Straight Talking Doc Unhinged

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 r

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 so

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

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 dangerou

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 pat

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 sell

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 opportuni

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 vis

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 s

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 biostat