Members of the establishment always believe they know they best and that their experience, their knowledge and their position give them the right to make decisions and to rule.

That is why they are known as the establishment.

By Dr Vernon Coleman

The Oxford Dictionary of English definition of ‘the establishment’ is ‘a group in society exercising power and influence over matters of policy, opinion, or taste and seen as resisting change’.

It is those words `resisting change’ which are the most significant. Anyone who questions the establishment must, by definition be ignored and if they persist and seem likely to become a nuisance they must be crushed, suppressed, vilified and ostracised.

The praetorian guard for the establishment consists of ‘the experts’.

We are constantly being encouraged to put our faith in experts. But there is plenty of evidence to show that experts (particularly those who are employed, accepted and promoted by the establishment) aren’t always terribly reliable. Indeed, a little research shows that they are unreliable. They tend to hide behind jargon which they use to disguise their ignorance and to convince non-experts that they know more than they do.

In the first part of my new book Medical Heretics I show how and why we should retain a modicum of scepticism when experts tell us things – particularly when those experts are part of the establishment.

In the second part of the book I explain how uncomfortable truths have always attracted abuse, ridicule and persecution and how those who dare to speak out against the establishment have always been regarded as dangerous heretics.

The iconoclast has never been a welcome figure in any age. Original thinkers, daring to question the establishment, are still being demonised, `de-platformed’ and cancelled by a modern culture which may appear to offer more freedom than ever but which is just as constrained, as restrictive and as destructive as anything in history.

The truth is not always agreeable, acceptable or convenient to those in charge. Confucius, the Chinese philosopher, was dismissed by his political masters and his books were burned. Those who didn’t burn his books within 30 days were branded and condemned to forced labour. Socrates was accused of corrupting the youth of Athens, arrested for being an evildoer and ‘a person showing curiosity, searching into things under the earth and above the heaven and teaching all this to others’. He was condemned to death.

Dante, the Italian poet, was banished from Florence and condemned to be burnt at the stake if ever captured. After they had failed to silence him with threats and bribes the authorities excommunicated Spinoza in Amsterdam because he refused to toe the party line, refused to think what other people told him he must think and insisted on maintaining his intellectual independence. He and his work were denounced as `forged in Hell’.

Governments once burned original thinkers at the stake for believing that the earth went round the sun. There may not be much burning at the stake going on these days but original thinkers are destroyed by being described as ‘conspiracy theorists’ or, for absolutely no reason at all, and with no supporting evidence for the slur, they are labelled ‘discredited’.

So, for example, the controlled editors of a fake encyclopaedia called Wikipedia are, if they are notable for anything, notable for their enthusiasm for replacing inconvenient truths with commercially or politically acceptable lies.

Doctors or scientists who even dare to question the officially accepted line on the use of drugs or vaccines (the line preferred by the pharmaceutical industry) are likely to find themselves fired or to discover that their grant applications are denied. The licensing authorities may remove the licenses or registration of doctors who even dare to question the officially approved line of thinking.

Even threatening doctors with the loss of their livelihood is enough to silence many. It is now increasingly common for doctors who voice views which question drug industry research to be told that they must be suffering from mental illness and to be offered medical help for their ‘mental illness’. This was, of course, a technique commonly used in the USSR to silence dissidents.

In my new, short book I explain how original thinkers have always been suppressed, reviled and dismissed, using biographies of Snow, Semmelweis, Vesalius, Harvey and others (including Dean Ornish and Professor Campbell) as illustrations. Some original thinkers were ignored. Some were dismissed as dangerous. Some lost their lives. So, for example, Michael Servetus wrote a book suggesting (accurately) that a separate pulmonary circulation existed within the body. For sharing this truth with the world, Servetus was burnt alive in 1553 by the Protestant leader John Calvin.

I believe that Medical Heretics contains an important message and I think it is vitally relevant to what is happening to truth-tellers in the world at the moment.

Medical Heretics: How the medical establishment crushes the truth and suppresses good ideas, by Vernon Coleman is available as a paperback on Amazon.