A viewer asks: “In his 1970s book, Medical Nemesis, Ivan Illich suggests medicine isn’t the primary reason people survive illness; sanitation, nutrition, and housing matter more. He goes on to say over-treatment and exaggeration of disease are widespread, that healthcare fosters dependency, and that illness is seen as unacceptable. Healthcare often operates less for the benefit of patients and more to serve political, social, or bureaucratic interests – public image, economic concerns, or voter approval over medical advice. His views jarred badly with me. Is it right to say, in 2026, that people avoid confronting mortality and that modern healthcare is more about socio-political optics than illnesses?”

You must look deeper to see why the critics of medicine can have a field day because of public complacency and professional blinding to keep them much like hamsters on a wheel, advertising their wares in good faith but having meager goods to share in the so-called practice of medical treatment, which is more like a series of make-work exercises targeted at alleviating symptoms, but those symptoms are often contrived to represent something greater than they truly do. This is why we see this as a kind of circus to get people on a treadmill and engage in costly, time-consuming, and inconvenient so-called medical treatment that is really nothing of the sort, more like a series of handholding exercises that is largely misdirected at the wrong things and done in quite a level of ignorance as to the true causes of illness and the true answers for illness, which cannot be found in pills and capsules from the pharmaceutical industry. So the basic premise of this author is correct, that the largest gains have been made with engaging seriously in deficiencies in lifestyle with respect to personal hygiene, sanitation measures to reduce infectious illness spreading, along with nutrition to help fortify physical well-being and resistance to disease. The latter will help as well with karmic rumblings that will begin when the body gets weakened in any way, and then things will worsen. So this author is looking only on the surface, as are other critics of the medical establishment. They see the inadequacies, they see the inappropriateness, and they see many gaining financially from it and it all looks like a con game. But in truth, all are being conned, including those who inflict their healthcare system on a gullible public. All are being misled to buy into a flawed system and accept it as state-of-the-art when that is far from the case.