How Modern Medicine Hijacked Death and How to Reclaim a Better Way to Die

Story at a Glance Scott Adams, who recently passed from an aggressive, rapidly progressing prostate cancer, openly shared his final journey with a wide audience, offering valuable insights for others facing the dying experience. Over centuries, the medical industry has increasingly monopolized death and dying, fostering a cultural view that treats death as something to fear, deny, and exclude from life—rather than a natural companion to accept. This distortion makes dying far more arduous in our society, fueling an escalating medicalization of death in which expensive, often futile interventions are imposed on patients—frequently against their deepest values and wishes. In contrast to the materialist scientific view that consciousness emerges solely from brain activity, compelling evidence indicates consciousness can persist independently of the brain and, in some cases, even transfer between individuals or contexts (e.g., via organ transplants or near-death accounts). Recognizing the spiritual dimensions of dying and how they intersect with modern medical discoveries. Many ancient and enduring traditions regard this moment as one of the most significant in human life. Prior to the COVID-19 vaccines being released, many concerns were raised about these experimental gene therapies, including their potential for causing infertility, autoimmune diseases, and cancer (e.g., many of the theoretical autoimmune issues were summarized by Stefanie Seneff shortly after the vaccines hit the market). So, when Pfizer’s regulatory submission to Europe’s FDA (the EMA) was leaked on December 9, 2020, I read through it in detail and discovered that Pfizer simply had been allowed to exempt itself from testing the vaccine for the above three key issues (despite that testing being required for gene therapies). Pfizer concluded their best option was to simply claim plausible deniability by insisting they “didn’t know” their vaccines would do all of that (because they’d “never” tested for them). Regrettably, due to the religious fervor surrounding the vaccine (e.g., that it would rescue us from the lockdowns and return everything to normal), my arguments to wait on the vaccine largely fell on deaf ears with my colleagues and instead, excuse after excuse was made to dismiss the highly unusual and severe complications our patients kept developing immediately after vaccination (e.g., “there’s no evidence for this”). Before long, people I knew around the country began contacting me with severe complications following the vaccination (e.g., dying suddenly or an elderly relative rapidly progressing into dementia) to ask if it could be linked to the vaccine. Hating that there was nothing at all I could do to stop this (I felt like an ant in front of a tsunami), I then decided I needed to document all of them so that I’d at least have some type of “evidence” I could show my skeptical colleagues (as I knew the medical journals would never allow vaccine injury datasets to be published). In the process of doing that, I came across numerous cases of cancers rapidly developing (or dormant ones that had been in remission for years coming back) immediately following COVID vaccination, including numerous unusual cases that strongly argued the two were linked. Before long, more and more people noticed similar things, and the notion of COVID-19 “turbo cancers” entered the cultural lexicon. Since that time, the medical orthodoxy has denied that this is an issue, but more and more datasets are emerging showing it is. When Trump ran for office in 2016, initially very few people believed Trump could win (e.g., this was shown in the political betting markets). However, Dilbert’s author Scott Adams did, and rapidly built a large online following by highlighting how his training as a hypnotist allowed him to recognize that Trump was the most politically persuasive candidate and hence, Scott hypothesized, was favored to win. As such, once Trump won, Scott pivoted to using that same lens (how persuasion shapes political events) to become a pundit on a variety of other current issues. During that process, Scott Adams made the controversial decision early on to endorse the COVID vaccine to his followers and to vaccinate. Note: I know of multiple other instances where individuals who were long considered “experts in propaganda” made the decision to get the COVID vaccine—something which I view as a testament to just how effectively the vaccine was marketed. Later, in January 2023, to his great credit, Scott posted a video essentially admitting he was wrong and the anti-vaxxers ended up being entirely correct. Then, on May 19, 2025, Scott Adams disclosed to his audience that he had terminal metastatic prostate cancer, vulnerably shared that he planned to utilize California’s medically assisted dying in the near future to reduce his suffering. Scott eventually tried a variety of cutting-edge conventional therapies recommended by top oncologists and, among other things, had the Trump administration directly intervene on his behalf with Kaiser when his access was abruptly cut off (highlighting the challenges patients without connections routinely face in the medical system). Nonetheless, nothing worked, and he gradually became weaker and weaker until he said his final goodbyes to his followers and passed away at home on January 13, 2026. People are so afraid to die that they never begin to live—Henry Van Dyke In 1976, Ivan Illich published Medical Nemesis, which critiqued the medical system and predicted many of the issues which emerged in the decades that followed. One key theme was that through the medical profession’s marketing, our cultural conception of death evolved from an intimate, lifelong companion we had no separation from to a feared, medicalized entity to be conquered by doctors with death being defined by the cessation of brain waves. Note: as I show here, the modern criterion for death is quite dubious, existing to support organ donations and eliminate the long-term costs of treating vegetative patients. Illich astutely argued that this medicalization, driven by the medical profession’s growing control, stripped individuals of autonomy, turned death into a commodity, and reinforced social control through compulsory care. He also argued that this Western death image had been exported globally, supplanting traditional dying practices and contributing to societal dysfunction by alienating people from their own mortality. Presently, one of the most common settings for death in America is within the hospital. This however is controversial as: End of life care is invasive and uncomfortable (e.g., CPR often breaks ribs). End of life care is frequently futile. End of life care constitutes one of the largest medical expenses in the country. Many individuals do not want to let their loved ones go and hence insist upon fighting for the care. Restricting end of life care is seen as government choosing to execute people to save money. Doctors who administer end of life care frequently refuse it for themselves. For example, to quote a 2016 article in Time: Doctors spend more of their lives in hospitals than anyone else. But when it comes to deciding where to die, they’re less likely than the rest of us to choose a medical facility, according to new research published in the Journal of the American Medical Association. Note: another 2016 study found 27.9% of physicians vs. 32% of the general population chose to die in hospitals, and during the last six months of life physicians were less likely to have surgery (25.1% vs. 27.4%) and less likely to be admitted to the ICU (25.8% vs. 27.6%). Likewise, a viral 2011 essay highlighted that doctors preferred to die at home with less invasive therapies. Of course, doctors don’t want to die; they want to live. But they know enough about modern medicine to know its limits. And they know enough about death to know what all people fear most: dying in pain, and dying a…