Medical Heretics and Conspiracy Theorists
Dr Vernon Coleman
NOTE
The following extract is taken from my book `Medical Heretics’.
Uncomfortable truths have always attracted abuse, ridicule and persecution and those who dare to speak out against the establishment have always been regarded as dangerous heretics. Governments and their hacks have always accused the truth-tellers of their own faults. The iconoclast has never been a welcome figure in any age. Original thinkers, daring to question the establishment, are still being demonised, ‘de-platformed’ and cancelled by a modern culture which may appear to offer more freedom than ever but which, in reality, is just as constrained, as restrictive and as destructive as anything in history. The truth is not always agreeable, acceptable or convenient to those in charge.
Confucius, the Chinese philosopher, was dismissed by his political masters and his books were burned. Those who didn’t burn his books within 30 days were branded and condemned to forced labour. Socrates was accused of corrupting the youth of Athens, arrested for being an evildoer and ‘a person showing curiosity, searching into things under the earth and above the heaven and teaching all this to others’. He was condemned to death. Dante, the Italian poet, was banished from Florence and condemned to be burnt at the stake if ever captured. After they had failed to silence him with threats and bribes, the authorities excommunicated Spinoza in Amsterdam because he refused to toe the party line, refused to think what other people told him he must think and insisted on maintaining his intellectual independence. He and his work were denounced as ‘forged in Hell’.
Governments once burned original thinkers at the stake for believing that the earth went round the sun. There may not be much burning at the stake going on these days but original thinkers are destroyed by being described as ‘conspiracy theorists’ or, for absolutely no solid reason at all, and with no supporting evidence for the slur, they are labelled ‘discredited’.
So, for example, the controlled editors of a fake encyclopaedia called Wikipedia are, if they are notable for anything, notable for their enthusiasm for replacing inconvenient truths with commercially or politically acceptable lies.
Doctors or scientists who even dare to question the officially accepted line on the use of drugs or vaccines (which will usually be the line preferred by the pharmaceutical industry) are likely to find themselves fired or to discover that their grant applications are denied. The licensing authorities may remove the licenses or registration of doctors who even dare to question the officially approved line of thinking. Even threatening doctors with the loss of their livelihood is enough to silence many. It is now increasingly common in Europe, America and Australasia for doctors who voice views which question drug industry research to be told that they must be suffering from mental illness and to be offered medical help for their ‘mental illness’. This was, of course, a technique commonly used in the USSR to silence dissidents.
Charles Darwin didn’t fare terribly well, either. After Darwin published his book On the Origin of Species many of the reviews weren’t exactly encouraging. Professor Samuel Haughton of Dublin claimed that ‘all that was new…was false, and what was true was old’. The ghost of Darwin may be amused by the fact that Haughton is now largely remembered only for his criticism of Darwin. Modern critics may be amused by the fact that Haughton was an early mathematical modeller and, therefore, one of the first in a long line of similarly labelled incompetents.
Not surprisingly, exactly the same thing has happened in the world of medicine where the establishment has always oppressed original thinkers, suppressed new ideas, rejected almost anything likely to help patients and demonised those physicians daring to suggest that the traditional way of doing something might be wrong.
This monograph explains how innovative doctors and scientists were sneered at by the medical establishment and how their work was suppressed, in some cases for centuries. I will detail some of the doctors who fought the medical establishment and (eventually) won.
The establishment has always opposed good, original ideas which threaten the status quo. And in the last century or so, the medical establishment has always done everything it could to protect the international pharmaceutical industry. This part of this book is about doctors who changed things for the good – despite being sneered at, suppressed, oppressed, demonised and threatened. Many of the most significant discoveries in medicine were suppressed and truths distorted simply to satisfy the medical establishment.
The truth is that original thinkers and people who do not fit neatly into the scheme of things have never gone down well and, sadly, many of the greatest men (and occasionally women) in medicine have died ignored, forgotten or in disgrace.
So, for example, it is not difficult to argue that Dr John Snow, the English general practitioner who practised in the 19th century and who led the way in two medical specialities (anaesthesiology and epidemiology) did more for health care than all the world’s drug companies put together. And yet he is largely forgotten: he received no honours, during life or post mortem and there is no statue to him. The only remembrance is the public house on the corner of what used to be Broad Street, which is named after him. Even the name of the street, which is in London’s Soho district, was changed from Broad Street to Broadwick Street by councillors and officials with no sense of history.
A couple of centuries earlier, Aureolus Philippus Theophrastus Bombastus von Hohenheim (known to his chums as Paracelsus) made himself enemies all over Europe because he tried to revolutionise medicine in the sixteenth century. Paracelsus was the greatest influence on medical thinking since Hippocrates but the establishment regarded him as a trouble-maker and, indeed, large parts of the medical establishment still regard him with distaste.
In my book `Medical Heretics’ I’ve written short essays about some of the most innovative thinkers in medicine – all of whom suffered to some extent or another at the hands of the medical establishment. Some were treated cruelly, some were professionally ruined and some were simply ignored or ostracised.
NOTE
The essay above is taken from Medical Heretics by Vernon Coleman. The book is available via the bookshop on www.vernoncoleman.com
Copyright Vernon Coleman May 2026
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