Read about the Flexner Report that paved the way for how mainstream medicine is practiced today...
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The Foundations Fund the Hack Abraham Flexner to ‘Standardize’ Medicine
Russ Winter
Winter Watch
October 25, 2021

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This second post in our series on the malevolent effects of the big Foundations concerns the medical industry. In 1908, the Rockefellers went to Andrew Carnegie, who then located one Abraham Flexner (1866-1959). The Jewish Flexner went across the nation studying medical schools and published Medical Education in the United States and Canada — more popularly known as the Flexner Report (1910).

Although Flexner had never set foot inside a medical school, he was Rockefeller’s / Carnegie’s first choice to lead a study of American medical education. Although not a physician himself, Flexner was selected for his “writing ability” and his disdain for traditional education. He was also a first class hack and self promoter.

The Flexner Report showed that there was a “need” to standardize the medical education system. It increased the schooling time required to be a physician to a minimum of six years, preferably eight years of post-secondary education, typically in a university setting. With the skyrocketing cost of education in recent decades this has ratcheted up the cost of medicine.

Up to that time, the teaching and practice of medicine was more hands on, and more of an empirical craft. The ideas of Dr. William Osler (1849-1919) dominated. His greatest influence on medicine was to insist that students learn from seeing and talking to patients and the establishment of the medical residency. He hoped his tombstone would say only, “He brought medical students into the wards for bedside teaching.”

Osler was more dedicated to developing the physician as a person and a communicator, also called “the bedside manner”. Interpersonal relationships with the patient and getting to know him or her as an individual was paramount. But Flexner attacked these traditions and other distractions from “serious learning,” such as intercollegiate athletics, student government, and other student activities. “Serious learning” morphed into standardizing medical education and care that favored a so-called loaded version of “science”, protocols, and memorization over a patient-centered approach