This first week traced how medicine in America was deliberately shaped by forces that claimed to elevate care while narrowing who had access to it.

Every medical encounter in the United States is reduced to a billing code. That code decides what work is rewarded and what work is neglected. It determines whether physicians are paid to listen or to cut, whether prevention is supported or starved, and whether a patient is treated as a person or a transaction. It is not neutral.

Healing Is Noble. Power Is Practical. Medicine promises healing, yet the structures around it often prioritize influence, lobbying, and financial power.

Science is meant to test, challenge, and self-correct. Marketing is meant to persuade and sell. When the two become entangled, medicine shifts from discovery to influence. The result is not abstract. It is felt in the lives of patients, and nowhere more painfully than among children.

Every doctor begins as a student. Before they treat patients, before they write prescriptions, and before they lead research, they sit in classrooms shaped by forces they rarely see.

When the American Medical Association (AMA) was founded in 1847, medicine in the United States was a crowded and contested field.

When I say The Beast, I am not talking about prophecy or religion. I am talking about the interconnected system of profit and control that has been built around us.