While we view traditional medical care as the norm, it was not always that way. Throughout most of the 1800's Americans chose alternative providers more frequently than orthodox doctors; their outcomes were better, their ideas based on common sense, their focus patient oriented, and even their fees lower. One of the primary goals of the AMA was to snuff out alternative philosophies, especially homeopathy. We will discuss these alternative ideas and how they impacted the medical landscape.

With orthodox medicine in disarray, with no standards of education, and with alternative medical philosophies ruling the roost, several prominent orthodox doctors came together to forma national organization to represent the needs of orthodoxy, the American Medical Association (AMA). Founded in 1847 largely by Nathan Davis, the AMA had several goals: To promote licensing requirements, to standardize education, and to provide a collective where all orthodox doctors could gather. Although formed as a democratic union of orthodox doctors, the organization from the start sought to stamp a unifying dogma upon its members and the nation, one that included the medical racial script. In fact, the script helped to congeal doctors under a single rubric of medical science, one shared by doctors North and South. Weak from the start, the AMA hobbled along for many decades before emerging as the predominant Progressive force in American healthcare, one destined to change the system into the one we know today.

After the Revolution, American was severed from the European seat of orthodox medical power. American orthodox doctors were forced to establish their own schools, their own dogma, and their own leaders. Much of what glued orthodox doctors together and led to copious research was the medical racial script, much of which was inscribed in the standard medical school curriculum North and South. However, during the Republican period, Americans eschewed labels, rules, and favoritism. This translated into an ideal that anyone who thought themselves to be a doctor could be, without any desire to regulate physician education or practice. For instance, no states maintained licensing requirements despite an orthodox push to do so. Alternative medical ideas flourished. We will discuss how orthodox medicine responded and how the American School--researches focused on racial medicine--lofted America into some degree of intellectual independence.

Starting in the colonial period and crystalizing during the Republican Period, American doctors differentiated themselves from their European colleagues and from non-traditional healers by instituting a medical-racial script. We'll discuss what the script is, how it helped American healthcare and its white male doctors to establish legitimacy, and the toll it took on the African American community. The script will be woven throughout this course. Nothing more united white male doctors, helped grow the American medical infrastructure and academic foundation, and imprinted on American medicine its enduring stamp than the script. As we study the nidus of the AMA in the mid 1800's, the Progressive rise of orthodox medicine in the early 20th century, and the consolidation of modern orthodoxy, the script emerges as an often covert but powerful catalyst to the health care system we know today.

I will be presenting a series of lectures on the history of American Health Care through 1920. These lectures are interesting in how they lay a framework for the system we have today. The first lecture explores our colonial origins. How did the American healthcare system and its doctors change from their European mentors? What about the American landscape fermented something unique in the colonies regarding the practice and study of medicine?

Antibiotics are one of the most impactful medical discoveries in the past century. Along with sanitation and sterile technique, antibiotics have led to a dramatic increase in life expectancy. However, now we have moved down a different road. We are over-using antibiotics, killing our gut bacteria, causing resistance leading to superbugs that can't be stopped by any of our technology. The judicious use of antibiotics is lifesaving. The overuse of antibiotics is just the opposite. Hear the two docs talk about this important issue!

Drug companies, the media, physician groups, and patient advocacy groups, month others, have convinced the American public that the key to health is more testing, more doctor visits, more drugs, more procedures. We have invented more diseases and diagnoses the past decade, scared more patients into falling prey to "necessary and lifesaving" interventions for conditions that are more phantom than real, and yet no one is talking about what really matters. In areas of the world where people live far longer than we do, and have far less chronic illness, they don't see doctors, take drugs, or suffer from fabricated diseases. They eat well, exercise, and have strong communities, all of which contribute to their better health. While our system is excellent at fixing urgent problems such as a ruptured appendix or heart attack, it is awful at keeping us healthy, largely because it has spread a false gospel that people are sick when they're not and that they need more of what our system has to offer, all of which contributes to the $5 trillion healthcare cost and simultaneous drop in life expectancy. Today Alan and Andy discuss what really matters! And it's not what your doctor will likely tell you!

Today we talk about the impact of drug advertisement on both patient and physician decision making. These companies know that a huge investment in ads will result in more prescriptions, one of many ways Big Pharma infiltrates so many aspects of the medical industrial complex.