A Machine that Goes “Ping!”

Monty Python summed up modern medicine in a three-minute skit

 A movie called Monty Python’s The Meaning of Life was first released in 1983. The first two Python movies revolved around a film length coherent plot, but this movie took the Python crew back to their origins of standup comedy as it was a series of unrelated sketches and skits. One in particular has remained in my memory. Usually referred to as the hospital sketch, it depicts a group of gowned and masked doctors in an operating room, where they bring in an array of medical gadgets on trolleys, nearly filling the room.

At one point, someone asks, “haven’t we forgotten something?” to which the reply was “the patient”. The patient in this case was a heavily pregnant woman in labor. When she asks what she is supposed to do, she is told, “nothing dear, you are not qualified”. Her husband is kicked out because “only those involved need to be here”. When a hospital administrator enters the room, he is the total center of attention and comments favorably on the use of expensive equipment, especially “the machine that goes ‘ping!’”.

The most prescient line was delivered after the mother asks if she had a boy or a girl. “I think it’s a bit early to be imposing roles on it, don’t you?”

This was followed up by one of the doctors telling the new mother that she would probably now get depressed, and she could go to her GP to get some “happy pills”. 

Welcome to modern medicine

No one with working brain cells would welcome a return to an earlier era, where medicine was largely superstitious guess work and where the “cure” was frequently part of the demise of patients. Thank goodness we’ve moved on from the medieval Italian advice that keeping weasel testicles near one’s bosom was an effective form of contraception or to believing as doctors in the 18th and 19th centuries did that cutting off half of the tongue was an effective cure for stuttering. I guess if this did work because if you didn’t bleed to death, you probably weren’t talking anymore. (A more recent modification is the frequent attribution of a tied tongue to a newborn baby and the practice of frenotomy to cut it loose from the floor of the mouth in order to enable breastfeeding.)

According to Ivan Illich, “The medical establishment has become a major threat to health. The disabling impact of professional control over medicine has reached the proportions of an epidemic.” “Physician origin” or iatrogenic diseases have been with us probably forever. Even in ancient times, female “hysteria” was diagnosed for anything a woman did that was viewed as unacceptable behavior and an amazing variety of treatments were used to “cure” women of this disease. Freud believed that hysteria in a woman was caused by the metaphoric loss of her penis, which could be fixed by marriage as her husband’s penis would fill the void left by her own absent phallus. 

Men believe they know more, even when they are wrong

A feature of living under patriarchy is the general acceptance that men are always right, even when it is glaringly obvious that they are not. Study after study has demonstrated that women and men, given the same task to complete will view their results differently. The men will overrate their performance and the women will underrate theirs, even when the objective results are nearly identical. Perception and preconceived stereotypes guide work promotions and underwrite the careers of successful politicians and other leading public figures and despite the increased number of women doctors practicing today, medicine has been considered as a male field of work. 

From the earliest days of allowing women to train to be doctors, concerns have been raised. “Wasting time” training women who would just get married and drop out has now morphed into concerns that “too many” women doctors turn the profession into a “pink collar” job, and that women dominating a job role intrinsically lowers its status.

Medical training entrenches a male oriented construct of physicianhood as a universal truth, even as the number of doctors who are women starts to overtake those who are men. 

Male hubris can be seen as a factor when it comes to using ineffective and/or harmful treatments too. Some of the reasons that doctors don’t change their practice, but insist on doing what they have always done are:

· Clinical experience (hey, it worked before)

· Natural history of the illness (it would have gone away even if nothing had been done)

· Love of the pathophysiological model (a fascination with illness)

· Ritual and mystique (doctors are a type of secret society)

· A need to do something (an inability to let things play out, even if this would be better for the patient)

· No one asks the question (a doctor’s opinion is not to be questioned)

· Patients' expectations, real or assumed (patients won’t accept that their doctor can’t fix them)

John Brinkley: an American pioneer (in hucksterism) 

He would have been an excellent gender affirming medic.

In the early 1900s, John Brinkley became one of the richest doctors in America, despite having no real medical qualifications. He claimed he could cure impotence, infertility, and other sexual problems in men by surgically implanting goat testicles into a man's scrotum. Fortunately for him, Viagra had not yet been invented.

Brinkley was an exemplar of today’s “gender affirming” doctors whose career arc should be an object lesson for everyone claiming that children (or anyone else) has some sort of gendered soul that may not match their sexed bodies. Today’s physicians should not be selling a belief in magic pills or potions or an astral scalpel that transforms male into female, female into male or either of these binarily sexed bodies into some sort of gender free corpus. 

How to create your market

In 1923 Brinkley set up his own radio station, that featured everything that one would expect to tune into: news, music, weather reports, comedy spots, gospel preaching and special features. One of these was a twice daily spot called Medical Question Box that was hosted by the good doctor himself. In response to the huge volume of mailed in questions, he prescribed medications, sold his patent medicines and encouraged listeners to self-diagnose and self-treat their illnesses. Very unusually for this era, he discussed areas of sexuality. This popular radio show allowed him to gain the trust of his listeners and brought thousands of people who paid to be treated at his hospitals.

Rumpelstiltskin: a fairy tale come to life

Illustration by Anne Anderson from Grimm's Fairy Tales (London and Glasgow 1922)

Rumpelstiltskin is a German fairy tale by the Brothers Grimm, first published in 1812. In summary, it tells the tale of attempting to fool a king, paying a price for this deception, but ultimately having a happy ending.

The transgender market is a metaphorical example of spinning gold from straw as Rumpelstiltskin did in this story. For out of an industry based on synthetic sex identities, at least US$2.1 billion was made in 2022, with a market size value of US$2.5 billion in 2023, which is projected to be worth US$5 billion by 2030.

The entire trans empire is based on taking healthy bodies and turning them into lifelong medical patients. It is health “care” based on a fallacy that leaves patients worse off, and their actual ‘dis-ease’ untreated, for living in a delusional state is functionally unhealthy, profoundly destabilizing and more difficult to escape when it is being affirmed by “experts”. 

Unfortunately, the modern-day version of this old fairy tale does not have the same sort of happy ending that the characters in Rumpelstiltskin enjoyed, because once you’ve had body parts surgically removed or damaged by harmful drugs, you can’t reverse this.

Puberty is not a condition, an illness or a disease

In the style of Brinkley, many of today’s doctors will confirm to parents and their children that any distress around the changes of puberty can be easily fixed. For a price of course. But that price is not just in how many dollars are spent, but in futures ruined, and in possibilities denied forever because of inappropriate, irreversible decisions being made. The ongoing “maintenance” costs of a trans identity never end, because the finishing line of changing your sex is never reached, no matter how many procedures you have or how many doctors you visit. 

Adding to the mental distress of people diagnosed as trans, is the chronic pain and physical indignities that are part and parcel of radically attempting to change your body into something it was never meant to be.

It is not just individuals and their families who need to play pretend around mentally fragile people, it is all of society. All child and women centered safeguarding must be forgotten to support males who want to join us in the public and private spaces that were created to ensure our safety from them, and babies born to “men” are denied the right to develop in a healthy mother who has their best interests at heart.

Brinkley and the machine

Brinkley was eventually charged with various crimes, dying before a trial could take place that would have seen him sent to jail. His surgical procedures and other treatments (one of which involved “curing” prostate problems with an injection that turned out to be water dyed blue), were just another version of the Python machine that goes “ping!”. 

Fancy complicated machines (ritual and mystique), combined with puberty (natural history of the illness), accompanied by a need to do something and a fascination with illness coupled with a push back against any real questions being asked and you have the perfect setup for creating harm. 

And as Brinkley discovered, you can get very rich at the same time.