Robert S Mendelsohn - the medical heretic

Dr Robert S Mendelsohn, a pediatrician, was a staunch critic of medical science and the medical system.

He pointed out that modern medicine was like a religion, and those who went against it were deemed to have committed a grievous "sin" – the sin of heresy, Dr Mendelsohn remained unrepentent, however, and proudly called himself 'The Medical Heretic'.

His first and most famous book, Confessions of a Medical Heretic, was published in 1980 and sold hundreds of thousands of copies. This is a profile of Dr Robert S Mendelsohn with excerpts of the book, originally published in a 1993 issue of The Good Life. The original article was titled...

The Confessions of Dr Robert S ‘Meddlesome’

The late Robert S Mendelsohn is sometimes called “Dr Meddlesome”. He makes life trouble some for his medical colleagues.

Like the time he allowed a mother to stay in a hospital room with her child past visiting hours…

The visiting hours were supposed to end at 7:30 every evening. One mother called me and said her child was crying but that he would stop crying and go t sleep by 8;30 if only she could stay with him until 8:30. I told her to go up to his room and stay

Then the nurse said this woman has to leave. I asked her what she would do if the mother decided to stay. She said she’d call the supervisor.

I called the supervisor…She said she’d call the hospital administrator.

The administrator called me and I asked him what to do. He said he’d have a police guard come and escort the woman out of the hospital. I asked him to do me favor and hold off for 15 minutes to see what I could do.

I called up a local TV newsman activist – told him I had a mother who was about to be thrown out of the hospital because she wanted to stay with her crying child.

Then I called up the administrator. The administrator said, “Alright, Bob, you win.”

Dr Robert S Mendelsohn gets his way and his views heard – by being direct and provocative. This is clear right from the opening line of this book:

I do not believe in Modern Medicine. I am a medical heretic. My aim in this book is to persuade you to become heretic, too.

Throughout Confessions of a Medical Heretic, Dr Robert S Mendelsohn fiercely attacks modern medicine – its science (or lack of it), its practices and its practitioners.

He cites real life examples of how diagnosis, drugs, surgery and doctors did a lot more harm than good. This, obviously, is an inside job. Yes, Dr Robert S Mendelsohn was once part of the medical establishment.

I once believed in Modern Medicine. In medical school, I failed to look deeply into a study that was going on around me, of the effects of the hormones DES – because I believed.

Who could have suspected that twenty years later we would discover that DES causes vaginal cancer and genital abnormalities in children born to women receiving the drug during pregnancy?

I confess that I failed to be suspicious of oxygen therapy for premature infants, even though the best equipped premature nurseries had an incidence of partial or total blindness of around 90 percent.

A few miles away, in a less ‘advance’ hospital, the incidence of this condition was less than 10 percent. I believed when my professors said the doctor in the poorer hospital just didn’t know to make the correct diagnosis.

I believed when I took part in a scientific paper on the use of the antibiotic Terramycin in treating respiratory conditions in premature babies. We claimed there were no side effects. Of course there weren’t. We didn’t wait long enough…

And I confess that I believed in the irradiation of tonsils, lymph nodes, and the thymus gland. I believe my professors when they said the doses we were using were absolutely harmless.

Years later, we found out that the ‘absolutely harmless’ radiation sown a decade or two before was now reaping in a harvest of thyroid tumors.

Modern Medicine, Dr Robert S Mendelsohn asserts, is not based on knowledge.

It’s based on faith. We don’t sat we know our doctors are good, we say we have faith in them. We trust them.

Would people allow themselves to be artificially put to sleep and then cut to pieces in a process they couldn’t have the slightest notion about – if they didn’t have faith?

Would people swallow the thousands of tons of pills every year again without the slightest knowledge of what these chemicals are going to do – if they didn’t have faith?

Modern Medicine can’t survive without our faith, because Modern medicine is neither an art nor science. It’s a religion.

Click here to read part II of this profile of Dr Robert S Mendelsohn

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