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."
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