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But merely being able to produce cures isn't enough to establish a
medical discipline. A new scientific order is a social organism--a
collection of humans welded together by a common belief. And
freshly-hatched superorganisms are often extremely vulnerable. Older
social clusters would prefer to kill such youngsters before they can
grow. In 19th century medicine, the entrenched and hostile social
beast was another professional clique, a coterie which had labored for
generations to establish its authority.
Homeopathy's rival: allopathy. Allopaths, with their dogmatic
belief in bleedings, mercury and opium48 waged a pitiless war to
discredit the newcomers. They founded the American Medical
Association to purge the medical profession of their rivals.49 And
through government manipulation and a public smear campaign, they
succeeded, hounding the homeopaths out of the medical schools, out
of the medical societies, and out of access to the carefully cultivated
image of medical infallibility.50
At first glance, this was a battle between two scientific truths,
two systems of belief. But under the surface, it was a struggle between
superorganisms over the lucrative proceeds of the medical trade.51 The
allopaths won.
As we've mentioned before, today's doctors--the heirs of the
allopaths-- are only able to deal effectively with about fifty percent of
the complaints brought to them. The other fifty percent they haughtily
dismiss as representing nonexistent ills. Yet many of the symptoms
they overlook may be produced by the very same allergic problems the
homeopaths claim to have dealt with successfully. The result: you and
I are saddled with a medical community whose "knowledge" is the
result of a battle between subcultures. Because we are in the hands of
the winners, a set of cures that could have healed us has all but
disappeared.
Even a wisp of imagination as fragile as poetry can be used in the
squabble between subcultures over who will get the goods. In the first
century AD, high-born citizens of the Roman Empire were obsessed
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