When Healing becomes a crimeby Kenney ausubel Essay

When Healing becomes a crimeby Kenney ausubel - Essay Example To better understand the nature of this opposition, it would be useful for all to read the book by Kenny Ausubel titled â€Å"When Healing Becomes a Crime †. This work is centered on the account of the story of Harry Hoxsey, the private practitioner of alternative cancer treatment with the allegedly very high rate of successful healings. During the course of his book, the author manages to demonstrate what factors have influenced the development of the current medical practices, and some of those factors are definitely not very comforting. One of the specific topics that were of the great interest to me in the book and turned out to be almost a revelation was the fact that despite testimonies of cancer surgeons about numerous accounts of "people who got well when they werent supposed to" (Ausubel, 2000, ch.2), the medical establishment, represented by the American Medical Association (AMA), acted to suppress alternative cancer therapies under such pretences as for example that their proponents in reality had no medical skill, while AMA itself was lead by Dr. Morris Fishbein who â€Å". . . failed anatomy in medical school . . . never completed his internship . . . [and] never practiced a day of medicine or treated a single patient . . .† (Ausubel, 2000, p.117). And especially unpleasant it was to learn that such persecution was initiated after unsuccessful attempts of Fishbein to buy the formula of Hoxsey`s anti-cancer preparations. All this information impressed be because it convincingly shows that medical pr ogress is unfortunately far from being always directed by the principles from the Hippocratic Oath. Another piece of information that I found interesting was more optimistic, and concerned the description by the author of instances when the protest of general pubic and the larger medical community was able to prevent unethical actions of AMA, like when in a commercially lucrative for them step