Straight Talking Doc Unhinged

With orthodox medicine in disarray, with no standards of education, and with alternative medical philosophies ruling the roost, several prominent orthodox doctors came together to forma national organization to represent the needs of orthodoxy, the American Medical Association (AMA).  Founded in 1847 largely by Nathan Davis, the AMA had several goals: To promote licensing requirements, to standard...

After the Revolution, American was severed from the European seat of orthodox medical power.  American orthodox doctors were forced to establish their own schools, their own dogma, and their own leaders.  Much of what glued orthodox doctors together and led to copious research was the medical racial script, much of which was inscribed in the standard medical school curriculum North and South.  How...

Starting in the colonial period and crystalizing during the Republican Period, American doctors differentiated themselves from their European colleagues and from non-traditional healers by instituting a medical-racial script.  We'll discuss what the script is, how it helped American healthcare and its white male doctors to establish legitimacy, and the toll it took on the African American com...

I will be presenting a series of lectures on the history of American Health Care through 1920.  These lectures are interesting in how they lay a framework for the system we have today.  The first lecture explores our colonial origins.  How did the American healthcare system and its doctors change from their European mentors?  What about the American landscape fermented something unique in the colo...

Antibiotics are one of the most impactful medical discoveries in the past century.  Along with sanitation and sterile technique, antibiotics have led to a dramatic increase in life expectancy.  However, now we have moved down a different road.  We are over-using antibiotics, killing our gut bacteria, causing resistance leading to superbugs that can't be stopped by any of our technology.  The...

Drug companies, the media, physician groups, and patient advocacy groups, month others, have convinced the American public that the key to health is more testing, more doctor visits, more drugs, more procedures.  We have invented more diseases and diagnoses the past decade, scared more patients into falling prey to "necessary and lifesaving" interventions for conditions that are more pha...

Today we talk about the impact of drug advertisement on both patient and physician decision making.  These companies know that a huge investment in ads will result in more prescriptions, one of many ways Big Pharma infiltrates so many aspects of the medical industrial complex.

With the opioid crisis looming on the horizon always, the question comes as to how to treat pain.  So many medicines have side effects an are overall dangerous.  Some work about as much as placebo.  We'll talk about medicines, but then discuss better ways to deal with pain, from mindfulness to exercises to other non-medical modalities.  Pain is real, but pain should not be an invitation to be...

We have always known about basic cancer screening tests, like mammography and colonoscopy.  But we have expanded the universe of cancer screening, relying on scans, blood tests, and genetic testing.  As we screen more, we find more, we treat more, but are we saving lives?  Much of the screening we do has not been shown to save as many lives as advertised, if any at all once the complications of th...

Many books and studies have pointed to the fact that we are a nation swimming in mental health diagnoses and drugs.  The DSM--the bible of mental health diagnoses--has exploded the numbers of mental health sicknesses you may have, and for every sickness there is a drug.  Both the DSM and the American College of Psychiatry are heavily funded by the drug industry, and their recommendations have led...

The American Heart Association (AHA) has devised new blood pressure guidelines.  In this iteration, the AHA tell us that any blood pressure over 120 is dangerous and must be treated, with pressures over 180 requiring immediate hospitalization.  There is no age cut off, and no accounting for individual variability. That the AHA is highly dependent on Big Pharma for its financial coffers, and has on...

New studies show that as we are drugging our senior more, they are falling more and dying more from their falls.  We may think that dramatically lowering blood pressure and sugars, fixing cholesterol with statins, using blood thinners to prevent stroke, and medicating sadness are beneficial, but the pile of drugs we're tossing into elderly bodies to "fix" aberrant numbers is leading...

In Return to Healing we lay out a very simple fix to the medical mess we are in.  We spend the first half the book explaining why it is a mess, and then the second half talking about who is profiting from the mess.  Then we give the fix. It's really very easy to repair a system that is simply off the tracks.  We lay it out simply.  This is one you don't want to miss!

Alan and Andy talk about how medical school does not prepare students to be whole-person doctors, focused on numbers and multiple choice answers and slices of the body.  William Osler devised an ideal medical school at Hopkins before the Flexner Revolt took it down.  In the Osler model students work with community primary care doctors from day one and throughout their entire medical school curricu...

As two primary care doctors with a collective 75 years of experience, we understand the benefits of having a primary care doctor who develops strong relationships built on trust, who customizes care to each patient, who takes a patient-centric and whole-person view of care, and who is critical thinker looking beyond the protocols and drug-company dictated "truths."  Multiple studies have...

We look at the role of primary care in our health care system and discuss why it is the crucial ingredient to save lives, lower cost, and help people feel better and be healthier.  As we gravitate toward a technician-run specialized system that rewards expensive drugs, tests, and procedures rather than whole-person holistic care, we are devaluing primary care and valuing what makes our system wors...

There is no question that primary care is dying in this country, much to the detriment of our entire healthcare system and every person who utilizes it.  We talk about an article called The Eulogy for Primary Care  that talks about why it's dying and missed opportunities.  Not only are no medical students entering the field, but those in it are burning out and having almost no time to actuall...

We know that at the hospital medical students, residents, and hospitalists dive into a Flexnerian orgy of tests, treatments, and more tests.  Is this helpful?  We'll go back in time and look at Osler's dream at Hopkins before it became the poster child for Flexnerian medicine.  

People are losing weight on the new drugs, but at what cost?  First there is the financial cost: we're paying $35 billion a year for these drugs, and don't be fooled, all of us are paying.  While insurance pays nothing for nutrition or exercise, it gladly pays for this.  And these drugs are untested long term, with some horrific potential side effects if you take them for a long time or...

Alan and Andy discuss specialty care and its inherent dangers.  We tell about specific patient examples, why excessive specialization seems appealing but results in over-testing and over-treatment, and how we can instantly change policy to mitigate the damage from specialization.  Ultimately specialists are paid more to convince people they are sick and lead them down a road of testing, procedures...

Alan Roth and Andy Lazris discuss screening for prostate cancer to explain how screening can be less beneficial, and more dangerous, than advertised.  Just finding it early doesn't mean you've done yourself a service.

The Drug Industry was front and center in the creation of our health care industry.  The reforms that created modern healthcare in 1911 and beyond were predicated on developing a research infrastructure in medical schools and in the medical community to generate money for industry.  Nothing really has changed.  Now the drug companies have control over federal agencies like the CDC and FDA; over ac...

In our book, A Return to Healing, we dissect what is wrong with our health care system, and show how you as a patient can better advocate for your own health in a system that often deceives you for profit.  But too, we want to fix the system and we explore a feasible solution at the end of the book, one that is simple to achieve and one that would lead to massive financial savings at the cost of i...

In the show Apple Cider Vinegar, the writers create a binary: the good and all-knowing doctors vs the charlatan nutrition gurus.  The gap is so wide between the two approaches that the reader is left thinking that in cancer, as in all things medical, doctors always have your best interest in mind and if they thought you should change your diet they'll tell you.  Doctors are not trained in nut...

Whether it is in attacking Kennedy, or in refusing to acknowledge what is dysfunctional about Medicare, Democrats use us vs them binary thinking to defend the medical system.  By finding easy targets that seem inane, or by inventing those targets by twisting the truth, the defenders of our horrific medical system prop themselves up by posing as the reasonable ones.  David Frum in the Atlantic did...