The advent of the scientific method has produced great human triumphs over the vagaries of nature, especially when it comes to healing sick bodies. Modern ‘healthcare’ is a miracle of human ingenuity and business innovation. However, many of the medical treatments on offer today and in the past are not based on any an ethical framework. Much of what the health industry and health authorities both advise and mandate does more harm than good. Money is a factor in the healthcare industry even if it’s offered by the government. In this series, I’m seeking to tell the stories of treatments that are miracle cures, incredible advances, and spectacular disasters. Negotiating the world of doctors, medicines, treatments, and bureaucracies is necessary if one wants to reap the benefits and avoid the disasters.
Anyone who has seen up close the death of a loved one in a hospital setting knows that there is a point where the medical system and the failing systems of the body become intertwined. Both of my grandfathers and my mother died this way. Ray Roush went into the hospital for a colonoscopy and had a stroke while under anesthesia. He never regained consciousness, lingered in a coma for a month, and then died. My grandmother believed the hospital doctors didn’t do enough to help him. William Clark was living an active life at 71 until he experienced some mild dizziness. A trip to the doctor revealed cancer in one lung, which was subsequently removed. They cut him open from the backbone to the sternum; I know because I saw the scar. With one lung, he was mostly inactive. He was then told the cancer spread to his brain and he underwent chemo and radiation which reduced him to a shell of his formerly active self. He died, 6 months after the dizziness first sent him to the doctor. I was 21 then and had left Florida to go to college in California. I heard about my grandfather’s death from my mother over the phone. Even then, I knew that there was no way to tell what killed him, the treatments, or the cancer.
Years later, my mother followed a similar path. She was already using several prescription medications by the time she was diagnosed with Parkinson’s. When she fell and broke her shoulder, the slide began to accelerate. The shoulder replacement surgery did not give her back the use of her right arm, but she was given more drugs. Eventually, she would be found unresponsive at the assisted living facility where she lived with my dad. EMS would be called, and they would take her to the emergency room, where she would eventually rally. The emergency room doctors thought that ‘adverse drug reaction’ was what caused her lapses in consciousness Eventually, she was found unresponsive and, like my grandfather, never woke up. With my sister beside her, she died.
In these three cases, I can at least take solace in knowing that no one in the hospital deliberately killed my blood relatives, even though the cause of death is clouded. What killed my grandfathers and mother? Was it an aging body, or a medical system gone wrong? Hard to say, but their interaction with modern medicine reveals another danger. Because the treatments and the disorders are so interlinked, it is difficult to detect the case when the doctor or nurse deliberately kills the patient. This instance is rare, but when it happens, it allows for a type of serial murderer of incredible brutality and reach.
The medical system is a perfect setting for murder since the patient/victim is already sick. The patients are in a setting where neither they nor their relatives fully understand what is being done to them, or worse yet, they are unconscious, and their relatives are not allowed access to them, as was the case in the early days of Covid. A baby in a neonatal ward can be separated from their parents behind a locked door; again, I know this because I’ve seen it. An adult is in the Intensive Care Unit is also vulnerable and isolated. It is a perfect setting for murder, and the alibi is built in since they were already sick.
In the UK, where the medical system is a division of the government, a pediatric nurse named Lucy Letby was recent giving a ‘whole life’ term for deliberately killing babies born prematurely. There could be no more vulnerable population of humans than ‘preemies’, and yet when Letby was alone with these tiny babies, she killed seven of them and attempted to kill six others. She killed them by injecting their tiny bodies with air and by flooding their system with insulin. Injecting them with air causes their tiny bodies to crack, as if she had hit them on the outside with a rolling pin.
The reaction of the hospital to the sudden decline of these infants, where death was possible but not common, demonstrates a further danger. The other nurses in the ward where Letby worked noted the connection between babies who declined and died and the presence of Letby, and it still took YEARS for her to be brought to justice. The deaths varied in many ways except one; the presence of Lucy Letby. Though she was suspected early on, the doctors and administrators in charge didn’t contact the police. There were internal reviews, and Letby was moved out of the neonatal unit, but the deaths were still thought to be natural. When Letby complained about the transfer out of the neonatal unit, she was given a letter of apology, but fortunately, because the deaths were clustered around her but otherwise, relatively uncommon, suspicions remained and eventually, there was an investigation. A closer look at Letby led to her writings, texts, searches, and correspondence, all of which were damning. She was eventually arrested, charged, tried, and convicted.
Letby was not the first UK medical authority to deliberately kill, not in the least, and the UK is not the only place doctors have used treatments to kill and used the cover of authority to escape detection. There have been many others, too many to count.
The most prolific serial killer of all time (as far as we know) was another UK medical authority, Fred Shipman. For at least 20 years, he treated patients at various UK clinics, many of whom died. His medical practice covered the period from 1974 until 1998. What brought an end to Shipman’s long career as a killer was not the hospital administration, but the coroner, who noted the high number of patients under Shipman’s care who died and the high volume of cremation orders he signed. Shipman wanted those bodies destroyed quickly. A taxi driver noted the number of healthy patients he drove to the hospital who later died, all under Shipman’s care. Who did not catch Shipman was any hospital where he worked, year in and year out.
He tried to forge a will for one of his final victims and make himself the beneficiary of her estate, and this, along with other evidence, sealed his fate after more than a quarter century of deadly practice. He was convicted of killing 15 women by injecting them with diamorphine, but the inquiry that followed, called The Shipman Inquiry, determined that 459 people died under his care over the term of his career and he was responsible for up to 250 of those deaths. His final victim was himself; he hung himself in prison in 2004.
Doctors and nurses can clearly hide a murder behind a death caused by an illness. The old, weak, or vulnerable are at risk anyway, and the medical staff has access to a variety of drugs and processes that can hasten death. There are clearly many people in every society who think that the weak or nonproductive are a waste of resources, and in a government run healthcare system, surely this temptation to save money by offing the sick is present. Canada, another Anglo country with a national healthcare system, offers the most generous suicide regime on the planet and it extends ‘assisted suicide’ ‘benefits’ to those who are merely poor or depressed. Doctors in this service seem to delight in providing aid in rendering death. We are long past the days of ‘first do no harm’ and into the realm of ‘there are too many people anyway.’
It should be noted that the medical authorities are not the only people who seem to gloss right past the death of the old or sick. In 2022, a Dallas assisted living facility employee, Billy Chemirmir, was convicted of murdering multiple older women by smothering them in their homes. Because these ladies were old, their deaths were attributed to natural causes even though each had been seen to be in good health, sometimes hours before their death, and their families reported valuable items missing from their homes. He is suspected in the death of 22 women, but how many he killed will never be known. What killed the women downstream of his first murder was the belief that old people ‘just die’ and no one need look any deeper. The same thinking was present at the hospitals were Fred Shipman worked and killed.
I have written on the massive demographic changes that are sweeping across the world here, and here, and in many other places. I have regularly watched and read the predictions made by Mark Steyn over the past 20 years, and more recently, watched many videos by Peter Zeihan, who notes the same trends. It’s fundamentally true; there are far fewer kids now, and so the average age of nearly every society on earth, including the US and the UK, is rising. As a result of immigration to the US and UK, the elderly native population is majority white, and the youth population is majority non-white. As this process has been playing out, everyone in the US and UK has been subjected to the never-ending dogma that declares both countries infected with ‘systemic racism’ and ‘institutional racism.’ Might this fundamental set up create a toxic opportunity for the non-white caretakers of an elderly, vulnerable white population to use the same cover Lucy Letby, Fred Shipman, and Billy Chemirmir used and commit theft and murder? Might the narrative that the old, white, and weak represent the racism of the past justify hastening their end?
Of course, this is happening. News reports of elderly abuse and murder are far too common, and those are the few that have been detected. As the Baby Boomers and then the GenXers pass into retirement, they will be cared for by doctors and nurses and non-medical caregivers that will be able to push them into death and face no legal consequences. As far back and 2007, the American Journal of Public Health published a report about “Gray Murder” which looked at trends in New York City homicide rates. The findings of this report include:
Nonelderly homicide victims were significantly more likely to be male, non-White, to have been shot in the city streets, and to have evidence of illicit drug or alcohol use. Elderly victims were more likely to be female, White, to have been killed by non firearm injuries, and to have been killed in their own homes.
They concluded:
The characteristics of homicide in non-elderly adults do not apply to elderly adults in New York City. Demographic factors and vulnerabilities of the elderly may underlie these differences, pointing to the need for oversight of isolated or homebound elderly persons and for protective interventions.
They noted the pattern of assigning death to age:
By contrast, relatively little attention has been given to victims of homicide aged 65 years and older. Geriatric homicides may be overlooked because of investigators’ presumption that advanced age and chronic illness provide sufficient explanations for most deaths.
Where did the murders take place?
Nonelderly victims were significantly more likely than were elderly victims to be killed in the street (46.1% vs 16.0%, respectively), whereas elderly victims were more often murdered in their own residences than were nonelderly victims (66.3% vs. 21.7%, respectively)
The core finding of economics, which is also a science, reads that humans respond to incentives. The incentive to kill is not difficult to find for those willing to do it, and those in positions of power over the weak, sick, and vulnerable are being tempted by the power they have. As every military planner knows, weakness is provocative. To survive the medical system, and any period of vulnerability, one will need watch dogs and caregivers that are known and trusted. Any situation that isolates the ill from those trusted watchdogs must be resisted. From those that are homebound to those in neonatal units that forbid parents from entering, everyone should be carefully vetted, and in some cases, adjusted or fought so that any killers lurking about know that eyes are watching, and an easy death is not available to harvest.
TomRoushOnline 