It has been said that families go “from overalls to overalls in three generations.” It has taken doctors a little longer than that. During the time of the Romans, doctors were of the slave class. At the time of the Industrial Revolution, as portrayed in George Eliot’s novel Middlemarch, doctors took their orders from the bankers and town councils. How far are we from that today? We are being referred to now, not as doctors, but as “health care providers,” a classification which also includes bedpan salesmen.

Dear Editor,

Dr. Michael L. Nahrwold’s “A Lesson from the Raintree” (Medical Sentinel, Summer 1996) is excellent, and particularly relevant to me. Ross Lockridge’s 1947 novel Raintree County is indeed one of America’s greatest novels, ranking, in my view, alongside Huckleberry Finn. Larry Lockridge’s recent examination of his father’s life, and his suicide immediately after the novel’s appearance, when the world seemed within his hand, is also excellent, as Dr. Nahrwold points out.

In Part I of this essay published in the Medical Sentinel, Summer 1996 issue, I discussed three of the seven enemies of the practice of medicine: Non-profit Hospitals/Hospital Administrators, Compulsory National Health Care Consortium, and Government Legislation and Implementation.

"AIDS: The Untold Story" by Stanley K. Monteith is not exactly what it claims to be. It is hardly an untold story that by the end of 1996 over 500,000 Americans had developed AIDS, and that a million Americans would "progress to terminal-stage illness and death," because they have antibodies against HIV.

Dr. Stanley Monteith has a long and distinguished history of being wrong about AIDS epidemiology, and his latest contribution to the Medical Sentinel continues the tradition.

It has been said that "men become accomplices to those tragedies which they fail to oppose." Nowhere is that truth more clearly demonstrated than in the apocalypse currently unfolding across the world as the HIV epidemic continues its silent spread from land to land.

Advances in the conquest of pain are underway, we are told, in Europe, England and the U.S. Pain clinics and pain specialists are increasing, as are hospices and pain-management courses in medical schools. This sounds wonderful, but the reality does not seem as wonderful as the labels. Our check into these facilities and their methods indicate that they seem dedicated more to teaching people to endure pain than to efforts to alleviate it.

ABSTRACT Invasive bacterial infections are associated with several acute and chronic illnesses, including: aerodigestive diseases such as Asthma, Pneumonia, Inflammatory Bowel Diseases; rheumatoid diseases, such as Rheumatoid Arthritis (RA); immunosuppression diseases such as HIV-AIDS; genitourinary infections and chronic fatigue illnesses such as Chronic Fatigue Syndrome (CFS), Fibromyalgia Syndrome (FMS) and Gulf War Illnesses (GWI).