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How can you achieve the impossible in life? Engemann doesn't know, but he wants to find out. His solution: independent thinking and human intelligence, far removed from the internet, digitalization, and AI. A strong character, a healthy psyche, and a conscious return to humanism form the basis for a stable society once again. Manipulation, misinformation, and lies instead of truth are leading to the collapse of our modern world. "Things weren't better in the past, but they were calmer." Ernst Engemann, a successful Swiss doctor with an inventive spirit in the field of surgical orthopedics, explores this issue autobiographically based on his professional and personal life.
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Seitenzahl: 242
Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2025
I'm often asked how you, as a trained baker and pastry chef, rose to become head physician for surgical orthopaedics, patent holder of a foot surgery fixation plate and author of highly scientific papers - published in specialist journals with the highest impact factors? How did you master the Swiss Federal Matura and medical studies as a primary school pupil with reading and writing difficulties?
My answer is always the same:
I don't know!
But I want to find out.
When I reflect on my youth today, I know that the teenage years are a formative phase of life for shaping mental stability. It is also clear to me that genetics play a role in this. The psyche cannot be shaped with pressure and beatings. In this developmental phase, we need role models, as the animal kingdom shows us.
The mental stability of an individual is largely passed on through the genetic make-up for physical and mental health.
However, this does not mean that only these factors are responsible for stability.
I have never lived or worked according to goals, but according to ideas of how something could, must or should be. A vivid example from my youth: I never did anything that I didn't enjoy. As a teenager, I was a person of movement. I was interested in soccer and gymnastics. None of my schoolmates were enthusiastic about these sports. They were into hornussen or swinging, which were the two sports that their fathers also played on Sunday afternoons.
An example from my time as an orthopaedic surgeon: Patients came to me because of unbearable joint pain and restricted movement. Their goal was to be pain-free of the musculoskeletal system through surgery and also to improve their quality of life. Quantum mechanically, it has an influence on the entire musculoskeletal system. My idea of the operation focuses not only on pain, but also on the mobility of all joints, muscles and leg strength. Rehabilitation supports my idea of a successful operation. With a little effort and willpower, my expectations could be achieved and promote enjoyment of everyday life. When discussing the operation, the aftercare was just as important as the operation. If you only focus on goals, you miss the feeling of life, but also the view of nature.
My secretary kept admonishing me for being too generous to the patients and spending too much time that couldn't be billed.
The reality was often different, I'm no longer in pain, I stop rehabilitation.
As a visual person, I was already observing the stars in the evening when the weather was fine when I was ten years old. I asked my father why the moon took on a different shape. The moon revolved around the earth and was only visible at night. He started with the full moon, which quickly changes into a crescent shape, from which you could write an a, i.e. decreasing until the new moon, after which the crescent shape turns into a letter z and increases until the full moon is visible. I only understood the background to the visible change much later.
Mental health is a human right
In the 21st century, a society of lies has developed whose credibility is steadily declining.
The ideology of constant economic growth overwhelms the psyche of young people through incentives via digital media and apps. Dating apps in particular are messing with the psyche, especially of young women, and their own thinking is being suppressed. The distinction between truth and lies is lost. Young people's minds are being changed by targeted advertising via the internet. This daily inundation of images and short videos cannot be digested by adolescents and interrupts the psychological maturation process. The psyche becomes unstable and collapses.
The causes of psychological destabilization are not only stress at school or at work, but also misleading online advertising and apps that appeal to young people in particular. Influencers are promoted by the economy. Young people can no longer separate the intrusive information, whether false or true. Mental maturation is halted and with it independent thinking.
The people affected seek help from doctors and psychologists, and as a result, healthcare costs are spiraling out of control.
Politicians are also overwhelmed, and only a few politicians have the gift of thinking for themselves. The lobbyists are the masterminds who violate the human right to a healthy psyche on a daily basis.
How can the human psyche be kept stable in today's generation?
Only legal controls over the Internet can prevent society from collapsing. Educating parents and young people makes a valuable contribution.
Artificial intelligence is a collection of data that we feed with our personal data every day, without our awareness. A clear example: customer cards and credit cards are used to gain an advantage in order to obtain our data and gain control over consumers.
This contradicts the protection of privacy. Human ignorance of the algorithms and consumer inertia facilitate the endless collection of data that we voluntarily supply to the corporations. The consumer is lied to by promises of benefits that have already been factored into the pricing.
For example, the AI promises great self-steering of the vehicles. You can catch up on your lack of sleep in the car or work on your PC, chat with your girlfriend or boyfriend. Humans will no longer be needed as truck drivers and bus drivers, but also in other professions. As a result, unemployment is on the rise.
AI will displace independent thinking if we do not consciously turn back to humanism. Human intelligence follows the laws of nature. AI only follows the algorithm. Both have different foundations that are diametrically opposed.
A thirst for knowledge and self-generated knowledge can perhaps bring a society that is falling apart back together if the unholy alliance between business and the state can be prevented.
The majority of our society only reacts when it comes to their wallets. They are not interested in problems until they experience them first-hand and seek help from the wrong provider. Have people already been so manipulated by the internet with false information that they have given up thinking for themselves?
It wasn't better in the past, but it was quieter
On the roads, you mainly encountered agricultural wagons pulled by harnessed horses. Tractors were still a rarity. Bicycles were frequently used. Cars were not seen every day; the first car in the village was used by the family doctor to visit patients at home. The main road already had a tarred surface.
Summer and winter climates were normal, as children would wish, with swimming and skiing. Climate change was not an issue.
We were familiar with telephone connections, but not every household had one installed. My parents were dependent on a connection so that they could take orders from city customers. As a teenager, I had to make appointments at school if they weren't direct neighbors.
Club life was reserved for adults, except for the youth squad of the gymnastics club. Gymnastics was my favorite sport. We played soccer with each other, there was no soccer club. Going out in the evening was a taboo. There were no fights between us, although we didn't always agree with each other.
My generation spent its youth in rural tranquillity, even though the Second World War was not that long ago. The mood back then was anti-German.
This calm had not shaken the psyche of my generation.
The economic upswing began after the world war. We brought many southern European workers to Switzerland. There was no public hatred of foreign workers back then, but there were jokes about them. The mood towards Germans was gloomy.
We were able to enter working life with undisturbed mental development.
For the further development of the psyche and character, recognition is needed in professional and private life.
The greatest progress in development takes place with the assumption of responsibility and problem solving.
It was only with a very well-developed psyche that I overcame the resistance against myself and my wife's long illness with cancer.
My generation has gradually achieved prosperity through hard work.
As an assistant at the university hospital, working fifty hours a week was normal. In addition, we worked nights and weekends without compensation. This model also had great advantages. We worked with the patient and on the patient and with the nurses. The experience we gained from this model was inexhaustible and strengthened our psyche and independent thinking.
AI controls people and the economy and creates more bureaucracy
Since artificial intelligence conquered hospitals and doctors' surgeries, patients have been relegated to second place. The bureaucracy is overflowing with staff who organize operations, record medication, medical services, labs and X-rays. Thanks to the data available, such as joint pain, headaches or stomach aches, AI is able to make questionable medical diagnoses that are available to the general public on the internet. Uninformed citizens are already reporting to hospital emergency rooms or doctors' surgeries with possible diagnoses that need to be clarified. The pressure on doctors is enormous.
AI does not work according to the laws of nature, but according to algorithms from the available data collections.
It increases the administration without increasing the production of a hospital or other companies accordingly.
The doctor becomes part of the administration and is distracted from his actual function. The surgeon has the advantage that he does not lose his manual skills. The increase in personnel due to AI is driving hospitals into financial difficulties.
Healthcare costs are rising ad infinitum.
The algorithms are programmed for advertising in such a credible way, including human inertia, that even ineffective ointments and medicines are bought en masse. After all, they have to work, advertising is not allowed to spread lies, according to the law. Non-prescription ointments and tablets for arthritis pain that cannot keep their promises are a good example. The manufacturing company protects itself by adding: "Ask your doctor or pharmacist", thereby shifting the responsibility to the buyer.
AI can make work and production processes easier and thus save time. This can be seen as progress.
It is not intelligent to become dependent on artificial intelligence.
The euphoria about AI is extremely dangerous.
Independent thinking becomes a foreign concept and with it our personal freedom, which we will lose in the future because our brain switches off thinking in order to save energy. Muscles also regress when they are not actively used.
As a doctor with a great deal of experience and a scientist, I am honestly concerned about the clinical training of the next generation of doctors. Their knowledge is based on weak foundations. This does not mean that they have not learned the theoretical basics, but only with the belief in the many PC chats and AI can the human brain store the basics only superficially, especially for the exams. Lasting experience is gained on the patient. I can only speak for surgery, a specialty in which I have many years of experience. It will be similar for the other medical specialties.
Three typical examples prove my criticism of the many PC chats and AI.
Case one:
A fellow glider pilot sent me an X-ray of his four-year-old son's left foot because he wanted my opinion on the X-ray. He was going on vacation with his family in three days. He wanted to know whether the splint on the foot could be removed before departure. His son had had a minor operation for an inguinal hernia. Before his stay in hospital, the little boy suffered a sprain to his left metatarsal with soft tissue swelling and pain, but was able to put weight on the foot. The operation was performed at the University Pediatric Surgery Department. As a precaution, an X-ray was taken of the left foot before discharge. On the day of discharge, the radiologist and the head physician were absent. The assistant was not in a position to assess the x-ray correctly, there could be a fracture, and he recommended splint fixation to immobilize the foot. The copy of the x-ray showed a typical image of growing bone, but no fracture. The suspected fracture was mistaken for appositional bone growth of a cancellous bone. If there is uncertainty in such cases, a comparative image of the healthy foot provides certainty. This must not happen at a university hospital. X-raying the bones of growing children, especially four-year-olds, requires the doctor to have basic knowledge of the growth of children's bones, which in turn requires theoretical knowledge of quantum physics as well as experience. There are certainly many students who look up the possible questions and their answers via chat apps on the internet before the mid-term exams. This is disastrous, even dangerous, for their future careers.
Case two:
A gynecology nurse was annoyed by the lack of knowledge of young assistant doctors. They were unable to distinguish a cyst from other tissue compressions on an ultrasound image. A cyst is filled with fluid and looks like a balloon filled with water. A tissue growth has a more or less uniform structure and can be easily distinguished from a cyst.
Their trust in young doctors is dwindling.
Case three:
Personal experience at the university hospital.
My cardiologist ordered a PET-CT because of irregular heartbeats. The cold working atmosphere in the department shocked me and made me think further.
The staff moved like human robots. A serious expression, without a smile on their faces, and only orders spoken with few words. I answered the doctor's questions from a standardized questionnaire. At least a small smile was visible on her lips at the end. Finally, the human robot told me: "You can go."
I immediately compared my eight-year experience at the university hospital many years ago. There was laughter, jokes and conversations among the staff while they were working. The staff also laughed and talked to patients. The working atmosphere was human and encouraging. I don't remember any employees complaining about the working atmosphere.
How far the capitalist economy together with AI has changed people into robots and thus wiped out independent thinking!
Case four:
This case mainly concerns surgeons who perform operations. Today, there is very good experience with the various hip and other joint prosthesis types that have been implanted on the market for years with very good results.
Hip prostheses from the 3D printer are advertised as progress. The material used consists of a mixture of various metals and plastics. They were not yet on the market when I was active. There are certainly advantages, but there are also disadvantages. The advertising claims that they fit more stably in the cavity of the femur than pure metal prostheses. This may be true, but this is not the reason for the better prosthesis stability. The basis of post-operative stability lies in quantum physics; the prosthesis is fitted naturally via compressive and tensile forces. Cementation of the prosthesis is a thing of the past. Another disadvantage of the 3D printer prosthesis is that it can only be used for a short period of time. The big problem is recycling the prosthesis. The companies offer surgeons a bonus if they use their prosthesis. I was also made similar offers for other prostheses.
My friend's wife's orthopaedic surgeon trusted this advertisement and fitted the patient with this hip prosthesis. The insertion itself was a challenge, and by hammering hard on the prosthesis during insertion, an important bone attachment of a muscle was damaged. Three further operations followed. The 3D prosthesis could not be replaced without incurring additional damage.
In prosthetics, not only for the hip, there are enough very good models with which you can demonstrate reliable and long-term experience data. I believed that a doctor cannot be influenced by advertising.
Or was I wrong?
AI has no credible arguments in joint prosthetics that could replace pure metal prostheses. Metal prostheses are also constantly being adapted.
The secret research data is not made available to the AI.
Progress in research is only made with independent thinking, visual insights, statistical data and a sound basic knowledge of cell functions, with the help of quantum physics and quantum chemistry. With this knowledge, it is possible to intervene in cancer cells or the immune system in order to redirect the misdirected cells.
My invention of the X-plate and the attack on the worldwide dogma of compression on bone fracture sites in traumatology only apply to the long bone, but not to the cancellous bone part that forms the joints. This is a result of independent thinking and not official belief, because no research has been carried out on this part of the bone and both types of bone have been legally equated.
KI as a reference book is certainly an advantage if it is not used for diagnosis but as a backup.
A typical example is malignant melanoma, a growing skin cancer that shows over a dozen early recognizable images and can confirm the suspected diagnosis.
I had helped organize the reduction in weekly working hours and the compensation of night and weekend shifts as head physician in my own hospital. I had to double the number of assistants and nurses. My working hours remained untouched because the head physician is not subject to the labor law.
Medical and computer technology has made great progress every year, so that assistants and nurses can work less with patients, to the detriment of both patients and the experience potential of doctors.
When I took over as head physician, there was no position for psychiatry or psychology. When I retired at the age of seventy, we employed a psychiatrist and a psychologist. Ten years later, there were a total of five vacancies, with a waiting period of more than half a year.
Politicians should urgently regulate the flooding of our society with AI and digital apps. But politics and business have no interest in regulation, as both benefit from it.
Without a legal basis for the regulation of digital media and apps, the mental stability of young people, but also that of adults, will increase rapidly. What then?
Self-acquired in-depth knowledge strengthens personality and character
My constant thirst for knowledge definitely shaped my independent thinking through histology professor Schenk. This way of thinking shaped me as a person. In the histology lectures, he lectured on how bone healing and bone modeling work. His lectures were unique and stood out from the others. He moved a table in front of the blackboard so that everyone had a good view of it. Standing on it, he drew with his left hand and described the drawing with his right. His way of lecturing touched me deeply. My fellow students found the lecture an amusing show and probably didn't understand the deep meaning of the content.
As a visual person, I grasped and understood the content of the lecture, presented in such a way that the core content of the lecture was forever etched in my memory. The research assignment was to lay the foundations for the surgical treatment of bone fractures using a metal plate and screws. To do this, you first had to know how the bone of an undamaged animal or human deals with compressive and tensile forces. The bone is controlled by only two bone cells, namely the osteoclast and the osteoblast. I have memorized this with a mnemonic . The osteoclast is the jackhammer that first removes bone substance. The osteoblast is the Muratore from Italy, who reshapes the bone with a plaster trowel. In the 1960s, at the beginning of the economic upswing, many people from Italy and southern Europe immigrated to our country as construction workers. The two bone cells are controlled by tensile and compressive forces through the piezoelectric phenomenon. Bones are also adapted to weight gain in adulthood by physical forces. Quantum physics was not yet a subject at universities at that time.
External forces, such as in an accident, usually only break the long tubular bones. A sheep was used for the microscopic examination. The ulna of the forearm or leg was selected for the tests. The bone fracture sites were examined histologically according to a defined schedule, and the result was that without pressure on the fracture sites from the plate fixation, no recognizable healing was detected or only insufficient healing. However, the fracture sites that were pressurized with the metal plate and screws healed normally over time. Among traumatologists and orthopaedic surgeons, the buzzword "compression" became established as a dogma in the history of medicine. Years later, when I spoke to professional colleagues about the piezoelectric phenomenon, they asked me: "What's that, I've never heard of this phenomenon before."
Only the long bone needs compression because of the blood supply, but not the cancellous bone part, for which no similar experiments have been carried out, as confirmed by the Working Group for Osteosynthesis Questions.
On both sides of the long bone there is a completely different bone structure without any gaps, the end of which is covered with cartilage and forms the joints. The spongy bone, as I imagine it, is a very, very large house with lots of little rooms and is more easily supplied with blood than the strong tubular bone. When force is applied, cim merals are destroyed. Cube bones also have the same spongy structure and form the foundation of the spine, the so-called vertebral bodies. The wrist, metatarsus and hindfoot are also of this bone structure. In the event of fractures, they only heal with good, stable anchoring using specially manufactured fixation plates. Due to the compact structure of the bone, the blood supply in the long bone requires precise repositioning and pressure on the fracture surfaces in the event of fractures.
After a few days, the plaster cast was removed and the sheep were able to put weight on the forearm. After six, twelve and sixteen weeks, the progress of healing was examined histologically. Those cases that received no or little intraoperative compression on the fracture sites healed much later from the periosteum than those with good reduction under compression. Compression and traction are a bipolarity, a positive and a negative pole. This polarity creates an electromagnetic field. The piezoelectric phenomenon is still with me today. It was the cornerstone of the X-plate invention and the lateral position contrary to the compression dogma.
The professional associations of orthopaedic surgeons and traumatologists worldwide make no distinction between fractures of the long bone and fractures or cuts of the cancellous bone. Both fractures are therefore treated equally in legal terms. This is particularly important in the USA. There, the surgeon must prove that he did not make a mistake. In Europe, the patient must be able to prove that the surgeon made a mistake.
When developing the X-Plate for fixation and stabilization of the crescentic osteotomy in the cancellous bone area at the base of the first metatarsal bone to correct hallux valgus, I had to convince the engineers that only stability was needed for healing. With my sponsor Michael Coughlin from Idaho for induction into the American Foot Society, as an International Member, I often had long conversations about his osteotomy and its fixation. The osteotomy was fixed with a so-called compression screw. The size of the screw head irritated the overlying soft tissue, especially the extensor tendon of the big toe. For this reason, I developed the X-plate. Michael mentioned several times that he could get into trouble with liability insurance because of the compression dogma if he used the fixation plate laterally, as I suggested, to stabilize the cut surface. After my publication and my experience, he also switched to the X-plate.
I unconsciously lived according to this behavioral pattern as a child. I did the work I had to do every day according to my parents' instructions. Neither of them put any pressure on me; as a latecomer of eight and a half years, they sacrificed a lot of time for me. My father took me everywhere with him, to the fields, the forest and the marketplace in Bern, where my mother offered vegetables, eggs and many other foodstuffs to customers. The only pressure on me came from my older brother, who sharply criticized my soccer skills. The criticism didn't trigger a reaction in me, which made him furious. I needed a sporting activity in addition to my fixed duties. Soccer and gymnastics played an important role in my childhood. I enjoyed both sports, but I was never fanatical about one or the other. I preferred gymnastics in winter and soccer in summer. In soccer, I practiced hitting the ball exactly into the corner of the horses' big feed door that I wanted to hit. Right or left, bottom or top or in the middle. I completed them because I enjoyed it. In gymnastics, I practiced handstands and walking on my hands in handstands. I was the only one in the youth squad who could do the handstand. I wasn't interested in other sports, hornussen and swinging were too boring and too easy for me, even though my classmates practiced these sports. My father wasn't active in sport, he didn't tell me whether he was active in sport as a schoolboy. I only know that he was never in a political party. He only commented once, with the statement: "If you don't understand something, inform yourself and form your own opinion."
I was particularly bored in my first year at sixth form. The teacher was an elderly gentleman of seventy. His obituary as a teacher was short and sweet: Religion and haymaking.
Every day the lesson began with religion, and he talked about God's chosen people, Israel. An hour later, in the Swiss history lesson, he talked about how the Swiss had won many battles against the Austrian Empire. It makes no sense that Israel, which did not yet exist in its present form, should be the chosen people of God, as the Confederates won all the battles ...
Compare statements with reality!
That was the phase of my life in which I unconsciously began to compare statements with other events.
Whenever a prank was planned among the boys at school, I was usually one of the leaders.
In our class, in the upper school, an older girl was assigned to start school. During the war in Germany, she was unable to receive a normal school education. She made up for the education she missed out on with us.
She was the daughter of a Swiss expatriate family who returned to Switzerland after the Second World War. Her mother was originally German. She only spoke High German, which was reason enough for us to regard her as a foreigner, because at that time most Swiss families had developed a hatred of German citizens. I had never heard my father talk about the war in my presence. As punishment for the insults, I had to take a detour to school and home for a week. I had never mentioned the imposed punishment to my parents, but they found out about it through other parents. My father explained to me that the girl was Swiss and could only speak fragments of our dialect.
This experience taught me, before acting, to put myself in a position over which she had no control. I still remember exactly what happened and the consequences of this school prank. Basically, I really liked her, even though she was older than me. She radiated a personality that stood out from her schoolmates. That probably irritated us, as we were brought up conservatively; it scared us all a little because we didn't understand the reality of the time.
Today I know that humans are not very different from animals, both are afraid of what they don't know.
A few weeks ago, I came across a woman walking her dog. We crossed paths and the dog started barking. We spoke briefly and during the conversation the dog sniffed my legs.
A few days later we crossed paths again and the dog remained quiet, he now knows that I am not a danger to him. We meet more often on my walking route and the dog wants to play with me, he knows me well now and trusts me.
In the meantime, I have had experiences with nature through visual observations that have prompted me to think further. Even as a ten-year-old, I watched the starry sky in fine weather and wondered which star we would live on after death. I never found a satisfactory answer. As an exercise enthusiast, I skated in winter; when I was young it snowed a lot and the snow was frozen hard so that I could sprint to school on my skates in the street. I had skates that you could screw onto high shoes. We called them heel killers because if they didn't fit well, the heel would be torn off.
Snow falls in winter, rain falls from the clouds from spring to autumn, and I realized that the heat and cold are responsible for this. When the clouds darkened and rolled towards us at high speed, I knew that lightning, thunder, heavy rain and sometimes hail were coming from the clouds. I was afraid of this force of nature and hid in the house.
My father tried to explain to me that the laws of nature are sometimes difficult to explain and that a lot of explanation was still needed. I also wondered why so many different cloud shapes form in the sky. Even in ancient times and the Middle Ages, people blamed gods for storms due to a lack of scientific knowledge because they were not satisfied with people's behavior. Today I know that this was a power grab by the religious authorities.
After I retired, I studied meteorology and climatology.