SUMMARY : “Le marché de la santé et les mensonges d Etat”, essai, 2024 At the heart of the trial is an anecdote: a newspaper informs its readers that a London court abolished the medical diagnosis of “natural death” to replace it with that of “violent death”. Ella was born healthy and died from asphyxiation at eight years of age after many hospitalisations. Her mother, Rosamund Kissi- Debrah, left her career as a teacher to devote herself, for seven years, to battling with legal authorities to find out if her daughter was one of the hundreds of thousands of children who die every year worldwide due to air pollution caused by human activities. The impunity granted by states and their public health authorities to polluters and their economic activities contributes to this disaster and the continuation of pollution to the detriment of the health of millions of human beings. It is clear to all that the resulting premature and preventable mortality is caused by man. Therefore, this constellation prohibits human and scientific medicine from diagnosing a natural death. Instead, it will use the term “anthropogenic death”. With the political, economic and health authorities not complying with human health rights, appealing to the courts was the only way for Ella’s mother to obtain a diagnosis that reflected the reality of life. Because, unlike the child’s caregivers, forensic medicine took into account the fact that she had grown up close to an intersection known for its constant heavy road traffic, producing toxic substances incompatible with respiratory health, especially at a young age. Medicine is meant to promote life and ensure health rights. The author emphasises the importance of the right to a scientific diagnosis for all. This right is part and parcel of the right to health, and derives from the age-old motto Primum non nocere, which applies to all professions working for life. The human activity we call “war” is no exception, because a human killing another human via an industrial product is an assassin guilty of causing an anthropogenic death and not a hero. Several chapters recall lawsuits against officials in the industry, health administrations, and the healthcare market that produced, sold and prescribed substances whose consumption was detrimental to the life, health and freedom of users. The analysis of the judgements found the same theme: violation of bodily integrity, negligent homicide, prohibition of selling the offending products on the market, and finally the attempt to restore justice by paying compensation to injured people or their families. For example, after the thalidomide and asbestos scandals, reparation payments have been continuing for decades. The trial puts at the centre of its second part – history – the Declaration of Geneva, the beginning of which follows: “As a member of the medical profession, I solemnly pledge to dedicate my life to the service of humanity”. This universal principle refers to the Declaration of Human Rights. It breaks with the tribalism that had characterised the healthcare system since its foundation by the leader of the Second Reich, Otto von Bismarck. Its motto, contrary to that of the medical profession cited above, reflects the spirit of the time: “By blood and iron”. It guided the redesign of the German empire after three wars. Thanks to these conquests, the Iron Chancellor demanded the German side of what he called the colonial cake. Later, his motto went hand in hand with the first genocide of the 20th century, a work perpetrated in Namibia. Neither the healthcare system nor its medical profession fought it. Under the liberal regime of Weimar, German physicians began referring to Plato’s philosophy of state. This western thought leader, unlike Hippocrates, rendered legal power to physicians that assigned them the task of selecting the humans whose life was useless and of killing them. In the Third Reich, the value of human beings was measured by their usefulness in winning the war, strengthening the economy and enhancing the race. From the first day of the Second World War, lying and deception led to killing by iatrogenic means. Physicians were hiding their crimes using the “euthanasia” euphemism, making up diagnoses and falsifying medical records. The healthcare system guaranteed the transformation of this activity into an industry for death known as Shoa, the elimination of an ethnicity diagnosed by its physician as being an “inferior race”. This ultimate antithesis to the universal principle proved once and for all the danger of putting physicians in the service of a power built on discrimination. The Nuremberg Trials ended with sentencing several physicians and healthcare system leaders to death by hanging. Physicians around the world could no longer return to Plato’s philosophy. They looked to Hippocrates to rephrase the millennial text known as the Hippocratic Oath. This historical section concludes with the refutation of medical universalism through the choice of a new thought leader. In “Dr Bernard Mandeville. Lecture On a Master Mind” presented before the British Academy for the Promotion of Historical, Philosophical and Philological Studies in London in 1966, the éminence grise of liberalism at the time and future Nobel Prize winner in Economics, Professor Friedrich August von Hayek, attributed this honour to the doctor of medicine, Bernard Mandeville, described as a mentor to Adam Smith, father of modern economics. However, it should be noted that Mandeville is an apologist of the principle of “the value of war in commerce”. In addition, he advocates for “the big, opulent and belligerent nation” achieving its victories by “force which must prevail over law”. This lecture manifests itself as a counter- project to the Declarations of Human Rights and the Declaration of Geneva. In response to this backtracking, the author puts human health rights in the middle of the third part of the trial. Based on his forty years of medical experience, he refers to health, this pure creation of nature at the base of each cell of the living being. The author recalls the Paris Agreements. Once they were signed, more than 190 states had then committed their health system, implicitly their medicine, to respecting Human Rights, Health Rights for all and Children’s Rights to grow up in a healthy environment congruent with their health. In concrete terms, it was the abolition of supremacy and discrimination, including the race theory nurtured by universities and medical schools for centuries. Because the cell is the vital element of organisms, no tribal or national social body can take the place of its microcosm. The cell is the first reference in scientific and human medicine. Cell theory, with its genealogy, anchors life and human health in natural history. Human history is an episode within it. Life, health and freedom are innate, and physicians are starting to be competent in treating them as internalities. It is neither scientific nor human to declare them “externalities” like the social science of economy does. In the microcosmic world of cellularity of organisms, human beings are a pure creation of nature and, since Hippocrates, the ultimate reference in medical science. Anthropogenic death is incompatible with the right to natural death. Only the latter corresponds to health rights.

Livre