Medicine needs to change

With catastrophically declining trust, medicine needs to become radically more open to outside criticism

It is remarkable how so many people in the medical community project their own psychological distress at experiencing disagreement onto the person who disagrees.

Anyone who disagrees publicly is "crazy" or a "grifter", even if those who are getting upset at the disagreement are the ones who are behaving in a manner that is completely unhinged.

This lack of emotional self-awareness seems to be virtually epidemic among some of the most active doctors online.

Yet there is no attitude or personality disposition that is more anti-scientific or prone to the production of hysterical misinformation that I can think of than this.

Is it any wonder that the medical community is so prone to endorsing each passing moral hysteria as it comes and goes?

Within just four years, we got apocalyptic, messianic, massively overblown narratives about BLM, Covid, and gender ideology, each coming from some of the most influential "thought leaders" within medicine.

The medical establishment is right to be concerned about human rights and public health--these must be pivotal concerns of the medical and public health communities--but in each of these cases, these concerns boiled over into an irrationalist hysteria that massively overstated the problem, overstated what doctors should be empowered by lawmakers to do to address it, and overstated what doctors could do to intervene and actually help.

These narratives were nearly entirely insulated from outside criticism, with outside criticism being denounced in the most unsavory--and with the benefit of hindsight--unwise and unscientific manner.

Perhaps one of the biggest reforms that needs to take place within medicine is the production of greater tolerance of critical points of view, greater emotional regulation, and greater restraint in the face of disagreement--so that medicine can regain its credibility in the eyes of the public that it is supposed to serve.

I will be honest with my own (in retrospect naively optimistic) hopes in this respect. I thought that by being a long-standing debunker of misinformation, I might have some credibility to say the things I did as Covid was winding down.

I thought my reputation as someone who had repeatedly fought against alternative medicine and nutritional dogmas online, always from a critical, evidence-based perspective--for nearly a decade--I thought that such criticisms from someone with my background would be valued, and that I could serve as a bridge between critical perspectives and the medical community.

I was right about almost everything I said, yet my reputation was smeared and my career was scorched as a response.

And I'm saying that, in a world dominated by social media, the medical community should learn to at least appear to listen and integrate criticisms from the outside--and that it would be made much stronger if it did so.

It should NOT continue the policy of smearing and polarizing against its opponents, which sadly remains the approach of some of the most prominent influencers in the medical community, e.g. Jennifer Gunter, Ryan Marino, etc.

The alternative is a continuation of this decline of trust, published in JAMA just two months ago:

I hope medicine learns to listen. Because I'm absolutely right on this point, and forward-thinking people in medicine know it. I'm not saying any of these things for attention or clicks or likes. My career is in shambles, and I have nothing to gain financially from any of this.

Thank goodness that after being dismissed from medical school I have an actual job that pays about 10 times more than the paltry sums that I make from social media.

I'm writing these things because they are the truth, or something very close to it, and because from a professional perspective, I still care about medicine more than anything else in the world.

Medicine needs to change.