Don't be fooled, dear reader. Doctors are in it for the money.

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We all know why medicine is such an over subscribed subject in higher education. Don’t we? Or do you still subscribe to the view that people enter into the noble profession of doctoring out of a sense of vocation, duty and desire to serve mankind? That is after all what the assorted knighted and lorded medics who pollute our airwaves would have you believe, of course. But they are lying. And I know this because I’ve read some economics.

Let’s start with earning power then. While engineers are pretty good in the earnings stakes the winners are dentists and medics:

Top 10 graduate salaries by subject
1 Dentistry £29,805
2 Medicine £28,913
3 Chemical engineering £28,415
4 Economics £25,726
5 General engineering £25,455
6 Veterinary medicine £25,206
7 East and South Asian studies £24,769
8 Building £24,755
9 Civil engineering £24,473
10 Mechanical engineering £24,446
Source: HESA 2007-08 as published in The Times on Thursday May 27th 2010.

People become doctors because the pay’s good. It’s a simple as that really – so why do medics insist on trying to persuade us that they enter into the profession for nobler motives?

Doctors are lying when they claim not to be motivated by cash (and they do protest too much).

And, you know, they’re also lying when they say that the assorted campaigns to medicalise lifestyle decisions – smoking, drinking, eating – are for the “public good”. They are not. They are a ramp – special pleading aimed at further enhancing the earning power of the medical profession (and its assorted hangers on).

After all, if we let all the drinkers and smokers die, that means less business for the quacks!

The same argument can be made for “mental health” – medical professionals have a vested interest in extending the scope of psychiatric medicine. The more ‘madnesses’ we can discover, the more treatments can be prescribed and the more there is need for doctors. And we – as consumers of medicine – are told we cannot make decisions about our health because ‘we do not understand’. We aren’t clever enough. We must allow the doctors to prescribe.

And, of course, while the scope of medicine (and the demand for doctoring) grows, the doctors operate the other end of the ramp by controlling how many people can become a doctor. After all, as demand has grown, our supply has not kept up because of the way in which doctors are trained. And when cheaper foreign doctors are brought in the profession does its damnedest to get the message across that those foreign doctors are somehow not as good as the expensive home grown quacks.

I do not offer an answer to this exploitative monopoly but just want you all to heed the warning. Doctors – like other protected professionals (lawyers, accountants and so on) are organised to act against the consumer’s interest and in the interest of the profession. As citizens we should demand that the truth is spoken. We should refuse to co-operate with the medicalisation of normal behaviours and lifestyle choices and should insist that, if we cannot exercise economic control over the power of the quack, we can at least insist on a greater degree of citizen decision-making and the respecting of individual choice.

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