Straight Talking Doc Unhinged

This week we discuss medical TV shows, such as House and the Pitt and Grey's Anatomy, as well as medical moments on non-medical shows.  Studies suggest that the message of these shows--the doctor as hero, the benefit of aggressive intervention, the fact that there is always a hidden diagnosis behind every complaint--is potentially dangerous.  It certainly feeds into the narrative that the med...

At the ADA Research Convention several members trying to pass out information were forced out after the police were called.  They were ADA leaders who wrote an editorial blasting the current Presidential administration for cuts in research funding.  Everyone agreed with their stance, just not their tactics.  The press labels this as censorship.  But is it?   The ADA is primarily funded and control...

Both Andy and Alan have been reported to their respective medical boards, both have had to hire lawyers, both have had to fight for their right to speak and to practice medicine.  The Board of Physicians is an extrajudicial entity, operating in each state to monitor and discipline physicians.  Most courts have said that doctors do not have the right to free speech or free choice.  Even if what doc...

Alan and Andy work in different medical environments.  Alan works in one of the poorest neighborhoods in the county, one with many who are uninsured, undocumented, who have to work multiple jobs, who have limited food options, and who had the highest COVID mortality in the world.  Andy works in a middle class environment filled with tech-heavy white collared people, where good nutrition and exerci...

We reviewed what several physician podcasts have to say about the new cholesterol guidelines.  We spoke about the guidelines in our March podcast, and also discussed in a later podcast how the local cardiology group in Columbia Maryland reported Andy to the Maryland Board of Physicians in an effort to censor him or take away his license because he dared put published studies in his practice newsle...

The Emergency Room can be life saving, but also can be a place to be feared.  We discuss several cases in which protocols and robotic thinking put patients in precarious positions, exposing them to unnecessary dangers, creating diseases where none exist, and base diagnosis more on tests that should have never been ordered rather than on a history and physical and common sense. We talk about two is...

We talk a lot about Big Pharma throughout this podcast but today we discuss its many tentacles.  Soon after making the podcast, Alan watched a hockey game and there was a drug ad on the ice!  The Pharma industry controls virtually all medical research; subsidizes medical schools whose "expert" physicians are dependent on Pharma funds to pay for their grants; finances and provides leaders...

This week Andy was reported to the Maryland Board of Medicine by a local cardiology group because some studies he included in his practice newsletter offended them.  These were major studies, peer reviewed, but did not coincide with the dogmatic messaging they seek to spread, and thus they accused Andy of spreading dangerous misinformation.  They want the Board to silence him or take away his medi...

The first half of American Medical History ends at the Flexner Report, which entirely morphed American Healthcare into a monolithic corporate entity under the complete control of the AMA.  Every aspect of healthcare transformed, from education, to payment, to philosophy, to licensing, to dogma.  The Medical Racial Script, long unspoken and oft ignored, became the law of the land.  What are the rep...

Two pages of the Flexner Report condemned African American medial providers, hospitals, and patients to decades of struggle.  Relying on the AMA's medical-racial script, and playing into the atmosphere of Progressive eugenics, Flexner's chapter devoted to the African American medical situation flowed from what united white orthodox providers and fed the corporate impetus that would finan...

Dementia tells us a great deal about our healthcare system.  Not even noted to be a disease at the time of Medicare's birth in 1965 it is now one of the most onerous and common diseases of the elderly.  Why?  And why is the incidence so much higher in the United States than the rest of the world?  We have tried to medicalize dementia and memory loss and created a multi-billion dollar industry...

As the medical community scripts new cholesterol guidelines, the media has compliantly announced that our nation's top scientists, most respected medical agencies, and academic centers want to prevent heart disease by screening for high cholesterol more aggressively and treating cholesterol more aggressively.  The geniuses who created the guidelines want screening and treatment to start even...

Depression is a very vague concept.  How do we determine if someone is depressed?  What does depression even mean, and how is it best prevented and treated?  The realities of depression veer sharply from how the medical industrial complex would like you to think about it.  They have designed screening tools and have incorporated them into the quality indicators required for all doctors to complete...

Once the AMA and William Welch orchestrated an alliance of Progressive reformers, corporate interests, and state medical licensing agencies, it was time to sanctify the cogs of a new medical system.  That is what the Flexner Report is all about, a survey of US medical schools largely scripted by the AMA, conducted by a little known educator working for the Carnegie Corporation named Abraham Flexne...

Alan and Andy discuss why they are dinosaurs, why primary care is becoming extinct and why its disappearance will instigate harm to the health care system, to patients, to our national debt, and to reason and sanity in health care.  Talking about changes within the medical environment, they show not only why primary care is being left to die, but also the measures needed to revive it.  It's n...

Two of American medicine's pioneers, and co-founders of Johns Hopkins Medical School, represented a fork in the road.  William Osler, whose scientific humanism pushed back against a healthcare system teetering between commercialism and quackery, created a solution at Hopkins: clinical care, doctors as teachers, patients as teachers, an end to protocols and dogma.  He believed in patient centr...

The AMA grew up in a libertarian America, but chose to change its nature during a top-down Progressive America, where experts and scientifically based rules were determined to be crucial to any viable reforms.  Working with corporate foundations, Progressive reformers, and German-inspired Progressive academic doctors, the AMA shifted course and transformed into a top-down organization that sought...

In the 1980's dermatologists were somewhere in the basement of the doctor world in terms of reputation and reimbursement.  It was always felt to be an easy job--not too much thinking, a limited scope of care, no after hours calls--but did not pay well  So the American Dermatology Association hired a publicist and some lobbyists in Congress and created a generalized fear of skin cancer, statin...

We are always amazed watching TV.  What used to be ads for car companies, beer, clothes, products are not proliferated by ads for drugs and companies seeking to sell you drugs.  These companies, like Hims and Hers, are willing to provide you with drugs to help everything under the sun, whether your obesity, hair loss, anxiety, ED, or infections.  No need to see a doctor now, just get on line, chat...

As the AMA gained power and scripted a plan to commandeer the medical system, it used its medical-racial script to leap on the progressive train, including an embrace of eugenics. Eugenics flowed from the medical racial script, and according to historians, was the secular religion of progressives.  It was deemed to be sanctified science, taught at all major universities, and penetrating the hearts...

Few people realize how important nutrition is, and it's not all about weight loss.  You can lose weight and be less healthy because you are not eating food that will feed your gut bacteria, energize your muscles, and strengthen your brain.  This is occurring in a lot of people on fad diets and taking GLP-1's.  The newer nutrition triangle, which replaces one that was antithetical to heal...

Born in Republican America, with its emphasis on democratic decentralization, the AMA was floundering in the late 1800's, with few doctors latching their sails to its agenda.  Most orthodox doctors remained fully independent, many graduated from poorly regulated schools without any firm curriculum, and the medical landscape was dominated by non-orthodox providers.  In this vein, the AMA shift...

Excluded from the AMA and from orthodox medicine, African American doctors had to find their own way in the late 1800's.  Virtually no African American doctors existed in the early century, but that changed in the Civil War, especially with the advent of Howard University and then a sprinkling of other medical schools that trained black doctors.  How the African American medical community gre...

The very landscape of organized medicine is being altered by corporate takeovers.  Whether in long term care, hospitals, or large groups, corporations are taking charge and offering "perks" that enhance the wealth of institutions, their leaders, and many specialist doctors, but take one more step in decimating primary care and focusing more on profits than patients.  Andy and Alan will e...

While we view traditional medical care as the norm, it was not always that way.  Throughout most of the 1800's Americans chose alternative providers more frequently than orthodox doctors; their outcomes were better, their ideas based on common sense, their focus patient oriented, and even their fees lower.  One of the primary goals of the AMA was to snuff out alternative philosophies, especia...