The Ordre des Médecins Displays Its Partnership with the MIVILUDES

The Ordre des Médecins Displays Its Partnership with the MIVILUDES for a Campaign against the “Hold” of Promoters of Non-Conventional Treatments

By CICNS (April 2012)

Pierre Bourdieu said: “Obscurantism has returned, but this time we are dealing with people who claim the authority of reason. Faced with that, one cannot stay silent.”

We join him and, despite the growing number of anti-cult publications, sometimes in major media, whose assurance, ignorance and contempt for any adversarial voice might prompt one to give up, to stop trying to provide a counterweight, we speak out on one particular and particularly significant publication: the dossier “Face aux dérives sectaires, l’union fait la force” (“Facing dérives sectaires, union is strength”), in the January 2012 bulletin of the National Ordre des Médecins.

On the cover, the image of four people in meditation, in a classic yoga posture. Their arrangement and the colour of the clothes suggest that one is a teacher and the other three his pupils. The faces breathe serenity. The dossier begins in the tone of general mobilisation: “The cult movements are extending their hold over the domain of health. Faced with powerful and litigious organisations, partnership actions are required”.

Then comes at once the evocation of the Order of the Solar Temple and of the “74 people fallen under the hold of this movement”. What connection with the domain of health?

The problem is that we find it normal today to associate with the worst intentions and criminal acts, entirely gratuitously (unargued, since the dossier does not even mention yoga or meditation), the peaceful (until proof of the contrary) and legal practice of millions of people around the world. This caricatural dossier, published in 258,000 copies, for a “scientific” readership, apparently triggered no protest and no public comment. The only clue known to CICNS of any insubordination to the “Ordre” is the copy of this bulletin we received by post from a doctor, with the suggestion of commenting on it publicly.

A well-earned dunce’s cap for the editor of the dossier, who twice writes: Mission Interministérielle de lutte et de Vigilance contre les Sectes (instead of dérives sectaires), driving the nail home in a historical paragraph where she writes that in 1995 it was an anti-cult-excess fight which then became a fight against cults, when it is the reverse. It seems the nuance escapes her totally, as does the difference between a discriminatory fight and a fight against proven excesses, which would inevitably produce case law, probative judgments on the qualitative and quantitative planes, in the proven absence of which a scientist worthy of the name should abstain from any conclusion as to the real existence of a social scourge.

Jean Baubérot, in his intervention at the colloquium “Cults: social scourge or scapegoat?” in 2007, drew a brief history of what he calls “the sacralisation of the doctor” in France, which is said to be the fruit, from 1803, of a political need to impel new beliefs controlled by the State, much more than of a plebiscite of patients, at a time before the true take-off of scientific techniques when the doctor was still close to Molière’s caricatures. This sacralisation may partly explain the attitude of the French Ordre des Médecins, which in this instance frees itself from any scientific approach by its “close collaboration with the MIVILUDES” and its partnership displayed in this bulletin with UNADFI, two militant and partisan organs covered by the State, at the antipodes of an approach of knowledge, and which make themselves the vector of a wholly subjective opinion in the service of a repressive and hegemonic will. An attitude which meets the synthesis made by Wikipedia of the definition the philosophers of the Enlightenment gave of “obscurantist methods”:

• Alliance with power, which permits censorship, violence;
• The discrediting of intelligence, study and erudition not by rational criticism but by essentialist criticism;
• The argument from authority elaborated by its organic clerics, according to a canonical knowledge. One will also note in the dossier the observation of a difficulty in obtaining convictions, indeed, most often, any reaction at all from the judicial apparatus when a “dérive sectaire” is denounced. An observation accompanied by regrets, and not by any self-questioning, and by a call for prudence in the attacks carried out, not out of concern to protect possible innocents but for fear of seeing decisions invalidated by the administrative court.

The fallacious argument, taken up by the bulletin of the Ordre des Médecins, consisting in saying that in the great number of reports one holds the proof of the existence of a danger, deserves to be brought into the light. For some thirty years the anti-cult camp has been crying “wolf!”, relayed by most of the media and by the State itself. The fact that today the population believes it sees the wolf on every street corner, when very few “wolves” have been trapped by the very numerous hunters in activity, is only the proof of the formidable effectiveness of rumour.

Finally, to qualify the same phenomenon as a “myriad of small groups” and as “powerful and litigious organisations” is paradoxical to say the least. The second appellation should be set beside the true power of the Ordre des Médecins and the interview with the secretary general of the MIVILUDES, M. Machi, who boasts of intervening within the judicial apparatus to “accelerate files” and bring “weight” to reports to the ARS[1].

Our critique in no way evades the possibility of excesses within non-conventional therapies, as can occur in any human activity, and induces no value judgement as to conventional practices. However, if we mention the “mote” (excesses existing, but not on the scale of a problem of society, until proof of the contrary), we could not fail to cite the “beam” of the 150,000 annual hospitalisations linked to medication accidents and the 13,000 to 18,000 deaths caused by medicines, in the majority prescribed by registered doctors, figures indicated in the report submitted by the Social Affairs Commission of the Assembly in conclusion of the work of the mission on Mediator and pharmacovigilance.[2]

The “partnerships” of the MIVILUDES are multiplying, from the ministries to the association of the Mayors of France, from the LCPAN channel to the National Council of the Ordre des Médecins, by way of the University Paris-V René Descartes and the School of Officers of the national gendarmerie, around a simplistic and Manichean idea, essentially generative of fear, whose message distilled by the cover of the Ordre’s bulletin could well be a synthesis: “Harmony, peace, spirituality = danger - Citizens, mobilise!”.

Fundamental liberties are in fact the true victims of this aberrant situation.[1] Agence Régionale de Santé[2] http://www.ouvertures.net/portail/l_id.asp?doc_id=562