Why Faith in Modern Medicine Is Crumbling

Ah, spirituality. The word alone is enough to conjure images of incense wafting lazily through the air, a yoga mat spread under the rising sun, and a neighbour peering over their fence to whisper, “Have they joined a cult? Or just stocked up on enough crystals to make geologists curious?” The thing is, spirituality doesn’t always come draped in patchouli-scented robes. Sometimes, it’s hiding in plain sight, dressed up as something far more clinical and modern—like the healthcare system. Yes, that grand, sprawling juggernaut of pills, scans, and surgical interventions. And if you adjust your perspective just slightly, you’ll start noticing how medicine has quietly slid into the role of the 21st century’s moral authority, demanding faith, unquestioning loyalty, and, dare I say it, worship.

We don’t often frame medical science in terms of spirituality because, God forbid, the word “soul” should wander into the sterile halls of Sciencetown uninvited. The High Priests of Rationality wouldn’t take kindly to it.

Let’s start with the language of medicine—Sciencese. You know it when you see it. A string of syllables that seem specifically formulated to stupefy the masses, not unlike ecclesiastical rites in Latin meant to mystify congregants while keeping them obedient. It’s not, ‘Drink more water because your kidneys are struggling.’ No, simplicity would be too… human. Instead, you’ll hear something like: ‘Implementation of a hydration regimen to facilitate homeostasis and optimise renal function in the setting of acute systemic dysregulation.’ Or, perhaps, more in line with the Sciencese stratosphere: ‘Patient demonstrates suboptimal hydration parameters, with potential compromise to glomerular filtration efficiency aligned with adaptive renal medullary hypoperfusion.’ Because clearly, what this moment needs is more syllables, not more water.

It’s true; Sciencese is a language designed to sound definitive and solemn, like the universe itself stood still to approve this message. And for years, it’s worked. People placed their trust in the incomprehensible, assuming that if they couldn’t understand it, it must be too brilliant for their small human minds to penetrate. But now more of us are waking up to a discomfiting realisation: it’s not brilliance; it’s choreography. A ploy to keep the Proles in line.

The Healthcare Hustle: How Faith, Science, and Morality Collide

Medicine isn’t just science. That’s the polite fiction we cling to because we like to think surgeons don’t have bad days and anaesthetists never lose concentration. But medicine touches birth and death, triumph and loss, hope and despair—in short, every profound moment that makes a human, well, human. We come to it limping, broken, terrified, or merely exhausted by the weight of living, and we ask for salvation. Not forgiveness, precisely, but a kind of deliverance: a cure, a fix, a return to our previous, pain-free incarnation. And we don’t just want science when we’re vulnerable like that; we want something to believe in. Is it any wonder, then, that our healthcare system demands our faith as its currency?

At its most obvious, this shows up in our reliance on doctors. We treat them like oracles, balancing the fragile entirety of our being on their diagnoses. They are trained, of course (though if you ask quietly, some might admit to having paged Dr Google—or, increasingly, ChatGPT—during a tricky moment), but they’re also fallible. Their opinions are, as often as not, educated interpretations. They are riddled with biases, influenced by subtle pharmaceutical marketing, and juggling workloads that would induce panic in an octopus. But the system conspires to hide that fragility. Instead of being treated as flawed humans navigating an absurd system, doctors are anointed with an unspoken divinity. They must not falter because our entire scaffolding of belief would collapse under the revelation that the priesthood is just as mortal as the congregation.

And now, studies suggest that LLMs—yes, chatbots—are not just assistants but outperforming human doctors in diagnostic reasoning. The next doctor you see might not just have Dr. Google on speed dial—they could be phoning in reinforcement from ChatGPT during the consult.

Do No Harm? How the Healthcare System Breaks Its Own Commandments

Then there’s the medicine itself—the potions and pills, the sacred dosages etched into electronic charts like commandments on stone tablets. We cling to them with the fervour of pilgrims, pop them with the faith that they will deliver relief from pain, uncertainty, or just the general inconvenience of mortality. No matter that some come with side effects so medieval-sounding (anal leakage and suicidal ideation come to mind) that they feel like they’ve escaped from Dante’s Inferno. To question these miracles is to commit sacrilege. And most don’t, not openly. Most of us endure, swallowing small doses of chemical chastisement, hoping that compliance will ward off the spectre of our finitude.

Let me clarify something. Medicine has done extraordinary things—emergency medicine, in particular, can work miracles. Car crashes, heart attacks, war zones—these are moments where modern medical interventions save lives every day. But we’ve been conditioned to treat the entire healthcare system as though it were just as indisputably miraculous. We hand over not just our physical bodies but also our trust, autonomy, and critical thinking. We approach healthcare with the expectation that behind every white coat lies a benevolent oracle, possessing absolute truths that shouldn’t, under any circumstances, be questioned.

If that’s not a spiritual practice, I don’t know what is.

Losing My Religion: When Faith in Medicine Falters

But faith is crumbling. It’s not happening all at once—it never does—but quietly, steadily, like sand slipping through clenched fingers. For decades, the system has been wobbling under the incongruity of its aims: saving lives versus turning profits. The pandemic shook the altar violently, revealing to the world just how much of this system is theatre—morality plays scripted by government bodies, Big Pharma, and corporations who have far more in common with televangelists than scientists. Where once we turned to healthcare as a source of salvation, we’re now faced with the stark truth: much of what we believed about its power was myth. Resurrection (or at least resuscitation) belongs to ambulance teams in movies—not always to the real ones. And health, true health, is not something that can be bottled and sold.

The rushed vaccine approvals, the suppression of dissenting voices, the authoritarianism cloaked as “public health”—none of this is how science is supposed to work. Science thrives on disagreement, debate, and discovery, not suppression. What should concern you isn’t that people have started questioning the system. But that it took them so long to begin asking.

Think about it. The pandemic didn’t just highlight flaws; it exposed the machinery—the damp and rusted cogs we were never meant to see. For decades, we’ve been spoon-fed the idea that progress in medicine always points onward and upward, that the system is too intricate and venerable to be anything but infallible. We were told to “trust the experts”—and many of us did.

At least at first.

But when questions arose about rushed approvals or about who exactly was pulling the puppet strings behind the medical-industrial stage, dissent was silenced rather than answered. Not debated, not reasoned with—erased.

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