When I was Senior Pediatric Consultant to the Department of Mental Health in Illinois, I cut out a certain kind of operation that was being performed on mongoloid children with heart defects. The stated purpose of the operation was to improve oxygen supply to the brain. The real purpose, of course, was to improve the state's residency programs in cardiovascular surgery, because nothing beneficial happened to the brains of mongoloid children—and the surgeons knew that. The whole idea was absurd. And deadly, since the operation had a fairly high mortality rate. Naturally, the university people were very upset when I cut out the operation. They couldn't figure out a better use for the mongoloid children, and, besides, it was important to train people.In prepaid group practices where surgeons are paid a steady salary not tied to how many operations they perform, hysterectomies and tonsillectomies occur only about one-third as often as in fee-for-service situations. Ritual Mutilations by Robert S. Mendelsohn, M.D.

almost half of the 100,000 or so surgeons we actually do have right now are superfluous. Those 50,000 or so extra unsheathed scalpels do a lot of damage. Ritual Mutilations by Robert S. Mendelsohn, M.D.

Mothers, too, are more likely to end up in the intensive care ward after an induced delivery. Postoperative complications occur in half of all women who deliver by Caesarean section. And the maternal death rate is 26 times higher than in women who deliver vaginally. I propose that we drop the term fetal monitoring and start calling it fatal monitoring! Ritual Mutilations by Robert S. Mendelsohn, M.D.

One of the true tests of a fanatic is whether or not he takes his own medicine—or believes his own press releases. The fact that doctors do get in line for the sacrifice only strengthens its grounding in ceremony. Ritual Mutilations by Robert S. Mendelsohn, M.D.

In prepaid group practices where surgeons are paid a steady salary not tied to how many operations they perform, hysterectomies and tonsillectomies occur only about one-third as often as in fee-for-service situations. Ritual Mutilations by Robert S. Mendelsohn, M.D.

Although tonsillectomies should have been for all practical purposes abandoned for 2,000 years, they're still quite popular as a medical ceremony. Ritual Mutilations by Robert S. Mendelsohn, M.D.

I can remember when if a hospital's incidence of Caesarean deliveries went above four or five percent, there was a full scale investigation. The present level is around twenty-five percent. There are no investigations at all. And in some hospitals the rate is pushing fifty percent. Ritual Mutilations by Robert S. Mendelsohn, M.D.

"Greed plays a role in causing unnecessary surgery, although I don't think the economic motive alone is enough to explain it. There's no doubt that if you eliminated all unnecessary surgery, most surgeons would go out of business. They'd have to look for honest work, because the surgeon gets paid when he performs surgery on you, not when you're treated some other way. In pre-paid group practices where surgeons are paid a steady salary not tied to how many operations they perform, hysterectomies and tonsillectomies occur only about one-third as often as in fee-for-service situations." ---- Robert S. Mendelsohn, MD. "Confessions of a Medical Heretic by Dr Robert Mendelsohn" (1979) Chapter 3 ("Ritual Mutilations"), pp. 58-59.