"You're Not a Real Doctor." (So Said My Mother.)
A Quick Note on People Who Recklessly Prescribe and Who Inappropriately Advise
When my mother visited me for the graduation ceremony when I received my doctorate, a Ph.D. in biology (physiology/neuroethology), she stopped dead in her tracks on the way to the convocation center. She turned to me and said, “David, I want you to remember something—-you’re not a real doctor.”
Well, she was wrong, of course, but we will not go into the whole “title war” nor what the word, ‘professional’ really means. Once borrowed, professors are no longer accepted in calling themselves “professional,” but sporting entertainers can. One can view this conflict as one of either great importance or one of utter pettiness. It is correct that a title does not confer omniscience. Possessing a Ph.D. does not make one “better” than anyone else (nor does an M.D., by the way). The education of an academic, including scientist, has completely failed if such a person holding a degree is unduly confident regarding their authority to speak.
The painfully humorous admonition fom my mother has served me extremely well.
I have a few insights into medicine, physiology and pharmacology. I have given more than one person tips for how to intervene in their medical care and have thus saved some body parts and maybe some lives. Medical doctors and hospitals are not part of a perfect system.
The way, however, that I interact in these situations is to first point out my mother’s stark instruction to me. That I am not a doctor is burned into my head and I am quick to blurt that fact out.
I have worked in emergency rooms, general hospitals, universities, medical schools, around physicians and medical scientists for much of my life. I am keenly aware of the limitations of my knowledge and training vis-à-vis clinical medicine. There are a myriad of ways that a non-physician such as myself could go disastrously wrong in advising a particular patient. Knowledge of normal anatomy and physiology (itself, modest) is no substitute for extensive training in disease (pathology), microbiology, pharmacology, clinical diagnosis and medical and surgical therapies. Further, even a physician, without access to a patient’s history and laboratory tests or other diagnostic procedures, would be foolish to be recommending or prescribing in casual settings.
What is more, I rather enjoy the freedom from the responsibility of caring for patients. I prefer to play with ideas. I am quintessentially absent minded. Ideas, when pursued properly, place a demand on a thinker that is not readily compatible with practical schedules, duties and routines. I have seen doctors and surgeons make mistakes. I feared that I would have made many more mistakes because of my particular intellectual constitution and temperment.
So, when I share what I believe to be important information about medicine, the functioning of the body and human biology, I always preface my remarks—and reinforce the caveat more than once—with the disclaimer that I am only speaking about something that I have tried or that I would try. I suggest strongly that the other person consult with their physician and make their own medical decisions based on their own research as well—-the latter part being what even most physicians will do with a patient who seems to be a competent information gatherer. I make sure that I sound like a warning label on the data insert for a prescription, over-the-counter drug or the legalese in a TV ad for a pharmaceutical nostrum read at an auctioneer’s pace.
This was my approach, no less, when talking to people about the mRNA-based pseudovaccines for COVID, the use of Ivermectin and early treatment, and even the more traditional vaccines like Sinovac.
I am confronted, frequently, with people telling me that they yielded to pressure from family, friends, employers, government ads or religious leaders to take one of these supposed “vaccines” for COVID, for the good of others. Sometimes, they did this without any advice from their own physician. They simply went to some public injection station in a pharmacy or set up in a parking lot.
I ask you, as a point of all this, where is the care that I exercised when people who are not particularly knowledgeable are urging injections for their family members, neighbors, co-workers, subordinates, co-religionists or other retail consumers? We now know for certain that the mRNA pseudovaccines are harmful and deadly to such an extent that they far exceed the threshold for rejecting the authorization for these products under normal circumstances. Further, these treatments (a term used in the broadest sense) are characterized by an upside down risk to benefit ratio that so argues gainst their use that it is distressing to contemplate what must be the reason for continued use, and advocacy for, these injection products.
Time and again I hear of people being threatened with ostracism from family and friends, disinvitations to gatherings and other such coercive tactics. Is any of this in conformity with the admonition to “do no harm” or (epistemological) caution concerning one’s own authority based on thoroughly-mastered knowledge and certified licensing?
This lack of caution in advising, moreover lack of caution in treatment, should have raised red flags for every person opting to be injected or making such a choice for a child or dependent adult.
The crafters of the COVID scheme, which we know from gatherings like Event 201 and documents from many foundations, NGOs and governmental sources, planned their control-freak policies well based on decades of psychological research. They knew that there would be bureaucrats whose trivial lust for efficacy and power would work immediately to enlist them in the cause of enforcing oppressive measures without rational basis. The event of 9/11 prepared the public to yearn for even extra-legal actions by savior government, as did insufferable TV programs and movies depicting ruthless tactics of policing, war and sci-fi/futurist figures clad in robotic armor—-supposedly for higher, material principles and “peace.” Further bombardment of the TV mind created a public in a permanent state of abject hypochondria. Correlated with this, it also created a large number of characters craving the unlikely role of the all-powerful doctor-policeman. “Take this or else!” and doors being crashed down actually played out in real life in some locations in the last two and a half years around the world—-particularly those countries where thug police possess little fear of a righteously armed public.
Even with regard to licensing and credentialing, I doubt that most physicians have the in-depth grasp of immunology, vaccinology and epidemiology to have made the predictive steps needed to handle such a novel and rushed presentation of challenges. It is not clear that such advanced training in immunology would have done any good. Sometimes intense and extensive training is merely a prescription for making the wrong decision more convincingly.
I hope that this is a lesson for society in general.
Back to the credentialling in the greater arena of policy making, this is where the concept of “authority of knowledge in its appropriate sphere” acquires its significance. The COVID phenomenon exaggerated to the level of grand theater, however real the virus may have been, did a lot of peculiar things. One of the curious things that emerged from this mayhem of public and epidemiological policy is that we came to understand the embarrassing limitations of the medical system, in general, and physicians, in particular. We had a situation where doctors both spoke up too little and where doctors spoke up too much, some doctors especially. Worse still is the possibility that many millions of physicians worldwide strongly suspected that COVID, as a social and economic phenomenon, was an enormous fraud perpetrated on the public and yet they remained silent.
It is more clear now that doctors should not be organized in tight bureaucratic structures of obedience. There is too much to be known (the art is long…) and there is too much that is not known, for medicine to work in the manner of a post office or automated-factory floor. There are too many moving parts, to use that expression, and this is more apparent when a Black Swan event occurs where there is little prior experience in treating a disease. Medicine is a practical art for this reason. The success of physicians like Drs. Zelenko, Kory, McCullough and many others in employing pattern detection, associative skills, genuine hypothesis formation and rational and guarded, bedside experimentation is exemplary of this.
In addition to misuse of the PCR (polymerase chain reaction) method for amplification of nucleic acid signal, a fragmentary signal by the way, modern medical science was abused in the reckless and corrupted, incompetent misuse of epidemiological modeling.
The stiffling of crucial perspectives by Big Tech and the Media(-ium) was another feature of the COVID script, including the perspectives of general biologists and economists to name only two of many. This was a fatal epistemological error that suggests propaganda and intent, that is to say more pointedly, fraud. Biologists, of which I at least know a tiny bit about, possess a 35,000-foot view of the world of animal survival rates; reproduction; fitness; immunity; ecological mechanisms; evolution and phylogeny from virions to man; and animal behavior—-all of which are freed of the narrow focus of physicians devoted to treating each patient’s benefit as paramount (as they are rightfully charged to, and should, do). Something certainly did not “smell right” about this Bill Gates-driven, megalomaniacally designed mechanism of vaccination and more for human abuse and—apparently—depopulation.
People are overly impressed with credentials. It is not that credentials and degrees are meaningless. These things certainly do have meaning. We afford such badges and diplomas both too much and too little. The public knows, depending which segment of the public one is referring to, very little about the structures of scientific institutions and medicine and how things get done. Simply put, after someone’s formal credentials are established for a particular topic, then their actual skill applied to a task must be assessed. A non-physician, computer-hardware engineer like Steve Kirsch (see his Substack page) has contributed well to the analysis of the safety of the products being offered as “vaccines” for COVID.
We could summarize the question of who gets to talk and who gets to be listened to, thusly. Foremost, everyone gets to speak and be heard. Formal credentials, like degrees, provide a superficial, but not exclusive, starter for further entrance into the courtroom of public opinion. Work history and publications are a test of demonstrated activity, but we still cannot say that it is good work—-even if highly respected by a closed society of an academic community. We often hear outsiders refer to someone as being a “top doc” or a “leading scientist.” These descriptions may have some merit, but I generally cringe at the submissive naïvete of the journalist or interviewer when I hear this. Then, we need to listen to the expert’s expressed viewpoint. It is not simply smoothness, “white coats,” swooshy video background, haircuts, shapely legs or fawning by others that increases the likelihood of their predictions coming to pass or their advice being true. Instead, there are the inherent elements of their reasoning that must reveal the reliability of their presentation. The judging of this requires various levels of expertise and trusted relaying of each participant’s arguments with their own credentials to be assessed. Disturbing as it is, all of this too can be corrupted. In times like this, outsiders become candidates for commentary, with similar requirements for establishing credibility.
No harm can possibly come from the public becoming better educated and informed, from whatever point they are beginning. Being a more competent receiver makes the overall capacities for the whole society improve as an epistemological entity capable of recognizing good information, making use of knowledge effectively and of apprehending and exercising wisdom. Our societies must not only receive and respond as programmed, they must be able to receive and be able to reject and not comply.
The irresponsibility of encouraging the public to pressure their spouses, family members, neighbors and other contacts to take a dubious medical procedure should be a cause for criminal or civil action—-if it is not already in various legal venues. I will also state that I am no more an attorney than I am a physician, so consult with a lawyer regarding any of the following before you take action. I believe that if someone is pressuring you—especially an employer—to take an injection, you could ask them to put their demand and their threatened consequences in writing. (At this point, you should probably already be looking for another job, anyway.) Perhaps, upon advice of an attorney if you so choose, you could file in district court a sworn affidavit regarding the matter—with documented evidence—to which the other party will have to respond if they would like to contest your claim. (Now, you really already should have another job lined up.) In short, we need to employ ways to bring to bear the force of statutes and codified law regarding medical negligence (even by a government health department), misrepresenting oneself as a physician, prescribing without a license, bureaucratic non-, mis- and malfeasance, as well as medical malpractice on these adventurous practices by our hegemonic bureaucracies and medical systems. I am sure that they have already tried to enable their actions with laws and administrative regulations. These rules need to be brought before judicial review. Regardless of the success in individual cases, these actions—amounting, after the fact, to educative and expositive probes into the processes of shifting modes of jurisprudence and bureaucratic authoritarianism in our nation—may be of great utility in confronting and reining in reckless actors, irresponsible government and tyrannical rule.
It necessitates another article, but one-time Nazi jurist, Carl Schmitt (no relation that I know of) recommended suspension of democratic processes and law during crises. My recommendation, to the contrary, is that suspension of democratic law and processes during small crises is never justified, and the adjunct statement is: all crises are small. Expressed in applicable terms in the case of the COVID phenomenon, to whatever degree that it can be considered to have been based on a genuine viral epidemic (which is highly debatable), could—and absolutely should—have been dealt with much differently. The Great Barrington Declaration is an apt example of a far superior alternative that fits established epidemiological principles. This event, not even a crisis in any way, was small.
Each person must become an evermore competent, final common pathway of decision making and action—-action honored by the government, a government who is the servant—not the leader—of The People. And the teachers (‘doctors’, in Latin], must be forever students and suspicious of what they, themselves, believe they know.
The ideas are excellent . I need to reread to get it all in .
Indeed, the process is infectious, isn't it? We need to encourage our neighbors to put on their thinking caps --- it really is the best (even entertaining) activity there is. It is particularly important to get young men and women using computers (really, cellphones are too small for effective and easier research). I also buy up good dictionaries (like older editions of the 'American Heritage Dictionary') and give them, primarily to young people. Then, the internet has become an important place to practice writing and getting over oneself enough that one can courageously comment on articles as well as writing one's own articles.