My own journey in health care has been eye opening to say the least. I started as a student in counselling psychology and began working on hospital wards around 15 years ago.

I would see the way psychiatric drugs were prescribed and dispensed to vulnerable people who often didn’t seem to have the capacity to fully consent to the drugs being given to them.

I also began to be aware of the side effects, withdrawal effects and long term health impacts of taking Big Pharma’s products.

This led me down various rabbit holes associated with modern healthcare particularly psychiatry and the history of vaccines.

However all roads lead to studying the inception of modern medicine during the late 19th and early 20th century which is often known as ‘allopathic’ medicine although this term has become controversial.

The politics of terminology aside, it’s not possible to study the history of medicine without looking into the influence of very wealthy American families such as the Rockefeller’s and Carnegie’s.

I was astonished to discover that the modern pharmaceutical drug industry started as an offshoot of the oil and petrochemical industries. And the ‘robber barons’ of the era were intent on taking over medicine and driving out competition so that their pharmaceuticals could gain a monopoly in the market.

This short documentary is a good introduction to the history and there is also the book Rockefeller Medicine Men by E. Richard Brown which is worth checking out.