Imagine that a drug company invents a new cancer drug. The drug is tested on humans who are saddled with a medical problem. The tests show that the drug significantly improves the condition of about 40% of the patients. About 20% of the patients are harmed by the drug. And between 2% and 18% of the patients die when they are treated with the drug. The fraction of the patients who die varies that much from hospital to hospital where it was tested. Evidently the results of the procedure are not at all consistent.
 
Do you think that if a drug like that were invented and tested today, would such a drug have any chance of being approved for use by the FDA? No, it would not have the chance of a snowball in hell of being approved by the FDA. The government does not tolerate medical treatments that kill several percent of the patients. Especially if only around 40% of the patients get better after taking the drug.
 
But there was a time when the kind of medical treatment I hypothesized above was used in reality! Back in the 1940s, 1950s and early 1960s, to be exact. The medical treatment in question was called “lobotomy”. People began dying and becoming crippled - as a consequence of being lobotomized - right from the start. The start was the end of the 1930s, when the procedure was invented by a Portuguese psychiatrist by the name of Egas Moniz. But the lobotomy procedure swept the world during the 1940s and 1950s anyway. The procedure was widely adopted within just a few years after it was introduced to the medical world. It was like a fad.
 
The lobotomy procedure was adopted without much substantial evidence of its efficacy. Egas Moniz had started out by just observing that when he severed the nerves in the frontal region of the brains of a mere two chimpanzees, Lucy and Becky, they subsequently became calmer and more subdued. He proceeded to test the procedure on a small number of humans who suffered from psychoses. Some of the psychotics became calmer and more subdued. There were significant negative side effects, but Dr. Moniz downplayed these negative side effects, when he urged his fellow psychiatrists to adopt the procedure as a way of treating psychotics. For example, a significant fraction of the lobotomy patients developed heavy bleeding in the brain and were crippled or died as a result. But many psychiatrists jumped at the opportunity to treat psychotics with this new procedure anyway. Why?
 
Well, why did Lysenko rise to prominence in genetic science in the Soviet Union? Politics. In the Soviet Union, science was controlled by the government. The Soviet government corrupted science for political purposes. Stalin wanted “science” to support his pet political programs in agriculture. There is a parallel between the rise of Lysenko in the government-controlled science of the Soviet Union, and the rise of the lobotomies in the government-controlled mental health care sector in the Western countries.
 
Back in the 1930s and 1940s, when the lobotomy procedure was invented and introduced, the mental health care sector was in a bad state. There was no effective treatment for many types of psychoses, including schizophrenia. As a result, the mental hospitals were overflowing with chronically ill patients. It used to be the case - before effective anti-psychotic medicines were developed in the 1950s - that many, many men who were diagnosed with schizophrenia in their youth, had to spend the entire rest of their lives in mental hospitals. It used to be the case that fully 25% of all the patients who were cared for in the hospitals (i.e. hospitals of all kinds, not just 25% of the patients in the mental hospitals) were schizophrenics. Obviously, that must have meant that our societies´ psychotics were an enormous burden on the mental health care system. Therefore, the army of psychotic patients was an enormous financial burden on the government.
 
The mental hospitals were namely financed mostly by the government, with tax money. Now, you know how politicians are. They will do almost anything in desperation, when they feel that they need to save tax money. Politicians´ attempts to save tax money are notorious for being misconceived and bungled. So - what would you expect the politicians´ reaction to the appearance on the scene of the lobotomy procedure would be? You would expect them to welcome it with open arms. For, here at long last was a medical procedure, which could relieve the government of the burden of paying for the hospitalization of psychotics, who constituted more than 25% of all the patients in the hospitals. And the lobotomies were quite inexpensive. It did not cost much money to just sever some nerves in the patients´ brains!
 
It would not be strange at all if the responsible politicians would evade the drawbacks of the lobotomies. To have stopped the lobotomies, on the grounds that they harmed many of the patients, would have cost the government enormous amounts of scarce tax money. So, apparently due to a conflict of interest, the government bodies charged with protecting the welfare of the patients - they just looked the other way and did not stop the lobotomies.
 
So - the “solution” to the psychoses which socialized medicine resorted to, were the lobotomies – a surgical procedure that only “worked” in the case of less than 50% of the patients treated and which led to between 2% and 18% of the patients, depending on where the operation was done, dying as a result. But was there any alternative?
 
Yes, a capitalist alternative for treating psychotics turned up in the 1950s. In the 1950s, a private Swiss drug company, introduced chlorpromazine, the first effective drug for schizophrenia. This drug was a blessing. Thanks to treatment with chlorpromazine, many thousands of schizophrenics could be released from the mental hospitals and could begin living relatively normal lives. And chlorpromazine was both inexpensive, and it did not have the deadly kind of side-effects which the lobotomies resulted in. And soon after chlorpromazine was introduced, a multitude of other anti-psychotic drugs were invented. These drugs saved the mental health care system at least as much money as the lobotomies ever did. And they did so without any significant number of deaths or maimings!
 
This, I put it to you, is a dramatic demonstration of the superiority of capitalism over socialism, in medicine. The “socialist” method of saving tax money in tax-financed mental health, was to adopt a medical procedure which was, in a great many cases, harmful to the patients. And the psychiatrists´ professional integrity was evidently not enough to save the patients when the government was paying the bill. For a psychiatrist to refuse to commit a lobotomy which the bureaucrats desired would have been biting the hand that fed him. The Hippocratic Oath was not worth the paper it was printed on when the government was financing the health care system. The capitalist method to save money in the mental health-care sector, on the other hand, was not to betray the interests of the patients - but to use human ingenuity to come up with a cost-effective, and safe way to treat a widespread disease.
 
I have, myself, a personal interest in this subject. I was given a diagnosis of schizophrenia, when I was a teenager. I spent a total of fifteen months in Swedish mental hospitals as a result. Fortunately for me, I did not become schizophrenic until the beginning of the 1970s. And by then the lobotomies had been discontinued, since the new anti-psychotic drugs had supplanted them.
 
I was treated with chlorpromazine. As a result, I recovered, and I eventually went on to discover the wonderful philosophy of Objectivism, and to live a pretty darn happy life as a result. But what if I had become schizophrenic while the lobotomies were still believed to be as a good “solution” to my disease by the political authorities? Then the psychiatrists might have cut up my brain - and I might have become a vegetable - or I might even have died! Even in the event of the “best” outcome, I would probably have wound up with intellectual capacities which were inadequate for me to learn the intellectually demanding philosophy of Objectivism. And then where would I be now?
 
So - the question of whether medicine should be socialistic or capitalistic, and of whether it should be financed privately or with tax money, is a life-and-death issue. I believe that the history of the lobotomy procedure constitutes an excellent polemical weapon against socialized medicine. The world´s Objectivists should make use of it to the hilt!