go to the doctor for a physical examination. For people with symptoms, it's not such a good idea, either. The entire diagnostic procedure -- from the moment you enter the office to the moment you leave clutching a prescription or a referral appointment -- is a seldom useful ritual."
• "Almost every stage of obstetrical procedure in the hospital is part of the mechanism that enables the doctor to create his own pathology."
• "The door to the doctor's office ought to bear a surgeon general's warning that routine physical examinations are dangerous to your health. Why? Because doctors do not see themselves as guardians of health, and they have learned precious little about how to assure it. Instead, they are latter-day Don Quixotes, battling sometimes real but too often imaginary diseases. The disastrous difference is that doctors are not tilting at windmills. Rather, it is people who are damaged by their insistent search for dubious diseases to conquer."
• "The greatest threat of childhood diseases lies in the dangerous and ineffectual efforts made to prevent them through mass immunization.....There is no convincing scientific evidence that mass inoculations can be credited with eliminating any childhood disease."
• "Despite the tendency of doctors to call modern medicine an 'inexact science', it is more accurate to say there is practically no science in modern medicine at all. Almost everything doctors do is based on a conjecture, a guess, a clinical impression, a whim, a hope, a wish, an opinion or a belief. In short, everything they do is based on anything but solid scientific evidence. Thus, medicine is not a science at all, but a belief system. Beliefs are held by every religion, including the Religion of Modern Medicine."
• "Doctors turn out to be dishonest, corrupt, unethical, sick, poorly educated, and downright stupid more often than the rest of society. When I meet a doctor, I generally figure I'm meeting a person who is narrowminded, prejudiced, and fairly incapable of reasoning and deliberation. Few of the doctors I meet prove my prediction wrong."

Publications

• 1982, Male Practice: How Doctors Manipulate Women, ISBN 0-8092-5721-1
• 1987, How To Raise a Healthy Child In Spite of Your Doctor, NTC/Contemporary Publishing Company, ISBN 0-8092-4995-2
• 1991, Confessions of a Medical Heretic, ISBN 0-8092-7726-3 (This book was first published in 1980)

External links

• NaturalChild.com - 'The Child Who Never Sits Still', Robert Mendelsohn, MD
• CBC.ca - Video: A 1985 Canadian Broadcasting Corporation television forum on AIDS featuring Dr. Mendelsohn