The Ring Is Set
In professional wrestling, there is a word that captures the paradox of a staged spectacle that must appear authentic: kayfabe. Wrestlers engage in feuds, rivalries, and dramatic contests that look real but are carefully scripted to serve a larger narrative. Audiences suspend disbelief, entering a world where the appearance of truth matters more than truth itself.
Modern medicine, dressed up as “evidence-based” and “science-based,” has become its own form of kayfabe. The white coats, the clinical rituals, the invocation of consensus, and the drumbeat of “the science is settled” are the performances of a system that is often more invested in sustaining authority and financial power than in the reproducibility of its claims. What patients experience is less a science of healing and more a theatre of medical dominance — a production that requires faith, money, and the suppression of inconvenient truths.
Medicine as Superstitious Religion, Not Science
The late Dr. Robert Mendelsohn, MD, a prominent pediatrician and outspoken critic of modern medicine, framed the profession in blunt terms:
“Modern Medicine can’t survive without our faith, because Modern Medicine is neither an art nor a science. It’s a religion.”
Like a superstitious religion, medicine claims sacred authority. Its priests are the doctors, its temples the hospitals, and its rituals the lab tests, scans, and prescriptions. Consensus functions as creed, and dissent is treated as heresy. The patient is required to believe — to submit — because the mysteries of diagnosis and treatment are cloaked in specialized language and technology.
Consensus, however, is the hallmark of politics, not science. As one critic wrote:
“There is no such thing as consensus science. If it’s consensus, it isn’t science. If it’s science, it isn’t consensus. Period.”
This inversion is at the heart of science-based kayfabe: what matters is not verifiable truth but the performance of certainty.
The Reproducibility Crisis – Pulling Back the Curtain
True science depends on reproducibility. If a claim cannot be repeated by independent researchers under controlled conditions, it is not science but speculation. Yet in medicine, reproducibility is embarrassingly absent.
C. Glenn Begley, former head of cancer research at Amgen, attempted to replicate 53 landmark cancer studies. He succeeded with only six. Forty-seven studies — the overwhelming majority — failed the basic test of scientific integrity. That means patients, doctors, and funding agencies invested in treatments that may have been built on sand.
Another startling revelation: for 25 years, research into metastatic breast cancer relied on a widely used cell line, MDA-MB-435. Over 650 papers were published based on it. Only later did scientists discover the cells were not breast cancer at all — they were derived from melanoma. Entire research programs, careers, and treatment protocols were effectively based on the wrong species in the ring.
This is not science; it is performance. The storyline must move forward, the kayfabe must be maintained, even if the plot is incoherent.
Evidence-Based Medicine or Evidence-Managed Medicine?
The phrase “evidence-based medicine” has an almost magical ring. It suggests rigorous logic, impartial testing, and objective care. But as Steve Hickey, PhD, and Hilary Roberts, PhD, observed in Evidence-Based Medicine: Neither Good Evidence nor Good Medicine, the term functions more as propaganda than reality.
The deeper truth is that what counts as “evidence” is carefully curated. Studies funded by pharmaceutical companies are more likely to yield favorable results. Negative findings disappear into drawers. As Dr. Vernon Coleman explained:
“Most medical research is organised, paid for, commissioned or subsidised by the drug industry… This type of research is designed, quite simply, to find evidence showing a new product is of commercial value.”
This is not evidence-based medicine. It is evidence-managed medicine. The storyline is crafted backstage, and the audience — patients and practitioners alike — are handed a script to believe.
Pharma and the Performance of Power
In professional wrestling, the promoters decide the outcomes. In modern medicine, the pharmaceutical industry plays that role. Doctors are performers in the ring, but the script is written by those who stand to profit.
Continuing medical education for physicians is often delivered by pharmaceutical representatives. Prescribing patterns are nudged with incentives, commissions, and relentless marketing. As Dr. Leo Rebello observed:
“Doctors of modern medicine receive their continuing education from Medical Representatives of (P)harmaceuticals, and prescribe lethal drugs based on cuts and commission.”
The opioid epidemic revealed this dynamic in brutal clarity. Purdue Pharma’s aggressive marketing of OxyContin — backed by selectively curated “evidence” minimizing addiction risk — produced one of the most devastating public health crises in modern history. The kayfabe held long enough to rake in billions, but once the storyline broke, millions lay broken as well.
The Rituals of Science-Based Kayfabe
Superstitious religion is known for its sacraments; every performance its props. In science-based kayfabe, the CAT scanner, the PET scan, the MRI, and the endless lab panels play the role of sacred artifacts. These machines radiate authority, producing images and numbers that few patients — and sometimes few doctors — truly understand.
Dr. Vernon Coleman compared this to witch doctors and alchemists:
“Doctors go to great lengths to disguise the fact that they are practising a black art rather than a science. The medical profession has created a ‘pseudoscience’ of mammoth proportions… Today’s clinicians have much more sophisticated mumbo jumbo to offer. They have laser surgery and psychotherapy, CAT scanners and serum manganese assessments… But however good the impenetrable pseudoscience may sound, it is still little more than mumbo jumbo.”
The kayfabe metaphor makes the point clear: the rituals are necessary to maintain the illusion of control, not necessarily to heal.
The Suppression of Alternatives
One of the most pernicious aspects of science-based kayfabe is the way it protects its monopoly. Alternative therapies are dismissed as unscientific, even when mainstream medicine fails its own standards.
High-dose vitamin C therapy, long championed by doctors like Thomas E. Levy, has shown remarkable benefits in some infectious and toxic conditions. Yet such treatments remain marginalized because they cannot be patented or monetized like pharmaceuticals.
Meanwhile, as Ralph Moss observed in his review of medical interventions, nearly half of all treatments in mainstream practice are of “unknown effectiveness.” Only 13 percent have been definitively proven beneficial. Yet it is the alternatives that are branded quackery.
This is classic kayfabe: the villains (alternative medicine) are always scripted to lose, no matter how flawed the hero (pharma) may be.
When the Storyline Breaks
Every wrestling storyline eventually strains credibility. In medicine, the kayfabe begins to unravel when the harm becomes undeniable.
- Vioxx, a painkiller once heralded as safe and effective, was pulled from the market after causing tens of thousands of deaths due to cardiovascular risks.
- The opioid epidemic, as already mentioned, exposed how profit-driven narratives could devastate entire societies.
- The reproducibility crisis, acknowledged even in mainstream journals like Nature, revealed that large swaths of medical “knowledge” may be little more than wishful thinking.
When kayfabe breaks in wrestling, the audience realizes it was entertainment all along. When kayfabe breaks in medicine, lives are destroyed.
Toward Real Science, Not Stagecraft
None of this should obscure the real achievements of medicine. Trauma surgery saves countless lives. Insulin transformed diabetes from a death sentence to a more manageable death sentence.
Surgery stands out precisely because it is the exception that proves the rule. It's success is praised in spite of kayfabe.
The path forward requires breaking kayfabe. Real science demands transparency, reproducibility, and humility. It means acknowledging uncertainty instead of hiding behind consensus. It means freeing medicine from the financial scripts of pharmaceutical companies and restoring it to the pursuit of truth.
Conclusion – Breaking Kayfabe
Professional wrestling thrives as long as kayfabe holds. The moment the audience insists on reality, the show loses its grip.
So it is with modern medicine. Science-based kayfabe sustains itself through ritual, consensus, and spectacle. It demands belief rather than proof. But as the cracks widen — from irreproducible studies to public health disasters — more patients are waking up to the show.
Breaking kayfabe in medicine does not mean rejecting all science or all doctors. It means refusing to confuse theatre for truth. It means demanding that medicine live up to its claims rather than hiding behind props, consensus, and pharmaceutical storylines.
The question is simple: will we remain passive spectators in the ring of medical theatre, or will we break kayfabe and reclaim science for what it was always meant to be — a search for truth, not a performance of power?
No comments:
Post a Comment