Name Robert Mendelsohn Role Medical doctor | ||
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Books Confessions of a Medical, How to Raise a Healthy C, How to Raise a Healthy C, Male [mal]practice: How Doct | ||
Robert s mendelsohn top 5 facts
Robert S. Mendelsohn (1926 – 1988) was an American pediatrician and critic of medical paternalism. He denounced unnecessary and radical surgical procedures and dangerous medications, reminding his readers of public health failures such as the 1976 swine flu vaccine fiasco and the damage caused to daughters of women who took the drug Diethylstilbestrol during pregnancy. He portrayed doctors as powerful priests of a primitive religion, with dishonesty as its central ethic. His mild manner appealed to the public, while his message infuriated his medical colleagues.
Contents
Mendelsohn wrote a syndicated newspaper column called The People's Doctor, and also produced a newsletter with the same name (the newsletter continued after his death until 1992, under the name The Doctor's People.) He published five books, including Confessions of a Medical Heretic, Mal(e) Practice: How Doctors Manipulate Women, and How to Raise a Healthy Child…In Spite of Your Doctor. He appeared on over 500 television and radio talk shows.
Education and career
Mendelsohn received his medical degree from the University of Chicago in 1951. He was certified by the American Board of Pediatrics. Dr. Mendelsohn had a full-time private pediatric practice from 1956 to 1967, and continued to see patients of all ages on a consultancy basis until his death in 1988.
For 12 years, Mendelsohn was an instructor at Northwestern 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.
Mendelsohn served as National Director of Project Head Start's Medical Consultation Service, a position he was later forced to resign after criticizing the “deadening atmosphere” of regular public schools. He served as Chairman of the Medical Licensing Committee of Illinois. He was president of the alternative medicine National Health Federation (NHF) between 1981 and 1982.
Criticism of medicine
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. Cancer treatments like hysterectomy and radical mastectomy, according to Mendelsohn, were among the most indiscriminately recommended surgical procedures.
In an era in which the side effects of medications and the risks of medical treatments were hardly known except to doctors, Dr. Mendelsohn insisted that patients, too, had the right to such information. In the first of his books to attract widespread publicity, Confessions of a Medical Heretic (Contemporary Books 1979), he describes his efforts to make the Physician's Desk Reference, the authoritative guide to medications and medical treatments, available to the public.
“The PDR is the beginning of knowledge about drugs. Although it’s easily available now, up until about two years ago the publisher refused to distribute it to other than members of the medical profession. I wasn’t aware of this when I gave the PDR many plugs in my column and newsletter. Finally, I got a letter from the publisher telling me to please stop referring people to their book since they distributed it only to professionals. They felt that the public wouldn’t understand the PDR and would be confused by it. Well, I published that letter in my column and I commented that it was the first time in history a publisher didn’t want to sell his books. . .” (Confessions of a Medical Heretic, p. 40)
In Confessions, Mendelsohn argued that the methods of modern medicine were often more dangerous than the diseases they were designed to diagnose and treat. He advised consumers to be suspicious of their doctors. “One of the unwritten rules in Modern Medicine is always to write a prescription for a new drug quickly, before all its side effects have come to the surface.” (Confessions of a Medical Heretic, p. 32)Death
He died April 5, 1988 at his home in Evanston, Illinois.