The dark history of modern medicine: U.S. surgeons routinely operated on babies without anesthesia

Thursday, August 10, 2006 by Mike Adams, the Health Ranger Editor of NaturalNews.com (See all articles...) Tags: surgical procedures, modern medicine, surgeons

A warning to readers: this is a gruesome story. Do not read this if you are squeamish. It's a hard-to-believe (but true) account of the horrors of conventional medicine and its barbaric surgical procedures, many of which are still practiced today.

We begin by examining the astonishing practice of prestigious U.S. surgeons operating on babies with no anesthesia, subjecting them to the intense pain and trauma of having their skin sliced open with scalpels, their internal organs poked and prodded, and their surgical wounds closed up with staples and stitches... all with full awareness of each terrifying moment of excruciating pain.

To stop the babies from screaming in terror, surgeons gave them heavy doses of muscle relaxants, paralyzing them for the duration of the procedure. And so these babies could only watch in terrified amazement, prisoners in their own tiny bodies, unable to move a muscle or make a sound, as strange men wearing masks and wielding sharp instruments went to work on their flesh.

If it sounds like a "mad doctor" horror film, think again: This was a common practice by U.S. surgeons right up to the 1980's. Many adults living today were once subjected to the terror of full-consciousness surgical procedures as babies or infants, performed by the brightest and most authoritative surgeons of the day -- the same kind of arrogant surgeons who now tell us that bariatric surgery is a treatment for obesity, or that surgically removing muscles of the skull is a cure for migraines.

Surgery has a dark and dreadful history in the Western world, and the practice of operating on babies without anesthesia is just one footnote in a saga too terrifying to accurately describe. Its real history is hardly ever talked about today, just as doctors don't readily admit their profession once hawked cigarettes on television, proudly proclaiming Camels were, "Recommended by more doctors than any other cigarette!"

But the practice was real, and it was "standard operating procedure" at places like Oxford University and Boston Children's Hospital. It makes us all wonder, though... How could surgeons be so cruel as to operate on babies without anesthesia?

The bizarre beliefs of surgeons

The answer, as strange as it now seems, is that they actually believed babies couldn't feel pain. It's absurd, yes, but the mindset continues today with medical experiments on animals, where researchers tell themselves these animals don't feel pain either.

Much of conventional medicine has always been based on a lie, or a series of lies. Babies feel no pain. Lab rats feel no pain. Monkeys are not conscious beings. Health knowledge is gained by dissecting living beings and identifying their parts. Take your pick.

It was once common knowledge in the field of medicine that female reproductive organs made women crazy. Hysterectomies, which are still routinely performed today for no medically justifiable reason, derive their very name from the intention of the surgery: Hyster = hysteria, ectomy = to remove. Thus, hysterectomies were ordered and performed on the simple basis of removing hysterical behavior in women.

The procedure, of course, was almost always performed by men. It was the women, you see, who were all insane, they claimed. The men were merely scientists practicing what they called, "evidence-based medicine" -- a term you still hear thrown around today by doctors and surgeons defending modern medical scams.

The madness of surgery continues into modern times

The madness of conventional medicine and its surgical procedures, sadly, is not yet a closed chapter in the history books. We're still living it, and millions of Americans each year are being subjected to surgical procedures that can only be described as utterly mad, if not downright profitable for the masked men performing them: Hysterectomies, gastric bypass surgery, heart bypass surgery, carpal tunnel surgery, the surgical removal of wisdom teeth and many more.

None of these have any medical justification except in a few extreme cases. Nearly all are conducted for the sole purpose of generating business for surgeons who suffer serious delusions about the efficacy of these procedures, just as the surgeons of three decades ago once believed babies could feel no pain.

There's not a conventional dentist who has looked in my mouth, for example, who didn't immediately urge me to undergo oral surgery to remove my wisdom teeth. I'm 36 years old. My teeth are fine. My jaw is fine. But my dentists are mad. Most patients would automatically say yes to such an authoritative suggestion, though. They'd agree on the spot: "Yes, I'll let you cut open my jaw and remove my teeth just because you say so!"

Two decades ago it was tonsils. Half the children I grew up with, it seemed, had their tonsils surgically removed. That particular procedure was a popular medical fad. Countless parents were hoodwinked into letting little Johnny go under the knife. But after hundreds of thousands of such procedures were performed, it eventually became obvious that removing the tonsils did nothing beneficial other than pad the pockets and egos of doctors. Today, it is rarely done at all. Tonsils get infected. It doesn't mean you should slice them out.

Besides, we have new surgical fads now like bariatric surgery -- a lobotomy of the stomach -- where surgeons maim patients for life and then send a bill to the ones who don't die on the operating table. Actually, they get billed, too. Surgery ain't free, you know, even if you're dead.

Nearly five percent of such patients are, in fact, dead in the first year following the bariatric surgery, studies now show. And many more who survive the ordeal find that they overproduce insulin after ingesting food -- a condition known as hyperinsulinemia. It's sometimes also called "islet cell hyperfunction," and it means the pancreas is producing too much insulin in response to food intake. You know what the surgeon's modern solution to this problem is?

They open up the patient and slice off part of the pancreas! Amazing, huh? That way, it won't produce so much insulin. It makes you wonder what the surgical cure for headaches might be.

With similar insanity, the modern treatment for an overactive thyroid is to fry it with radiation so powerful that people who undergo the procedure are now setting off nuclear materials detection scans at airports. Patients who receive the radioactive iodine injections used in the procedure are advised -- get this -- to avoid hanging around their pets because they're so radioactive, they might give the family dog cancer!

I swear, I'm not making this up.

Surgical treatments for mental health

If you think it's all a bit mad, you're right. But you don't know the half of it. Mental health, you see, has also been treated by barbaric surgical procedures. Turn the clock back on conventional medicine to the early 1900's when a psychiatrist named Henry Cotton was the medical director at the New Jersey State Hospital at Trenton.

Dr. Cotton cooked up the theory that mental illness was the result of bacterial infections and pus found throughout the body. With the full support of the medical authorities of the day, he and his staff proceeded to surgically remove practically every organ and structure in the patient's body in an effort to cure them of their "illness."

He would often start with the teeth, pulling them out one by one. If that didn't "cure" the patient, he would cut out their tonsils and sinuses. When that didn't cure them either, he'd move on to other organs: gall bladders, stomachs, spleens, ovaries, testicles and even their colons. Patients who weren't healed by this "treatment" were subjected to even more organ removals, to the point where some patients were maimed beyond recognition and were barely alive at all.

It wasn't all voluntary, either. Some patients were literally dragged kicking and screaming into the procedures, then violently strapped onto surgical tables so that the "treatment" could begin. Others actually paid big bucks for the treatment, as you'll see below.

Dr. Cotton publicly announced a cure rate of 85 percent. That number, he later admitted, included those who died from the treatment, because they were "no longer suffering" from the illness. (Sounds a lot like today's chemotherapy treatments for cancer, doesn't it?) Conventional medicine has a long history of fudging the numbers, it seems. You can announce whatever success rate you want if you redefine success. (Modern medicine has done that quite effectively with drug trials.) The actual death rate from Dr. Cotton's treatments, by the way, was 30 percent of all patients.

A pioneer of conventional medicine

Not surprisingly, conventional medicine gleefully embraced Cotton's work, heaping unprecedented praise upon his "genius" discoveries about the true cause of mental illness. He was honored at medical institutions across the U.S. and Europe, and invited to speak to elite groups of leading doctors and surgeons. He was widely considered one of the pioneers in the diagnosis and treatment of mental health disorders. (Today, by the way, the theory of mental disorders has shifted from "pus in the organs" to "chemical imbalances in the brain" which are treated by toxic synthetic chemicals known as prescription drugs. Different era, different terminology. Same con.)

As demand for his treatments skyrocketed, in part due to a series of glowing news reports published in the New York Times, Cotton saw visions of dollar signs like any good psychiatrist. He opened a private clinic for treating mental illness, where he raked in enormous sums for removing the teeth and organs of the super rich. Rich people, even in 1922, were just as gullible as rich people today when it comes to trading their wealth for medical procedures based on junk science.

Despite the astonishing death rate, patients couldn't get enough of Cotton's cutting-edge treatments, and they were willing to fork over top dollar to subject themselves to various organ lobotomies in the hopes of curing mental illness that was most likely caused by simple nutritional deficiencies. (It's much like today, where cancer patients are tripping over each other to sign up for the latest, greatest, over-hyped anti-cancer drug, no matter what the cost, when most cancers are easily treated with low-cost herbs and nutritional therapies.)

When Dr. Cotton fell ill himself, he had his own teeth surgically removed and promptly returned to work, performing the same procedure on others. He did not, however, remove his own testicles. (Apparently, he didn't have the balls.)

A champion of conventional medicine

But this is no laughing matter. What's important to note about Dr. Henry Cotton was not the barbaric nature of his surgical treatments, nor the madness of his ideas, but rather the stunning fact that he was widely considered a pioneer by the medical authorities of his time. Cotton, for example, was considered a top student at the John Hopkins School of Medicine, and the psychiatric industry openly accepted Dr. Cotton's insane methods. Even to this day, the American Journal of Psychiatry offers this glowing whitewash of Dr. Cotton on its web page about the history of the Trenton Psychiatric Hospital: "In 1907 Dr. Henry A. Cotton became the medical director, and a new era in the treatment of mental diseases began. Among other improvements, Dr. Cotton is credited with abolishing all forms of mechanical restraints and implementing daily staff meetings to discuss patient care."

Mysteriously, there is no mention in the journal of Dr. Cotton's barbaric methods of treatment other than calling them, "...a new era in the treatment of mental diseases." The American Journal of Psychiatry focuses instead on Dr. Cotton's exciting invention of "daily staff meetings." Wow. That's amazing stuff. Meetings? Really?

Prestigious medical institutions around the world were suckered in, too. They lined up to invite Dr. Cotton to speak at their schools. Even the New York Times wrote glowing accounts of Dr. Cotton's "scientific discoveries."

All the brightest doctors in the world, it seems, couldn't tell the difference between treatment and torture.

Modern surgery is still half mad

And many still can't today. Because the history of surgery in conventional medicine continues right up to this day, where countless barbaric procedures are still being formed, all in the name of "treating" patients. Babies are now receiving anesthesia when operated on, thankfully, but 50,000 Americans this year will have their digestive tracts partially ripped out in a procedure marketed to them by surgeons hawking the latest weight loss "cure" who just happen to avoid mentioning all the sexy side effects of the procedure (like having to drink all your food through a straw for the rest of your life, or puking every time you swallow any chunk of food larger than a tater tot).

The fad procedures always change, you see, but the cons don't. Today, just as a hundred years ago, the public and the press remain hoodwinked by the false authority and high-IQ language of surgeons pushing the latest surgical fads... all based on the latest and greatest "scientific knowledge" of the day (which will be considered nonsense in about twenty years).

But it doesn't matter how much technical knowledge they learn, nor the sophistication of their high-tech instruments, nor whether they can perform remote surgery over the internet with a robot-controlled arm. It sounds cool, but it's really just stupid. Cutting into the human body is plainly traumatic and harmful by its very nature, and it should only be used as a last resort when other treatments are not available.

Just to clarify, we do need great surgeons to save the lives of those suffering from trauma, accidents or physical birth defects. Some people genuinely benefit from cosmetic surgery, and I'm not just talking about silicone implants. Some dental patients really do benefit from oral surgery when things have deteriorated too far. There are many other examples where surgery has a legitimate purpose.

We need these technicians in society for many things, but not for half the things they impose upon us. Much of the surgery being done today is a sham, and not coincidentally, it just happens to be a sham that keeps surgeons well paid, just like it has for over a hundred years.

Dr. Cotton would have been proud to see modern medicine carrying on his trademark insanity today. I can see him smiling right now, with no teeth.

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