Straight Talking Doc Unhinged

We all believe that cholesterol is so bad that we better measure it regularly and lower it by drugs.  Just ask your cardiologist: Got to get that LDL cholesterol below 70 or catastrophe will ensue!   But as we explain, this is a myth that germinated back in the 1950's and has been perpetuated and normalized over time.  Virtually all doctors believe in this myth and preach it to you.  The fact...

The statistics bounce around about COVID even as the virus wanes and becomes just another recurrent cold.  But the religious fanaticism of the COVID faithful, the rituals, the restrictions, those have not disappeared.  In my world of geriatrics and long term care, my patients are still being made to suffer and even killed by those doctors and policy makers who insist that the COVID religion must n...

From masks to one -way aisles to PPE to 20-second hand washing and 6-foot separation, COVID has demonstrated the religiosity of health care more than any singular event in my lifetime.  The Gospel of Infectious Disease, which includes public health, is a frightening one; these doctors and their agents have consistently been on the wrong side of science and have helped orchestrate some of the most...

In my book The Great Stupidity, which chronicles the journey of a naive and gullible French boy who seeks to find a cure for the Black Plague and to speak with the Great Frenchie in Paris who promises to provide the scientific means of stopping the plague, from waving ones hands to other absurd but accepted rituals, I seek to show how dangerous it is when we use religion to combat a medical crisis...

Prostate cancer helps us understand the religion of health care through a very unique lens.  For any religion to be effective it must instill fear into its adherents, have priests who offer a means of alleviating that fear, and then provide appealing but ultimately deceptive techniques to "cure" someone that seems to be sensible and effective but which in fact are dangerous and misleadin...

Health Care has taken the shape of a religious theocracy in this country, with Trillions spent for the allure of salvation and eternal life, and a medical industrial complex mimicking the Catholic Church of the Middle Ages driving people down dangerous roads of myth and dogma to feed the beast.  Medical priests, aka doctors, drive the faith and convince vulnerable and frightened patients to dive i...

The only way I can grasp the huge gap between medical fact and the dogmatic myths spewed out by doctors and slurped up by frightened patients who seek salvation and long life is to view health care through the lens of it being a religion.  Everything about our health care system and its doctor-priests is tainted by dogma.  We spend $4 trillion dollars largely ticking people into selling their bodi...

We have talked about how Flexner's imprint on US health care leaves doctors as unthinking pimps for the drug companies.  Doctors rarely independently evaluate interventions and tests, nor is their gaze patient-specific.  Rather, they are apt to listen to "experts," many of whom are either directly or indirectly (in terms of their academic funding and research opportunities) beholden...

We have been told that picking up cancers early and fixing them will save lives.  But does it?  It depends on the cancer.  For breast and colon cancer, for instance, lifetime screening saves 1/1000 people from cancer deaths compared to those never screened.  Other cancers, such as ovarian and pancreatic, are so aggressive that screening is not of value, since once these cancers are visible they ha...

Since the publication of Ansel Keys landmark and fraudulent Seven Countries Study over 50 years ago, our nation has been on an anti-cholesterol kick.  We ascribe almost God-like meaning to the cholesterol measurement--especially Big Bad LDL--and are hell bent in doing whatever is necessary to bring it below some magically drug-industry defined threshold either with medicines or by sticking to a lo...

From the seeds of Flexner's Report grew the biostate in which we currently live.  COVID certainly was the biostate on steroids, although the biostate has been part of our lives for decades thanks to Flexner. What are the ingredients of a biostate?  First and foremost, I don't want it to sound like some conspiratorial James Bond Villainy type of creation.  In fact, the biostate is multifa...

We have already heard how the Flexner Report in 1911 reduced doctors to robotic drones, beholden to corporate America, under the strict rule of AMA policies and dictates, who were taught that patients are nothing more than a series of numbers to be measured and fixed.  The blueprint of Flexner--drawn up by corporate tycoons, eugenic doctors, and the AMA brass--sought to homogenize American medicin...

In part 2 of our look at the Flexner Report, we explore the nuts and bolts of the report and show how an insignificant educator, a fledgling medical organization, and a Eugenicist at Hopkins conspired with industry to reshape the entire medical industrial complex.   The Report determined which medical schools would live and die.  To survive the onslaught schools had to shift their curriculum to on...

In 1911 the medical world redirected itself with the publication of the Flexner Report, a legacy we still live with today.  Everything we discuss in this podcast--from putting numbers over people, to doctors being pimps of drug companies, to industry infiltrating every aspect of health care, to people being bamboozled by false promises and expensive treatments--was born out of the womb of Flexner....

When doctors uses deception and tricks to convince you to think that all the tests, drugs, and procedures they sell to you are "necessary and lifesaving," it's also crucial that they sell you on a fiction even more crucial to their role as unwitting pimps for the drug and device companies.  They have to convince you that their snake-oil remedies are safe!  Of course, they have trick...

When we have a medical society hell-bent on measuring and fixing your numbers, you'll get a lot of tests, procedures, and drugs all designed to find abnormal numbers and fix them.  But really, we need to base our tests and treatments on clinically meaningful outcomes:  does the intervention actually help you.  That help may be subjective  and not subject to be measured ("I have less pain...

As we delve into the dysfunction of our health care system, the most salient problem is that of numbers.  We as doctors and as a profit-driven health care mega-complex have reduced patients into a series of measurements that, if abnormal, label them with defined diseases and subject them to number-fixing treatments.  Whether medicines to lower sugars and cholesterol, stents to fix blocked arteries...

“Far too large a section of the treatment of disease is today controlled by the big manufacturing pharmacists, who have enslaved us in a plausible pseudo-science.” -William Osler At the turn of the last century, William Osler's vision of a patient-centered health care system based on science, critical thinking, and compassion was taking root at Hopkins.  But then came the Flexner Report in 19...

When we fall prey to doctors who promise us the world and delivery us a dish of deception and snake oil covered in a sauce of science and benign intent, we are easily fooled.  Doctors are good at frightening us and then telling us, in the most detailed and complex way, that we have a disease and they have the cure.  We either listen to them or we die.  We all received a big dish of this medical de...

To understand why our medical system spends so much money to generate such bad results, we have to understand how it convinces patients to engage in acts that do not help them but which they believe are necessary and lifesaving.  Doctors often used deceptive statistics and false promises of cure to sell patients drugs, tests, and procedures that are either not beneficial or are actually dangerous....

We've been discussing afib and the use of blood thinners to prevent strokes.  We showed how medical statistics can be manipulated to show exaggerated benefit while minimizing risk, how surrogate markers (all strokes vs clinically significant strokes) are used to exaggerate the benefit of the blood thinners, and how that flawed data can put inputted into a calculator to show a precise risk of...

How your risk and benefit of medical interventions is explained to you goes a long way into your deciding if you want to take that drug, do that test, or have that procedure.  We all trust doctors to tell us the truth.  Sadly, they often don't.  Afib is an illustrative way to show how medical statistics can skew the truth and make a certain drug or intervention seem more beneficial than it is...

We will start delving into how doctors and the medical system can fool you by using various statistical tricks, models, and deceptive declarations of fact.  No disease is more illustrative of this than atrial fibrillation (afib), which is a heart condition that is a multi-billion dollar business.  Whether you have afib or not, learning about it can help you understand the most basic concepts of ho...

As a doctor of 30 years, an author of fiction and nonfiction, and someone who studies our healthcare system, I felt it was high time I tell you the truth about the the mess we call healthcare.  Because, everything they tell you is necessary and lifesaving, all those drugs and tests they tell you that you better get or God forbid the consequences, it's all a bunch of nonsense.  Modern health c...