This Month in the American Medical Association: Dystopia
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Nearly 200 years ago, a Hungarian obstetrician, Ignaz Semmelweis, made a recommendation to his fellow physicians. Patients were dying right and left of all kinds of infections. Semmelweis noticed that his patients were less likely to get infected and die if he washed his hands before touching them. He advised other doctors do the same. The reaction of the established, prominent medical community to the suggestion that illness could be spread via unwashed hands? Well, like I said, it was nearly 200 years ago, it was a primitive time. There was no social media outlet he could be banned from. The term ‘misinformation’ had yet to be invented, so no misinformation boards could censure him. Instead, his fellow doctors ridiculed him for suggesting that their hands could possibly be the cause of their patients’ deaths, he lost his job, and he ended his days in an insane asylum.
Thankfully, such a story could never happen in America today. We no longer have insane asylums. Other than that, though, things haven’t changed much. In the hospitals we do have, many doctors now spend large parts of their day thoroughly scrubbing their hands. Much of the rest of their day is spent writing articles for influential journals on the need to ban unapproved opinions.
The most read article this past week in the Journal of The American Medical Association is this one, “Social Media and Medical Misinformation: Confronting New Variants of an Old Problem.” Old problem, indeed. If you think the article is full of penitent soul-searching about all the embarrassing groupthink that pervaded elite medical institutions dating at least to Semmelweis, and continuing throughout the 20th century (remember lobotomies, anyone?), you clearly do not know doctors. No, the piece starts from the assumption that leading doctors are impeccably trustworthy and is mostly concerned with brainstorming the most effective ways to get their critics committed to insane asylums banned from social media.
The author even supports revoking the medical licenses of physicians “who spread demonstrably false information.” I am occasionally accused of being contrarian, so, for once, in the spirit of charity, I will agree to get on board with this initiative. I thought I could help out by nominating a few physicians for such de-licensure:
- The entire American Academy of Pediatrics leadership for the blatant, shameless lie that babies don’t need to see faces to learn speech and social communication. Now, hold on, you might be saying. Maybe they didn’t know it was ‘demonstrably false’ when they said it, maybe they’re just idiots. I’m sympathetic to that position, but unfortunately, the evidence tells a different story: their own pre-Covid evidence, which they scrubbed from their own websites, about the importance of seeing faces to babies’ language/social development. So, sorry, but those medical licenses have to be revoked if we truly want to wipe out the scourge of online misinformation.
- The doctors in charge of advising all the colleges that continue, to this day, to require Covid booster shots for perfectly healthy twenty-somethings, against all medical evidence, against the recommendation of outspoken pro-vaccine advocates like Dr Paul Offit, and against the international norm of country after country currently limiting mRNA booster shots in young adults. Stripping the doctors of their licenses tragically won’t bring healthy young adults who trusted them, like this one, back to life, but it would be a nice symbolic gesture in the fight for medical truth.
- The doctors at the CDC who put demonstrably false information in their official CDC ‘fact checks,’ which then have to be stealth-edited months later once they’re too embarrassing. I’m referring, of course, to this CDC fact check. As this poor gentleman could tell you if he were brought back to life, the CDC’s facts in this case are indeed “demonstrably false.” Great harm is done to the practice of medicine when official government medical fact checks are not facts. As the JAMA article suggests, the only path to regain trust is one that begins with stripping licenses.
- I suppose, in a court of law, it would be difficult to prove beyond a shadow of a doubt in the above cases that the physicians involved knew the information they were spreading was false. Maybe the CDC and the AAP just accidentally put in the wrong password so many times their websites scrubbed themselves. In order to decisively win a case, the prosecution, absent a mind reader, would have to get very very lucky and find a very, very arrogant defendant who openly bragged that his medical advice was a knowing lie. Luckily, we have just such a doctor!
Feel free to add your own suggestions in the comments.
What next for JAMA, the prestigious journal that published this article? Well, because truth is stranger than fiction, the very same week they published the above article, they also published this study on gender affirmation. The study’s shocking finding? Children who hate their breasts feel happy three months after doctors cut those breasts off. File that study in the bin with the one about anorexic girls who feel better about how they look a couple months after doctors perform liposuction on what is left of their bellies. Of course, we don’t perform weight-loss surgeries on anorexic adults because that is so clearly wrong, manipulative, and outside the bounds of common decency. Knowing that doctors are performing similar, albeit even more dangerous and irreversible, acts of inconceivable cruelty on 13 year old children across America today is infuriating. Our leading medical journals literally do not know that boys can’t become girls, while at the same time they are trying to rev up the “misinformation” apparatus to come after the rest of us. I have a feeling someone’s gonna end up in an insane asylum when this is all over, I just hope it’s not me.
I am a retired physician and astonished at how much respect and credibility the physician community has lost in the last three years. Most physicians went on taking care of patients and practicing their usual diligence but deferred to spokespeople and department and hospital leaders. Now, ironically, the last institutions to give up unnecessary masking are doctors' offices and hospitals. Physicians are well educated but really ignorant about what is going on in the public marketplace. Our "representative" organizations like the American Academy of Pediatrics have shamelessly issued policy statements and perspectives with zero effort or interest in finding out what the average pediatrician or pediatric specialist really thinks. The transgender clinics and movement, in my opinion, represents the greatest medical malfeasance of recent memory and there is no forum or pediatric organization to discuss the issues at hand. This is catastrophic. Take the totally reasonable Great Barrington Declaration, which reads better and better with age, and how "our leaders" imposed censorship and shaming on its authors. Few practicing physicians protested and how would they? There is no forum for independent discussion. It is now up to physicians to radically change our representation. Thanks for this piece. We absolutely need to demand dissenting opinions and minority interpretations of data that Alex Berenson is so good at. Physicians have been trained to read the medical literature critically but more and more journals like JAMA are publishing opinion pieces as objective reports.
I have made the anorexia – transgender parallel several times. Growing up in an affluent southern suburb in the 90s, I knew plenty of girls who struggled with anorexia and bulimia. When/if they finally got treatment, no one affirmed their beliefs that they were overweight. When someone is suffering from a delusion, you don’t play along. You help them see their delusion for what it is and move past it.