As the AMA gained power and scripted a plan to commandeer the medical system, it used its medical-racial script to leap on the progressive train, including an embrace of eugenics. Eugenics flowed from the medical racial script, and according to historians, was the secular religion of progressives. It was deemed to be sanctified science, taught at all major universities, and penetrating the hearts and minds of those who believed that science would solve the world's problems. Like German progressive medical science, eugenics relied on discrete numerical measurements to reach conclusions about race, intelligence, and even body habitus deemed to be scientifically unassailable. Thus were most of those who reformed health care in the German-progressive tradition also deeply steeped in eugenics. While we call eugenics pseudoscience today, that's very deceptive, because in its day it was solid science, and those who discredited eugenics were considered pseudoscientists. Hence we see that medical science had from the beginning specious origins, and it would only get more muddled and dogmatic as the AMA grew and spread its gospel across the nation.

We are always amazed watching TV. What used to be ads for car companies, beer, clothes, products are not proliferated by ads for drugs and companies seeking to sell you drugs. These companies, like Hims and Hers, are willing to provide you with drugs to help everything under the sun, whether your obesity, hair loss, anxiety, ED, or infections. No need to see a doctor now, just get on line, chat with an AI doc, and buy the recommissioned drugs sold by the company, and you are all set. Once again, drugs can be had on the cheap, real medical care evaporates in the wake of easy access, and more harm and cost flood the system. Hear as Alan and Andy discuss this disturbing new trend in healthcare.

Few people realize how important nutrition is, and it's not all about weight loss. You can lose weight and be less healthy because you are not eating food that will feed your gut bacteria, energize your muscles, and strengthen your brain. This is occurring in a lot of people on fad diets and taking GLP-1's. The newer nutrition triangle, which replaces one that was antithetical to health, places fats, fiber, and fruits/vegetables in their correct place as being the very lynchpins of health, with processed foods, sugars, and fake fats being the poisons we should minimize. We all have our treats, and that's fine, but the key is to focus most of the diet on the good stuff. The best diet is often the very opposite of what doctors tell you: it's high fat and high carb, and it's important to know how to chose the most quality fats and carbs and avoid the rest.

Born in Republican America, with its emphasis on democratic decentralization, the AMA was floundering in the late 1800's, with few doctors latching their sails to its agenda. Most orthodox doctors remained fully independent, many graduated from poorly regulated schools without any firm curriculum, and the medical landscape was dominated by non-orthodox providers. In this vein, the AMA shifted course in the late 1800's, increasing its funding stream, starting a journal, and gravitating towards a more top-down Progressive model of care. Part of its shift required certain compromises and a restructuring of its code of ethics, enabling stronger relationships with the growing pharmaceutical industry that led to more ads and increased revenue, and permitting the inclusion of homeopaths into its orbit if they adhered to certain orthodox precepts. Where the AMA did not bend is in its medical racial script, as it turned its back on the growing orthodox African American medical profession.

The very landscape of organized medicine is being altered by corporate takeovers. Whether in long term care, hospitals, or large groups, corporations are taking charge and offering "perks" that enhance the wealth of institutions, their leaders, and many specialist doctors, but take one more step in decimating primary care and focusing more on profits than patients. Andy and Alan will explain why what these corporate vultures sell is appealing but ultimately dangerous and often lethal.

Excluded from the AMA and from orthodox medicine, African American doctors had to find their own way in the late 1800's. Virtually no African American doctors existed in the early century, but that changed in the Civil War, especially with the advent of Howard University and then a sprinkling of other medical schools that trained black doctors. How the African American medical community grew and prospered by essentially engineering an alternate medical landscape is something often overlooked by medical historians, and yet is crucial to understand white orthodoxy, the medical racial script, and the posturing of the AMA. Ironically, most African American doctors upheld the most foundational tenants of orthodoxy and worked well with white doctors, but were shunned by organized medicine, medical schools, and remained excluded from most medical institutions.

While we view traditional medical care as the norm, it was not always that way. Throughout most of the 1800's Americans chose alternative providers more frequently than orthodox doctors; their outcomes were better, their ideas based on common sense, their focus patient oriented, and even their fees lower. One of the primary goals of the AMA was to snuff out alternative philosophies, especially homeopathy. We will discuss these alternative ideas and how they impacted the medical landscape.

With orthodox medicine in disarray, with no standards of education, and with alternative medical philosophies ruling the roost, several prominent orthodox doctors came together to forma national organization to represent the needs of orthodoxy, the American Medical Association (AMA). Founded in 1847 largely by Nathan Davis, the AMA had several goals: To promote licensing requirements, to standardize education, and to provide a collective where all orthodox doctors could gather. Although formed as a democratic union of orthodox doctors, the organization from the start sought to stamp a unifying dogma upon its members and the nation, one that included the medical racial script. In fact, the script helped to congeal doctors under a single rubric of medical science, one shared by doctors North and South. Weak from the start, the AMA hobbled along for many decades before emerging as the predominant Progressive force in American healthcare, one destined to change the system into the one we know today.