The Making of the Flexner Report: Follow the Money- This is why you are met with dismissal or belittling comments when you mention an herbal adjunct therapy to your doctor

Enter… the Flexner Report.

Here is a story of the efforts of a few players who drastically altered the path of medicine in North America based on personal gain and profit.

What is the Flexner Report?
The Flexner Report – actual title “Medical Education in the United States and Canada” but nicknamed for its author, Abraham Flexner – was an in-depth assessment of 155 medical schools in the US and Canada. It was commissioned by the American Medical Association, funded by the Carnegie Foundation, and penned by Flexner, who visited each of the schools.

Published in 1910, the Flexner Report would redefine medical education in North America, putting a stranglehold on what could be taught in medical schools. With the stated goal of creating more uniform standards in North American medicine, it established the biomedical model as the sole legitimate form of medicine and contributed to the eventual closure of schools that did not meet its standards.

Under the biomedical model, drugs are often designed to suppress symptoms through molecular interactions. You attack the specific symptom without regard for affect on the rest of the body. Thus, the current rampant statistics of iatrogenic disease. Iatrogenic disease is an ill effect that is caused by a medical procedure or substance used to treat symptoms but causes a secondary illness. (Side-effects anyone?)

Flexner Report bottom line, if your medical school was focused on teaching pharmaceuticals and surgery, you were in. Herbs, nutrition, water cures, thousands of years of empirical evidence about which food and herbs to use when… nope, not good enough, time to close the doors and suppress all knowledge not in line with the narrative.

Before the Flexner Report
Prior to the 1910 report, medical colleges that focused on herbalism and holistic health flourished in the United States, although they wouldn’t have used the words “herbalism” or “holistic health.”

Doctors practicing in what was called the “Eclectic” tradition used knowledge of plants drawn from various sources, including European and Native American folk medicine, to help patients. There were schools of hydrotherapy using ancient knowledge of how to heal with water along with homeopathic colleges using plants and minerals to activate the body’s innate healing power.

Eclectic medicine was focused on strengthening the whole person with natural means instead of using drugs to kill a pathogen without regard for its effect on the overall health of the person.

One of the Eclectic movement’s leaders was John Uri Lloyd, a pharmacist whose practice was infused with ethnobotany and herbalism. His extensive research into the medical use of plants shows how vastly the pharmaceutical industry has changed since the early 1900s. His name will come up again in this post – he helped fund the Lloyd Library and Museum, which houses publications of the Eclectic physicians and medical schools.

More here:
https://kamimcbride.com/the-flexner-report/