Dear Marion,

Thank you for your letter. I wish you the very best for
the results of the laboratory tests, when you receive them,
namely that the examinations ill turn out to have been
entirely "unnecessary."  As you are well aware, the genius
of your correspondence your knack for asking the right
questions, inquiries for which I have been waiting, which
I am eager to try to answer.  In your most recent letter
you ask: 

"As a thoughtful person and a long-time witness to your own
hand-biting behavior, do you think your judgement about the
value of medical treatments is sound?"

My replies:

A) I consider "health" in part a quasi-religious issue, or,
if you like, an "existential" matter, which each person must
adjudicate in his or her own behalf, a question to which it's
folly to presume to dictate an answer and about which to
proselytize or propagandize is an insult to the spirit.

My own orientation is mirrored in a poem-prayer of Rilke's:

O Herr, gib jedem seinen eignen Tod.
Das Sterben, das aus jenem Leben geht,
darin er Liebe hatte, Sinn und Not.

Rainer Maria Rilke, 15.4.1903, Viareggio 

I expand the imperative for "seinen eigenen Tod", ones own death,
to an imperative for "seine eigene Krankheit", - ones own illness,
a disease condition by which one is transformed and into which
one is transformed, an illness which is no longer inimical to,
but which is the ultimate completion and fulfillment of ones 
existence.

B) I consider it in part a rational and an historical issue.

B.1) Significant facets of contemporary medicine appear to me to
be wasteful and destructive, both economically and spiritually,
being driven by i) greed of physicians, medical institutions and
insurance companies, ii) governmental compulsion for regulation
and control, and iii) popular ignorance, superstition and fear.

B.2) Significant facets of contemporary medicine appear to me to
constitute remarkable achievements of human intelligence and
social organization: e.g. prevention of plague, typhus, cholera,
smallpox, poliomyelitis, tetanus, rabies ... much, though not all
antibacterial and antiviral chemotherapy. It is usually very
difficult, if not impossible, to determine the value of therapies
newly introduced. 

C) The primary task of the physician is not "to cure" the patient,
but to mediate, like a broker, between her or him and contemporary
scientific, professional, economic reality: to help the patient 
identify and obtain the "health care" which is optimal for her or
him. By these standards, the destruction which the medical profession
is perpetrating on the health of individuals is quite comparable to
the destruction which the banks inflict on the individuals on whose
houses they foreclose. The doctors are doing to the spirit of the
nation what the bankers are doing to its economy.

Have I answered your question?

Jochen