The Medicalization of Death and How to Reclaim a Better Way to Die
Prior to the COVID-19 vaccines being released, many concerns were raised about these experimental gene therapies, including their potential for causing infertility, autoimmune diseases, and cancer
So, when Pfizer’s regulatory submission to Europe’s FDA (the EMA) was leaked on December 9, 2020, I read through it in detail and discovered that Pfizer simply had been allowed to exempt itself from testing the vaccine for these three key issues (despite that testing being required for gene therapies).
Given that, I assumed that they had been tested for, major issues were found, and that Pfizer concluded their best option was to simply claim plausible deniability by insisting they “didn’t know” their vaccines would do all of that (because they’d “never” tested for them).
Note: the EMA publication also presciently highlighted other key issues with the vaccine such as regulators expecting it might not work in the field (due to the virus rapidly mutating), that the vaccine’s mRNA rapidly degraded, and that the lipid nanoparticles were chosen for efficacy rather than safety.
Regrettably, due to the religious fervor surrounding the vaccine (e.g., that it would rescue us from the lockdowns and return everything to normal), my arguments to wait on the vaccine largely fell on deaf ears with my colleagues and instead, excuse after excuse was made to dismiss the highly unusual and severe complications our patients kept developing immediately after vaccination (e.g., “there’s no evidence for this”).
Before long, people I knew around the country began contacting me with severe complications following the vaccination (e.g., dying suddenly or an elderly relative rapidly progressing into dementia) to ask if it could be linked to the vaccine.
Hating that there was nothing at all I could do to stop this (I felt like an ant in front of a tsunami), I then decided I needed to document all of them so that I’d at least have some type of “evidence” I could show my skeptical colleagues (as I knew the medical journals would never allow vaccine injury datasets to be published).
In the process of doing that, I came across numerous cases of cancers rapidly developing (or dormant ones that had been in remission for years coming back) immediately following COVID vaccination, including numerous unusual cases which strongly argued the two were linked (e.g., a benign lump that had been stable for over a decade suddenly growing at a rapid rate after vaccination and being diagnosed as an extremely rare cancer they had no risk factors for which had metastasized throughout the body).
Before long, more and more people noticed similar things, and the notion of COVID-19 “turbo cancers” entered the cultural lexicon. Since that time, the medical orthodoxy has denied this is an issue, but more and more datasets are emerging showing it is—which is particularly unfortunate, as beyond rapidly progressing, “turbo cancers” tend to be much less responsive to cancer treatments.
All of that briefly, is why I believe the medical field has irreversibly damaged the credibility it worked for decades to earn with the public.
Scott Adams
When Trump ran for office in 2016, initially very few people believed Trump could win (e.g., this was shown in the political betting markets). However, Dilbert’s author Scott Adams did, and rapidly built a large online following by highlighting how his training as a hypnotist allowed him to recognize that Trump was the most politically persuasive candidate and hence, Scott hypothesized, favored to win.
As such, once Trump won, Scott pivoted to using that same lens (how persuasion shapes political events) to become a pundit on a variety of other current issues. During that process, Scott Adams made the controversial decision early on to endorse the COVID vaccine to his followers and vaccinate and belittle followers who didn’t, leading to many derisively calling him “Clot Adams.”
Note: I know of multiple other instances where individuals who were long considered “experts in propaganda” made the decision to get the COVID vaccine—something which I view as a testament to how effectively the vaccine was marketed (and the fact that very few people, including “medical experts,” have an in-depth understanding of controversial medical topics).
Later, in January 2023, to his great credit, Scott posted a video admitting he was wrong and the ‘anti-vaxxers’ were entirely correct.
However, he framed the decision to not vaccinate as being due to one’s “luck” of habitually not trusting the government and that being correct in this one instance, rather than the correct decision being a result of intelligent reasoning, as “all” the data at the time had shown vaccination to be the correct choice and every intelligent person (Adams included) who correctly analyzed that data had concluded vaccinating was the proper choice.
Then, on May 19, 2025, Scott Adams disclosed to his audience that he had terminal metastatic prostate cancer, vulnerably shared he planned to utilize California’s medically assisted dying in the near future to reduce his suffering, and that he had no further interest in using fenbendazole or ivermectin for the cancer because he’d already tried them without success.
This shook a lot of people up, in part because they had strong feelings about how cancer should be treated and in part because it being widely publicized online made a lot of people bear witness to a torturous and protracted death process and hence were forced to be present to the reality of the phenomenon in their own lives.
Scott eventually tried a variety of cutting-edge conventional therapies recommended by top oncologists, and among other things, had the Trump administration directly intervene on his behalf with Kaiser when his access to them got abruptly cut off (highlighting the challenges patients without connections routinely face in the medical system).
Nonetheless, nothing worked, and he gradually became weaker and weaker until he said his final goodbyes to his followers and passed away at home on January 13, 2026.
Note: following this, I polled the audience here to find out if there was interest in discussing this topic, and found out a lot of you wanted this topic to be explored (e.g., due to the emergence of turbo cancers).
Changing Relations with Death
People are so afraid to die that they never begin to live—Henry Van Dyke (1852 – 1933)
In 1976, astute philosopher and polymath Ivan Illich published Medical Nemesis, which critiqued the medical system and predicted many of the issues which emerged in the decades that followed (e.g., he highlighted that since our society had conditioned us to believe that instead of relying upon ourselves, we always needed a doctor to get better if we were sick, it created an inexhaustible demand for medical services which would always increase but never be satisfied).
A key theme he covered in Chapter 5 (pages 64–77—which can be read here), was that through the medical profession’s marketing, our cultural conception of death evolved from an intimate, lifelong companion we had no separation from to a feared, medicalized entity to be conquered by doctors and Illich traced this shift through six historical stages, from the Renaissance “Danse Macabre” to modern death under intensive care, where death is defined by the cessation of brain waves.
Note: as I show here, that modern criterion for death is quite dubious and in part exists to support organ donations and eliminate the long term costs of treating vegetative patients.
Illich argued that this medicalization, driven by the medical profession’s growing control, stripped individuals of autonomy, turned death into a commodity, and reinforced social control through compulsory care.
He also argued this Western death image had been exported globally, supplanting traditional dying practices and contributing to societal dysfunction by alienating people from their own mortality.
I agree with him, but feel the impacts of this were far more profound than even Illich hinted at.
Medicalized Death
Presently, one of the most common settings for death in America is within the hospital. This however is controversial as:
- End of life care is invasive and uncomfortable.
- End of life care is frequently futile.
- End of life care constitutes one of the largest medical expenses in the country.
- Many individuals do not want to let their loved ones go and hence insist upon fighting for the care.
- Restricting end of life care is seen as government choosing to execute people to save money.
- Doctors who administer end of life care frequently refuse it for themselves.
For example, to quote a 2016 article in Time:
Doctors spend more of their lives in hospitals than anyone else. But when it comes to deciding where to die, they’re less likely than the rest of us to choose a medical facility, according to new research published in the Journal of the American Medical Association.
About 63% of the physicians died in a medical facility, including a hospital, clinic or nursing home. That rate was similar to others in healthcare and people with higher education who weren’t in healthcare. But 72 percent of people in the general population group died inside a medical facility.
Note: another 2016 study found 27.9 percent of physicians vs. 32 percent of the general population chose to die in hospitals, and during the last six months of life physicians were less likely to have surgery (25.1 vs. 27.4 percent) and less likely to be admitted to the ICU (25.8 vs. 27.6 percent).
The study didn’t look at the reasons for the small-but-notable preference of physicians to die at home, but they may be symptomatic of the profession. “Doctors see a lot of patients who are treated aggressively at the end of life, and often in ways that seem maybe too intense,” Blecker says. Physicians may also be more familiar with the limitations of care and the quality of life that’s sacrificed with intensive care, he says.
The numbers also reveal that people often end up going against their own wishes at the end. “Generally, there’s an incongruity between what people state as their preferences of how they want to experience end of life and what actually happens,” Blecker says. “Most people say they prefer to die at home, but as we show here, two thirds or three quarters die in some sort of medical facility.”
Palliative care in the U.S. isn’t adequately available yet, and the fact that most Americans want to die at home suggests there’s more work to be done—even among physicians, who still die at medical facilities at high rates. “I think even if the people who should be the best at this are still not dying in the comfort of their home, that we still have a lot more communication and understanding of medical options to get more people to die a ‘good death,’” Blecker says.
Likewise, in 2011, Ken Murray MD (a retired general practitioner), in the viral essay How Doctors Die, highlighted that doctors preferred to die at home with less invasive therapies.
Of course, doctors don’t want to die; they want to live. But they know enough about modern medicine to know its limits. And they know enough about death to know what all people fear most: dying in pain, and dying alone. They’ve talked about this with their families.
They want to be sure, when the time comes, that no heroic measures will happen–that they will never experience, during their last moments on earth, someone breaking their ribs in an attempt to resuscitate them with CPR (that’s what happens if CPR is done right).
Almost all medical professionals have seen what we call “futile care” being performed on people. That’s when doctors bring the cutting edge of technology to bear on a grievously ill person near the end of life. The patient will get cut open, perforated with tubes, hooked up to machines, and assaulted with drugs. All of this occurs in the Intensive Care Unit at a cost of tens of thousands of dollars a day.
What it buys is misery we would not inflict on a terrorist. I cannot count the number of times fellow physicians have told me, in words that vary only slightly, “Promise me if you find me like this that you’ll kill me.” They mean it. Some medical personnel wear medallions stamped “NO CODE” to tell physicians not to perform CPR on them. I have even seen it as a tattoo.
Note: many patients do not know that the overall survival rate with hospital resuscitation is around 23-25 percent, making it typically futile (while outside the hospital CPR hovers closer to 10 percent—although the figures I’ve seen for both of these vary quite a bit within these rangers). Additionally, while no formal data supports it, many colleagues over the years have observed subtle variations in how CPR is performed significantly increase the survival rate, but to the best of my knowledge I have never seen these observations make it into clinical training or guidelines.
This is taken from a long document, read the rest here midwesterndoctor.com
Header image: World Trademark Review
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