When doctors go on strike, death rates go down. In 2016 suc…

The most comprehensive review of medical impact of doctors' strikes is published in the academic journal Social Science and Medicine. A team of researchers at Emory and Georgetown Universities in the US analyzed five physician strikes around the world, all between 1976 and 2003.

Doctors withdrew their labor, from between 9 days and 17 weeks. Yet all the different studies report population mortality either stays the same, or even decreases, during medical strikes. Not a single study found death rates increased during the weeks of the strikes.

For example, in Los Angeles County, California in January 1976, doctors went on strike in protest over soaring medical *malpractice insurance premiums*. For five weeks, approximately 50% of doctors in the county reduced their practice and withheld care.

Two of the articles reviewed by Cunningham et al, found the strike may have actually prevented more deaths than it caused.

In Bogota - Colombia in 1970, there was a 52 days period in which doctors disappeared altogether except for emergency care. The "National Catholic Reporter" described a "string of unusual side effects" from the strike. The death rate went down 35%.

An 18% drop in the death rate occurred in Los Angeles county in 1976 when doctors there went on strike. When the strike ended and the medical machines started grinding again, the death rate went right back up to where it had been before the strike.

In Israel in 1973 doctors reduced their daily patient contact 90%. Strike lasted a month. The death rate dropped 50% during that month. There had not been such a profound decrease in mortality since the last strike!

Doctors strike often in Israel so there's a lot of data there.

Cunningham and colleagues point out that striking physicians in Jerusalem opened aid stations, supplementing medical care. In truth, most doctors in Jerusalem provided care in a private or partially private context.

Here is where we see some light.

A huge part of the problem is, of course, hospitals themselves and what they represent— industrial medicine. It is a problem of scale and the inhuman, machinic forces that govern those places.

Death by hospital, or iatrogenic death, is the predictable outcome.

Nurses carelessly overmedicating or mixing medications, secondary infections, unnecessary surgeries... and there is this mysterious category "other errors in hospital". Presumably, the hospital malfunctions— or begins functioning of its own accord. Who knows?

Another clue is that many doctors that strike are the ones willing to take "industrial action" over malpractice insurance premiums. In the 1976 Los Angeles strike only 50% of physicians were involved. The ones that remained were the ones whose main concern was for their patients.

But that was in 1976, nearly half a century ago. I suspect the percentage of "good doctors" is much lower in 2022. Industrial medicine has only continued to increase in scale, providing more bureaucratic crevices for psychopaths to thrive.

It is clear to me that when doctors are embedded in their communities and they are treating their friends, neighbors or co-religionists, that their patient care constitutes an entirely separate phenomenon from what occurs in hospitals.

The only solution is to abolish hospitals, they are centers of pestilence which should be shunned by all. They cannot be reformed.

Return to the country doctor. There is a much lower chance he will murder you if he has to look your family in the eyes every day.