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Is modern medicine making us sick? The radical seer Ivan Illich certainly thought so

'No self-healing capacity whatsoever.' (Bob Riha, Jr./Getty Images)

'No self-healing capacity whatsoever.' (Bob Riha, Jr./Getty Images)


December 29, 2023   7 mins

Who the hell is Ivan Illich? A philosopher and medieval scholar born in Vienna in 1926, a Catholic priest whose service started out in New York’s toughest neighbourhoods. An educator and a radical. An extreme polyglot, speaker of Italian, Spanish, French, German, Latin, ancient Greek, Hindi and Portuguese. A self-described “errant pilgrim”, a wandering wise man, a theological rap on the door. Handsome too. Think of McConaughey’s character in Contact, but with a splash of the Unabomber.

A righteous scourge where progress is concerned. He fell foul of feminists in the Eighties on account of a book about gender that championed the old-fashioned way of doing sex. Traditional sex roles as a bulwark against undiluted consumer culture or some such gender complementarian red-herring. He was greeted at the college campus in Marburg where he was teaching at the time by a mob brandishing a giant papier-mâché phallus. His reputation never recovered. Up until then, he’d been something of a fixture in academic circles. A Roman Catholic priest-cum-anarchic theorist. A bit of a celebrity, even. An ascetic who never really called anywhere home. His final years of transitory earthly existence he spent refusing to treat a large, painful growth emanating from his neck. Reputedly self-medicated by puffing on opium instead.

The corruption of the best is the worst, a Latin Maxim he frequently cited. Illich was at war with the systematisation of charity. The systematisation of everything, in fact. His most famous book — Deschooling Society — is a denunciation of compulsory education, of the “specialised torpor” it can’t help but induce. “Giving” in the Christian sense should not always have to be broken down into rules. This was the essential message embedded in the parable of the Good Samaritan. You answered the call of a specific suffering. As in antiquity, you should not be bound by place or people, but free to love at will. With the institutionalisation of the Christian message, with its ascension to power, the inclination to force the hand of kindness took hold. The mystery was sucked right out of it, and with it went so much of the power and the glory. The church became the forerunner of the law-abiding modern state, the modern state whose incessant social engineering Illich heaps scorn upon from behind a wall of medieval scholarship.

However, it is a later Illich book, in which he turned the same line of attack onto modern medicine, that I find most provocatively stimulating in a 21st-century context. Written in the Seventies, Limits to Medicine — Medical Nemesis: The Expropriation of Health (catchy title) constitutes one of several blistering critiques of modernity and post-industrial alienation Illich produced in his heyday. The gist of it is that the more we lather ourselves in technology, the more of our autonomy we inevitably sacrifice, and the more technology we need just to get by in turn. Instead of enhancing nature, we attempt to step beyond it. A self-replenishing negative feedback loop ensues. The result: Nemesis, the envy of the gods. “Unbounded material progress has become everyman’s goal. Industrial hubris has destroyed the mythical framework of limits to irrational fantasies, has made technical answers to mad dreams seem rational…” I wonder what he might have made of Dignitas?

For Illich, anguish is a part of health, and the inner resources we acquire putting up with it are more precious than decent blood pressure, than the odd bit of surgery. They are fundamental to the building of community. What he calls the “art of suffering” is paramount. In all pain there is a question mark, he claims. To smother it out entirely is to prioritise one aspect of healing — treatment — at the cost of atrophying all of our cultural and spiritual strengths when dealing with agony. Pain-killing gone too far renders us little more than spectators of our own decay. If we don’t bother trying to turn suffering into meaning, we are left ever more dependent on “the machine”.

The book is broken up into three sections. Beginning with clinical iatrogenesis, when pain and death are a direct result of medical procedure — most obviously, when myopic surgeons do things like amputate the wrong limb, and more obliquely through drug side-effects or antibiotic resistance. Here you’ll lumber into a swamp of footnotes, and far too many Seventies-born statistics, some of which have aged badly. For a start, treatment for cardiovascular disease has come a long way in the last 50 years. You can argue that medical practice sponsors a morbid society by inculcating slovenly lifestyles, but credit where it’s due, I’d far rather suffer this illness today than in 1973.

The sections covering social and cultural iatrogenesis in turn tackle what becomes of society when health policies reinforce an industrial organisation that encourages ill-health. He’s not wrong when he declares that the more energy invested in medicine as a commodity, the greater the delusion that society has a supply of health locked away somewhere. I’ve lived my entire life under this delusion, and will no doubt continue to do so. In fact I’m a prime candidate for an Illichian makeover. I’m depressive, over-ambitious, obsessive-compulsive, an addict and a complete neurotic. I’ve leapt under the knife at every available opportunity. Five times in all. As an adult I’ve had the tonsils out, despite being told it was non-essential. I’ve had two painless, totally benign lumps removed from my neck. Most recently I had a node sliced off of my right vocal cord. I’m the kind of person that starts hammering Solpadine Max the moment I get a sniffle. I expect industrial medicine to sort it, whatever it is, and in no time at all. No self-healing capacity whatsoever.

Illich claims that the negative function of money is the devaluation of that which cannot be bought and sold. The more we dismantle any natural ability to cope, the more we shroud ourselves in pseudo-divine scientist mystification. Obvious enough statements. What’s more interesting is Illich’s attempts to reach behind this dilemma. In his opinion, blaming Big Pharma for the abuse of proscribed chemicals is tantamount to blaming the mafia for the abuse of street drugs. Short-sighted and pointless. When the market for consumer goods reaches a critical level, civilisation convinces itself that the human condition can be remodelled without limit: this is his real gripe, what he considers the root of the problem. When we hit a brick wall, the same thing that birthed the problem is reached for. This cycle of over-consumption he sums up as a kind of compulsive nostalgia, a desperate hankering for yesterday’s progress. In a world unfit for human habitation, Illich’s notion of the “patient” becomes an accomplice to the lie that his failings are biological, as opposed to systemic.

The lofty Catholic material really starts to sing once you get into old age and death in part three: cultural iatrogenesis. “From Stockholm to Wichita the towers of the medical centre impress upon the landscape the promise of a conspicuous final embrace…” Illich is very much in favour of old people being given a corner to die in at the family gaff as opposed to subjecting them to invasive and repeated medical procedures, and instead of outsourcing terminal decline to the old folks’ homes and the hospice. A cruel inversion here he points out: to die at home now is the preserve of the rich. Yet, the more wealth the country from which you hail globally has, the more likely the man in the street is to wind up surrounded by strangers in the closing chapter of his life.

From what I’ve seen, death in the mountains of Kabyle, where half of my family live, looks like more fun than death in working-class England. The intergenerational support network provided by the more “primitive” society is something most of us no doubt miss, subconsciously but bitterly. Have we shunned death? Illich certainly believes so. For us, death is crisis, instead of something to which we relate every step of the way, instead of that which informs and enriches our ability to fully live. Keep it out of sight. It spoils the utopian fantasy that everything is manageable, if we just hurl enough cold rationality at it. Shrouding it in an air of “crisis” justifies near limitless ineffectiveness where science is concerned, our replacement for religion. An excess of futile treatments in the dying embers being symbolic of this. As far as Illich is concerned, at the moment of demise, the insured are paying for participation in their own funeral rites and little more: “in an insidious way the doctor provides each citizen at the last hour with an encounter with society’s deadening dream of infinite power”.

In his antipathy for the industrial world, a lot of the time he goes way too far. He appears drunk on his own ideological fervour. On a botched suicide he writes: “I know of a woman who tried, unsuccessfully, to kill herself. She was brought to the hospital in a coma, with a bullet lodged in her spine. Using heroic measures the surgeon kept her alive, and he considers her case a success; he no longer has to worry about her ever attempting suicide again.” I like a bit of hardcore cynicism, it’s refreshing in a world which seems sworn to naïveté, but isn’t this beyond harsh where the medical practice in question is concerned? He’s not into birth control — I don’t agree but I can look past that, he’s a man of the cloth after all, it’s kind of to be expected — but what good does this statement do anybody? At one point he even appears to call for the scapegoating of doctors as a plausible solution to the overextension of medicine into human civilisation. That to me just sounds like sour grapes.

You’ll often run into this problem reading Illich. Any remedy shy of some kind of Marxism-tinged, back-to-basics, Catholic revolution-cum-devolution is only furthering the grief, only enabling the torment of the species further. He attacks welfare as only deepening the problem, for instance. Unless people are downing tools entirely, they’re not doing enough. They’re complicit in their own damnation. I like the fiery tone, the austere biblical voice, but come on, let’s be pragmatic about this. At the end of the day, who’s going to remove your appendix, your uncle Abdul? Your gran?

That being said, prescribed medication is still the third highest cause of death globally. Some of this stuff has aged badly, but aspects of the underlying philosophical argument he hammers home are perhaps even more valuable today than at the time of writing. Overly radical yes, but Illich is also something of a seer. He’s maybe not your man for a solution, but through the prism of his very specific and expansive learning we can look at the mess of our current state of affairs with fresh clarity.


Lias Saoudi is the frontman of Fat White Family and the Moonlandingz, and the co-author of Ten Thousand Apologies: Fat White Family and the Miracle of Failure

FatWhiteFamily

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Malcolm Webb
Malcolm Webb
11 months ago

I found this a somewhat confused and confusing article. However in one respect I found it helpful. It reminded me of how, in modern Britain, we now tend to shun and institutionalise death. Most of the elderly members of my family have died in a hospital. One recent exception however proved uplifting. Given the ability to suppress pain, dying in a real home in the company of family and true friends proved to be so very much better for all concerned, not only the person dying but also for all those who loved her. Institutionalising death it seems to me is not necessarily a good idea. I thank the author of this piece for reminding me of that.

Frank Sterle
Frank Sterle
11 months ago
Reply to  Malcolm Webb

The pharmaceutical industry, meanwhile, notably profits from the continual and even addictive sedation and concealment, via tranquilizers and/or antidepressants, of symptoms of cerebral disorders, including the anxiety and/or depression that often accompany higher-functioning autistic spectrum disorder — especially if there’s related adverse childhood experience (ACE) trauma.
From my understanding, only a small percentage of Canadian physicians currently are integrating ACE-trauma science into the diagnoses and (usually chemical) treatments of patients.
And I don’t believe it’s just coincidental that the only two health professions’ appointments for which Canadians are fully covered by the public plan are the two readily pharmaceutical-prescribing psychiatry and general practitioner health professions. …
Where I reside, therapy is unaffordably $200-plus an hour. Such non-Big-Pharma-profiting health specialists as counsellors, therapists and naturopaths (etcetera) are not covered at all by the public healthcare plan.

Carmel Shortall
Carmel Shortall
11 months ago
Reply to  Frank Sterle

Betcha MAiD is!

Cathy Carron
Cathy Carron
11 months ago
Reply to  Malcolm Webb

Re: dying at home with those who love you…not sure about the UK, but families in the USA can be spread throughout the country, working full time jobs and have lots of their own family obligations. It becomes impossible to tend to the elderly who remain in the original location, many of whom are living beyond 85 years, etc. It’s unfortunate but that’s the modern world.

My 95-year-old mother is in as assisted living facility in Massachusetts, 150 miles from my current home of 40 years. It took massive planning just to get my adult children who have jobs and children in NYC to my mother’s facility to celebrate Thanksgiving this year, not to mention the expense of travel & hotels, meals, etc. Of course, she would like us to be with her 24/7 which she demands frequently but which is impossible. She would love to live with one of us but she’s wheelchair bound, legally blind and needs round-the-clock care – cooking, feeding, etc. not to mention increasingly more medical attention. A simple UTI (urinary tract infection) sends her to the hospital frequently. There has to be a better way to deal with aging but so far we haven’t seen it. Be careful wishing to live a long life if you don’t have the resources to leave this earth the way you want to.
By the way, she never smoked or drank alcohol, is 30 lbs overweight but pursued a very clean life which is why she coasting to 100.

Last edited 11 months ago by Cathy Carron
Mark Vernon
Mark Vernon
11 months ago

The dimension that’s missing, now widespread in writers using Christian insights to critique the present, is why Illich developed his analysis, which wasn’t ultimately for civic or cultural reasons, but religious and spiritual ones.

He feared that the over-institutionalisation of education and care saturates our imaginations, blocking awareness of transcendence and God. Humanising qualities are eroded and the technology-driven age takes root, with its odd mix of panicky hope and despair.

Mike Downing
Mike Downing
11 months ago

Death remains the one thing we can’t sort out (but watch this space) and is like the ultimate pesky fly in the ointment of our dream of a ‘life without limits ‘.

This is really what the Esther Rantzen story in the papers is all about. She wants to be in control right to the end, and make it her campaigning ‘legacy’.

Meanwhile the NHS swallows resources like a bottomless pit and the population gets fatter, lazier and more prone to depression. Something has gone seriously wrong somewhere and it will surely all collapse in due course.

Mr Tyler
Mr Tyler
11 months ago

Cardiovascular and other medicines may have improved since the 70s, but the great man-made iatrogenic monster that is Covid-19 is sufficient alone to condemn 21st century. medicine.

Alison Wren
Alison Wren
11 months ago
Reply to  Mr Tyler

And definitely not forgetting the medical disaster (but profitable idea) that letting people believe they can change sex has engendered. Malpractice suits are lining up everywhere this ideology has taken hold.

Carmel Shortall
Carmel Shortall
11 months ago
Reply to  Mr Tyler

“Cardiovascular and other medicines may have improved since the 70s”

They have not. But Big Pharma and a supine medical ‘profession’ has ensured mass prescription of statins. A jab in every arm and a statin in every gullet! Soon, I expect, they will all be compulsory…

Jane Hewland
Jane Hewland
11 months ago

Is this good writing? Or bad? When you get to the end of an article and think I’m not sure what this guy has said except for a truism that modern society has a phobia about death, are you justified in wondering if you should cancel your Unherd subscription? Writers like Mary Harrington get away with over florid over complex language because there are genuinely interesting thoughts being expressed. Don’t think this guy does. A publication that falls too often for this kind of article, believing the writer must be clever because he’s difficult to understand is not one I can support for long.

Andrew McDonald
Andrew McDonald
11 months ago
Reply to  Jane Hewland

That’s a bit harsh – I thought he rather cleverly captured the Illich tone of voice, though you’re right that he seems to have little insight or exegetory scope. Illich’s point about health (like his view on undertakers*) was simply that modern civil structures were de-skilling and de-humanising us all. Not much to see here….though he had more to say on education I agree.

* family DIY best.

Paul Monahan
Paul Monahan
11 months ago
Reply to  Jane Hewland

Agreed

Richard Pearse
Richard Pearse
11 months ago
Reply to  Jane Hewland

Interesting take: I thought it was fun to read (mildly whimsical, ironic tone) and I’d never heard of this guy Illich so I’m still wondering whether he was just another crackpot wailing about modernity and capitalism (“Marxism-tinged, back-to-basics, Catholic revolution-cum-devolution”) or an interesting thinker.

The part about dying in the hospital (or drugged comfortably in a hospice until you stop eating) was very interesting (and close to home – for me and apparently other readers). We’ve outsourced death and dying to the land of tubes, urine bags, orderlies and white coats: is the spiritual and life-lesson impact the same as watching grandpa “old and gray and full of sleep and nodding by fire”? I feel it’s important to confront this occasionally (as we all, gradually, start to nod by the fire).

Ergo, I enjoyed the article, though it may not have been as profound as some.

Frank Sterle
Frank Sterle
11 months ago
Reply to  Richard Pearse

We Canadians are often envied abroad for our “universal” healthcare system, yet our health may soon-enough come second to profit maximization, in particular those insatiably amassed by the pharmaceutical industry. 
Resultantly, we continue to be the world’s sole nation that has universal healthcare but no similar coverage of prescribed medication, however necessary.
Not only is medication less affordable, but other research has revealed that many low-income outpatients who cannot afford to fill their prescriptions end up back in the hospital system as a result, therefore costing far more for provincial and federal government health ministries than if the medication had been covered.
Ergo, in order for the industry to continue raking in huge profits, Canadians and their health, as both individual consumers and a taxpaying collective, must lose out big time. 
So, while we are often envied abroad for our supposedly universal health care, our health may soon-enough come second to profit maximization, in particular those insatiably amassed by the pharmaceutical industry.

Cathy Carron
Cathy Carron
11 months ago
Reply to  Frank Sterle

We don’t envy Canadians their healthcare as we see enough of them driving into the USA to get treated when their system won’t address their concerns. People from all over the world take advantage; in the small Massachusetts town I grew up in, Portuguese who immigrated would bring their elderly over and after they’ve been in the USA for a year, they’d plop them in local nursing homes. There were so many that didn’t speak English so interpreters would be hired – all thanks to the American taxpayer. I know this because my mother used to process Medicaid payments for our town.

Robbie K
Robbie K
11 months ago
Reply to  Jane Hewland

It’s not just bad, it’s terrible. He writes: That being said, prescribed medication is still the third highest cause of death globally.
A fact apparently. Based on a Guardian article, which was based on some bloke’s blog where he claims the second biggest cause of deaths is old people falling over because they are dosed up on anti-depressants.
It’s absolutely absurd garbage.

Benedict Waterson
Benedict Waterson
11 months ago
Reply to  Robbie K

The opioid epidemic includes prescription medications

Robbie K
Robbie K
11 months ago

Of course it does and that’s a valid point. The article however, whilst making some good observations has been based on a load of old guff.

Andrew Fisher
Andrew Fisher
11 months ago
Reply to  Jane Hewland

Your comment is rather too self revealing, I would suggest. If you accuse this perfectly cogent and well written article – or the very sparse and focused prise of Mary Harrington of being “florid” then perhaps your issue might be actually “reading” itself! The absorption of a sometimes complex reality that can’t always be stripped down to a comic book level.

Last edited 11 months ago by Andrew Fisher
Michael McElwee
Michael McElwee
11 months ago
Reply to  Jane Hewland

The man can turn a phrase.

S B
S B
11 months ago

An interesting read. Thanks to the author and to Unheard.

Edward De Beukelaer
Edward De Beukelaer
11 months ago

This piece is confusing because the author mixes two narratives of health: the first narrative is the one used by modern medicine coming out of the enlightenment and and Descartes area treating our bodies as bits working together, like in a machine, which medicine will fix. This has resulted in the modern medicine paradigm which has now lost to control of rising chronic illness and unpleasant deaths. It is clever at saving lives but not so much as providing health.
The other narrative is more associated with traditional views on health and disease seeing us as being systems where all is linked in endless feedback loops and as part of larger systems (household, family, town, environment, country, … earth). It is not always so clever at saving lives but very good as providing health.
Both narratives are valid and add value to medicine. the problem is often that ‘we’ prefer to believe in only one narrative and see the other as not right.
Illich narrative is perfectly sensible if you allow for the thinking of his time and his worry about modern medicine correct but maybe not perfectly adjusted.
Many still believe in the value of modern medicine: most of the improvement of quality of life and life expectancy has been achieved through better sanitation and only a possible a mere 10% due to modern medicine (https://rootsofprogress.org/draining-the-swamp)
health is altogether another thing from relieving pain and saving lives: see page 16-17 of this: https://files.visura.co/users/12837/8849a41e6cadcc2d07f3a8f032df11ba.pdf
It is about time that the medical profession wakes up to this because 1) no country can afford modern medicine for all its citizens, 2) modern medicine does not seek health, it is mostly interested in illness, 3) modern medicine is damaging to the environment (To just mention Anti microbial resistance)
We have tor educe modern medicine to what it is good at and learn from traditional medicine how it is possible to heal people to health (see G20 last August https://www.who.int/publications/m/item/who-traditional-medicine-summit-2023-meeting-report–gujarat-declaration)

Jacqui Denomme
Jacqui Denomme
11 months ago

Great distinctions. Your reply just clarified the article for me and in fact was more illuminating than the article itself and likely the book that inspired it. Unfortunately the systems our governments now fund seem to support a model that profits from sickness rather than the promotion of wellness.

Matt Soucie
Matt Soucie
11 months ago

Lias is such a rambler, but he’s great. Likewise with Ivan Illich, so this piece was a treat for me

j watson
j watson
11 months ago

As we know there has been a huge increase in average life expectancy last 50yrs. Some of that has much to do with modern medicine, as the Author notes with specific reference to cardiac care as but one example. Significant morbidity improvements have also been delivered – the benefits from things such as joint replacement and cataract surgery, thus alleviating immense pain, disability and blindness, are transformational and what preceded them sometimes forgotten.
Undoubtedly some clinical and esp pharmaceutical mismanagement occurs. But it would still be difficult to weigh all the interventions now possible against such mistakes and find modern medicine makes us sicker overall. Modern Medicine is one of the greatest achievements of the West.
Yet the Author is onto something about how some interventions may be inappropriate near to the very end of life. These judgments are not easy though, and the Author offers no suggestions on what might improve things. More time, support and the cultural encouragement to develop more Advanced Directives could help. But who should prompt these via discussion with us? Overstretched GPs? And when we are desperately trying to get a patient back home to die are the community support and care resources there? ‘Fast tracking’ is a process used every day by UK Hospitals to help get someone back home to die, but it often doesn’t manage to move fast enough because the support isn’t there.

Caroline Ayers
Caroline Ayers
11 months ago

I loved this article – I’d never heard of Illich. I agree he was something of a seer. Thank you Unherd x

David Harris
David Harris
11 months ago

I remember the book and its author (Deschooling, Ivan Illich) from my 1970s teacher training lectures. Had until now completely forgotten it. Nice to be reminded tho’. 🙂

Peter Lee
Peter Lee
11 months ago

Having just gone through the Covid Vaccine horror story , with young sports people are dying left right and centre, this article would seem quite topical.
We need to stop relying on institutional medicine and be responsible of our own healthy life style. A good walk every day with good eating habits will do the trick.

Last edited 11 months ago by Peter Lee
Mark Vernon
Mark Vernon
11 months ago

As William Blake, a comparable prophet, put it: “The bounded is loathed by its possessor. The same dull round even of a universe would soon become a mill with complicated wheels.”

Last edited 11 months ago by Mark Vernon
Alix Daniel
Alix Daniel
11 months ago

The iatrogenic development of medical science has got worse since Illich’s work. During Covid, countries with advance medical care have suffered much more than poor countries with an excess of mortality, morbidity, drug consumption and human despair at such a level, I can now comprehend. Western medical science does not care anymore and my profession of family doctor is doomed.

George Scialabba
George Scialabba
11 months ago
Janet G
Janet G
11 months ago

Thanks George Scialabba.

UnHerd Reader
UnHerd Reader
11 months ago

Well I don’t know about whether it makes us sick or not. If I ever get a chance to be treated by a doctor or the NHS I’ll let you know.

Alex Stonor
Alex Stonor
11 months ago

Brilliant.

Janet G
Janet G
11 months ago

Victoria Sweet’s writings about slow medicine are worth reading. The first I read was ‘God’s Hotel: A doctor, a hospital, and a pilgrimage to the heart of medicine.’ https://www.penguinrandomhouse.com/books/306891/gods-hotel-by-victoria-sweet/

Jacqui Denomme
Jacqui Denomme
11 months ago
Reply to  Janet G

I loved this book and wish all health care professionals could be inspired by its profound insights.

Katalin Kish
Katalin Kish
11 months ago

Freakonomics shares some insights also, about the harm too much medical help poses.

Wireless Internet connectivity of medical systems & devices e.g. pacemakers and insulin pumps pose a much bigger threat to life though, because as yet few medical professionals are able to grasp how far the risks of unprotectable technology outweigh any benefit.

Anything with a CPU is hackable.

I even experienced a Faraday Cage penetration in 2022 in my own home as a likely demo to a Science graduate of a new crime tech addition to Australia’s biker arsenals.

I am writing from 14+ years experience as a crime-tech-demo-dummy in a leafy suburb of Melbourne, Australia, where I have owned my home since 2001, investment properties since 2010.

I had to give up trying to earn a salary in 2017 due to devastating cyber-crimes, house break-ins evidently via utilising government/military-grade resources. Last obvious cyber-crime less than 2 hours ago.

Finances are mentioned, because in Australia all crime victims are assumed to be charity cases whose poor life decisions led to their inevitable demise.

Since I never even dated the stalker ex-coworker from the Victorian Electoral Commission trading stolen info for Crimes As A Service at least since 2009 with e.g. Australia’s bikers, ongoing crimes against me are not even domestic violence.

The stalker didn’t (still doesn’t?) just have unrestricted access to every woman’s home address in our state, possibly the whole of Australia, he had/has unrestricted access to the up-to-date whereabouts of people in witness protection.

Crimes against me have featured remote physical harm capabilities from the time I declared self-representation at court in 2019, as corrupt Victoria Police forced me to fight at court as an accused criminal in an admitted silencing attempt about crimes I witnessed as a public servant, crimes I am reduced to surviving at times every few minutes even seconds since mid-2009.

It was a relief of sorts to read about Kamala HARRIS’ Vietnam incident. My self-representation cut the court case short: prosecutors bluff.

The most severe of these incidents occurred on 9 July 2022.

A sudden, extreme dizziness came over me making me vomit for about 10 hours, giving me a scalp burn without any observable contact. Debilitating dizziness took 7 months+ to taper off, tinnitus continues.

Do corrupt Victoria Police / Australia’s bikers aim at cognitively disabling crime witnesses they cannot silence with violence, cannot discredit via bizarre crimes? A biker’s unpunished physical assault against me only increased my resolve to fight the crimes and corruption of Victoria Police.

Using military-grade tech against crime witnesses violates the Geneva Convention of course.

Remote-physical-harm acts via military-grade resources qualify as war crimes, yet they are unpunishable, because no victim can prove for the foreseeable future that the effects they experience are directly linked to remote-weapons-grade tech, let alone proving individual cyber-criminals’ guilt beyond reasonable doubt.

This article meets terrifying tech reality in health institutions’/doctors’ propensity to close ranks against patients with negative health outcomes.
Any punishment, if/when these crimes become punishable will be after the fact.
Coma is rarely reversible and the dead will remain dead.

#ididnotstaysilent

Last edited 11 months ago by Katalin Kish
Nick L
Nick L
11 months ago

This guy is a terrible writer. I expect more from UnHerd.