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International Women's Day & Dr Suzanne Humphries

Created on: 2025-03-08

Modified on: 2025-03-09

On International Women's Day, I'm going to name a woman who is truly inspirational. There are many contenders past and present, but this year, my vote goes to:

Doctor Suzanne Humphries

Dr Suzanne Humphries

A brief biopic: born in '64, she became an MD in '93. She went on to specialise in nephrology, i.e. kidneys. While working as a consultant at a major hospital, realised that her patients were receiving routine vaccinations on arrival, before she'd even seen them.

As a kidney specialist she was aware that this created risks (e.g. increased bleeding following biopsy) and confusion when it came to diagnosis, and therefore she requested her incoming patients - some of whom were already very ill - not be routinely vaccinated before she saw them.

As Dr Humphries points out, if she had concerns about any pharmaceutical drug having a side effect on her patients, and did not want it administered to her patients before she had seen them, that would have been accepted without question, as normal practice.

But that didn't happen. She had questioned the holy of holies, vaccines, and this was the beginning of her conflict with her colleagues.

Ultimately, she left a good career to follow her conscience. She teamed up with a software engineer, Roman Bystrianik, who had also done significant research in medical history, and together they wrote the book, "Dissolving Illusions".

The first edition came out in 2013. This is a landmark book on the subject, very comprehensive, covering the history of vaccines and the diseases they were for, from the 1800s up to the 20th century. It's written for the lay reader, nonetheless, it's very thorough, and in places quite technical.

Suzanne's next book was "Rising from the Dead", published in 2016. This tells her story, her experiences as a medical student, and as a consultant, and her frustrations with dealing with establishment dogmatism.

It's also a very personal autobiography, which talks about her spiritual life, her dabbling with the New Age, and her eventual return to Christianity.

Most recently Suzanne and Roman collaborated on a 10 year anniversary edition of Dissolving Illusions, which came out last year and greatly expands the original, and comes with a companion edition, altogether adding 700 pages of new material.

The test of integrity is how someone behaves when they have something to lose - and Suzanne Humphries passed many such tests with flying colours.

Here are some snippets from her autobiography:

"All around me at medical school, many students had health problems - some of which were significant - and which often couldn't be fixed by the very people who were training them." [p173]

"It isn't just doctors who are sick. So are their families. Someone I went to medical school with is now a neonatologist. Her previously healthy spouse tragically died of a mysterious neuromuscular disease around the age of 40. Every cabinet in that house was filled with drugs . . . ."

"Everywhere I looked, I saw doctors' kids that were sick with emotional and health issues."

"The doctor's cure is all too often part of the disease and, strangely enough, that applies to doctors as well as patients. This might be why people who look at their sick doctors have low expectations for their own health as well." [p179]

"Doctors who prescribe by the rulebook and run approved hospital services are considered successful and brilliant. . . . They never question the fact that their patients come back over and over, and get sicker and sicker, while their medication lists get longer and longer. . . .

"Yet, those of us who feel like a cog in a financial wheel and have a lot of questions are dismissed as outliers with, "low cognitive complexity in thinking patterns" - even though we have spent years in libraries and medical literature to find better answers, and have stretched our thinking patterns far beyond what is expected of any medical doctor.

"This leads to a new problem because those who broaden their knowledge base beyond convention, whether doctors or laypeople, are targetted as quacks, nutters, and perhaps conspiracy theorists, by default. Doctors love their high standing in society and hate to be called quacks. Most will do whatever it takes to not stick their necks out - even if that means delivering fewer choices and more dangerous treatments than necessary to their patients." [p297-8]

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