On the Profanity of the Doctor Patient Relationship.

Its Heretics All the Way Down

On March 9th, 2021 and coinciding with the first wave of covid epigenetic injectables, the Australian Health Practitioner Agency issued the following diktat against criticising government health policy re the same.   

Ahpra---Position-statement---COVID-19-vaccination-position-statement.PDF

With reference to social media, the gag order states, inter alia

“Any promotion of anti-vaccination statements or health advice which contradicts the best available scientific evidence or seeks to actively undermine the national immunisation campaign (including via social media) is not supported by National Boards and may be in breach of the codes of conduct and subject to investigation and possible regulatory action.”

Practitioner experiences make clear this prohibition on free speech also refers to in clinic interactions between doctor and patient. The most a practitioner is permitted is to state is to state plainly they are a conscientious objector, though be silent on their reasons. For if to to give voice to their conscience they might be persuasive, and to risk being persuasive is to impede the vaccine rollout. This will not do.  

Now the bio robots of technocracy and the ultra socialist agents of the state who inhabit the bodies of “doctors” should have no quarrel with the diktat. Make no mistake there are plenty of these around. They see themselves as allied with patient interests only insomuch as this rings true with the Maoist agenda of protecting the public from the individual, the guild guideline from the patient at the center of care. The patient might not realize this yet this is the case.   

But I must take issue also with those doctors on the dissident side who place the therapeutic encounter in a different category and protest that the diktat impacts on the “sanctity of the doctor patient relationship”

Often at public speaking events I’ve said similar myself, only with a different turn of phrase. Instead I borrow from the psychotherapeutic frame and phrase it something like this

“what this diktat means is that there should be three chairs in the consulting room; one for the patient, one for the doctor. And a third chair symbolic of the governments intercalation or intrusion in the relationship. This third chair should sit between patient and doctor. The doctor should be aware of, and explain the reasons for, the third chair”

To which I continue to describe the consequences of the third chair. Censorship is real regardless of the attitude or epistemic state with which the doctor approaches their part of the dialogue on the covid “vaccines”. The doctor might be ignorant of the diktat. With all the comfort and sincerity in the world, they might issue advice in accord with government health policy. Nonetheless the censorship is always there in its potentiality. Any doctor who would like to oppose it faces a problem. To speak out places the doctor at risk of discipline including the loss of accreditation to practice. And so the government controls the message in one direction and public health becomes ipso facto, totalitarian. Insomuch as the doctor faces a penalty of not working, to work then becomes conditional of becoming a de facto conscript. An agent of the state! A traitor to the relationship itself!    

Having expressed such a view and being a free speech extremist, why do I then object to the notion of “the sanctity of the doctor patient relationship”. The answer is because it is sloppy language and heresy.

The latin sanctitas enters old English circa 14th century saunctite and now is sanctity. Sanctity means "holiness, godliness, blessedness”. Sanctity is an explicitly and exclusively religious term of art. Take it again to be synonymous with holiness. And holiness can only come with God and through God.  

What is sanctified is also akin to and running parallel with the sacred. From the latin sacer, something sacred is to be set apart and made inviolable in virtue of having been consecrated or purified. Once again only in a kind of relationship with God can the object, the person or the practice become sacred.

From the sacer becomes the sacred, and form the sacred are the sacraments. These vary depending on denomination though as a general rule of traditional thumb are seven in number. And these seven are baptism, chrismation, communion, confession, unction, ordination and marriage. Insomuch as these rituals may, to a secular observer, appear merely as words, contracts and various movements of the body they appear as profane as any other. But insomuch as they present an occasion to encounter the transcendent these are mysteries and sit outside the profane world of post pagan medicine.

The reason why I make a dwelling on this etymology is to offer up a reformulation of the statements which remain faithful (pun intended) to the statements made by dissident doctors in the wake of the diktat of March 9th 2021.

For they are effectively saying this

“the state shall not infringe into the holiness of the doctor patient relationship. It is set apart from the world. In its un-understandable. It is holy mystery”

Heresy I say. What cringe! There is no sanctity here and nor should there be. The only way to redeem any semblance of the sacred or the sanctified is to explicitly take up the staff of Aesculapius, don a toga and fully enter into a pagan tradition. Yet even here we find that an Oath (to the Gods of Hippocrates) does not a sacrament or sanctification (of and from the Gods) make. Or to put another way, graduation and accreditation do not an ordination make. In any case and anyway, modern medical schools have largely abandoned the original form the Hippocratic Oath. and no doctor, I repeat, no doctor, observe the entirety of the oath. Read it in its fullness if you doubt me.  

You might think that this is a rabid religious (and Christian) defence of sanctity. Not so. To be sure, the religious community should lay claim to the terms and assert the boundaries clearly. But it is the secular community who should be most aggrieved, even the libertarian community regardless of religiosity (or probably lack of it). What I am saying is that the state via its public health organs and the post Nietzchean (read death of God) medical pharmaceutical complex considers itself as the new church. What these dissident doctors are doing in appropriating the use of religious terms is affirm the quasi-religious pretentions of the profession and its hierarchy both. What is being in effect said is “the church of AHPRA should stay out of the specific confessional of the surgery” or “bishops leave the priests alone”

Contra the power of a state inversion of pseudo-theocracy, the only way forward is to pass through paradox. That is to say the way forward is to gain by losing. There is no sanctity in medicine. Let’s do away with it. There is however beauty in the profane. Let us elevate instead privacy in all human relationships against state intrusion, doctor-patient included. Every conversation is an opportunity for the interlocutors to say “this is ours. Get thee hence the state”