Mr MD MS ER physician either believes that takeout food is spontaneously generated in nature and flies to his house on wings or that cooks and delivery people are not human.
One of the biggest revelations of the COVID era is how many people in the medical profession are mentally ill idiots. I recently read a Twitter thread of pediatricians, and it was a sad, disheartening experience.
This pandemic has completely shattered my trust in the medical professionals. Perhaps it is a blessing in disguise as I will never blindly follow their recommendations about my health or health of my child ever again. My child was recently prescribed a long-term medication that came with a black box FDA warning on neuro-psychiatric side effects and some horror-stories about mothers taking months to years and countless psychiatric appointments to figure out that their children suffered from them. I only found about it googling it. It was not discussed at the appointment. Needless to say, the medication is left unused.
My mother died at 66 (which is younger than I am now) due to medical malfeasance, so I lost my trust in the profession long ago.
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If you made it this long without shattering that trust… you’ve been lucky.
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You are correct. I am not sure it was lucky though. There were red flags there all the time, I just did not want to see them. Denial is a powerful thing. I have my regrets about falling in line and following advice that may have, in retrospect, exacerbated some health problems my child has. I will have to live with that “what if” for the rest of my life. It makes me have some sympathy though for people who fell for the whole corona pandemic thing. If you have taken the vaccine and all the recommended boosters, and have given them to your children, it is going to be mighty hard to acknowledge you made a mistake. Since taking the shots, my father has new heart and digestive problems but is the staunchest defender of the vaccine, which he claims elicited zero side effects.
I just read that 44% of younger ppl don’t want kids. Since most will be infertile maybe that’s a good thing?
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Even the ones who are not total idiots are seriously out of touch with reality. Many years ago I had to have surgery on my left hand to repair a broken bone that had healed improperly. Like most right-handed people, I had never fully appreciated my left hand until I lost the use of it. (I had a baby in diapers at the time, and if you’ve ever tried to change a diaper with only one hand, you know how much fun that is.) I made the mistake of wondering aloud how I was going to do all the things I needed to do in the course of a normal day when I couldn’t use my left hand, and the surgeon helpfully suggested that I hire someone to do all the stuff I couldn’t do, because of course that was what his wife would do under similar circumstances. Sure, doc, in my dreams…
I trust most doctors.
Most doctors aren’t tweeting out hypocrisy. In fact, most doctors aren’t tweeting at all.
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“I trust most doctors… most doctors aren’t tweeting at all.”
Amen.
Almost every adult knows at least one doctor who is a horse’s behind. But “most doctors” care about their patients and are trying their best to help.
Some doctors are wokester Red Guards. “Most doctors” aren’t.
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Here is the thing. Although I have no doubt that most doctors care about their patients and are trying their best to help, it does not mean that one should have a blind trust in them. Nowadays, medicine is standardized and done by medical personnel following standard procedures and flowcharts. If a patient presents with symptom X, do the exam Y and prescribe medicine Z. What the medicine Z is, is often influenced by the newest medication that pharma is pushing. Medicine is a business with the primary aim to make money, not to cure people. And by the way, it is not doctors who are in charge of the medicine anymore, they have been reduced in many cases to little cogs in a big machine. A doctor who thinks out of the box, even a little, is going to have a hard time surviving in this system. While guidelines are good, medicine is really an art, but instead of a masterpiece, you are getting a paint-by-numbers piece.
I could go on for a while about this, also in the context of the covid pandemic. For example, in the country where I am originally from, more than 90% of primary care physicians stopped seeing patients in person for almost a year, and things are still not back to normal. Good luck getting treatment for whatever ails you over the phone!
The paint-by-number… is so much worse than having some incompetent physicians on the loose. There is nothing good about it.
Just one example: I’ve had three kids. Pregnancy is hellish. One of the main reasons is that pregnancy hormones, basically from the moment there’s enough Hcg to trigger a positive test, shut down my digestive tract. Nothing moves without a substantial dose of magnesium or a heavy-duty intestinal illness. I’ll try to avoid any further detail on that, but it is a constant misery for nearly the entire pregnancy, and for months afterward. I have a lot of experience with gut rehab now.
Third pregnancy, I was having trouble keeping my glucose numbers down, my hemoglobin tanked, and the digestive issue wasn’t responding to anything. Not even huge doses of Miralax were helping. I had to go see a perinatologist a couple of times at $375 a visit out of pocket, and also a digestive diseases specialist at $400 for ten minutes.
For that $$$, the perinatologist wanted to put me on metformin, had no advice whatsoever on the digestive problem, and wanted me to take iron supplements (just FYI, iron pills are notorious for causing constipation– I wasn’t going anywhere near those). And the digestive diseases specialist told me to take Miralax. Which I was already doing, and it wasn’t working, and I told him that. That’s what you get for the money.
So, the hemoglobin situation being desperate, I started eating red meat for every meal, as much as I could stomach, and almost nothing else except maybe a shred of spinach here and there. Brisket for breakfast, roast beef for lunch, ground beef for dinner… and maybe a pork chop or bacon every couple of days for variety.
My blood glucose normalized overnight, and stayed good. My digestion started working dramatically in less than 48 hours, and stayed functional. I no longer needed any digestive aids whatsoever, and there was no reason to put me on any kind of insulin-sensitizing drugs. My numbers were rock steady. And I felt like a whole new person– like, not an undead zombie. My hemoglobin still sucked, because red blood cell turnover takes time, and I didn’t have long enough before my due date.
Afterward, I poked around in fringe diet forums a bit– the keto and carnivore-diet hinterlands– and what did I find? Probably the number one complaint (maybe we could call it the number-two complaint?) people had about those diets was that they reliably induced loose bowels. So this is a real, consistent phenomenon that a lot of people know about. It was not some wild fluke that only happens to me. It probably would work for most people in my situation, and involves none of the risks of drugs. But my perinatologist and the digestive diseases specialist, who were charging me insane amounts of money to give me crappy advice, never said a word about it.
Either they didn’t know, or they weren’t allowed to divulge. I’m guessing they didn’t know. That information currently has no channel for making its way into mainstream medical knowledge or education. Doctors get like five minutes of training on diet, in med school, and they’re not allowed to recommend anything that diverges from the My-Food-Plate-Pyramid garbage that was written by big-ag lobbyists to maximize corn sales. I hated their useless guts after that adventure, and since the problem was solved, I never talked to them again. What if they had a patient with piles of money who discovered it and actually came back to tell them about it? They’re manacled to the official paint-by-number recommendations. If they veer off the well-trodden path of [shrug] “uh, I don’t know, take more miralax”, they risk censure by their professional organizations, and getting into hot water with insurance companies. Most physicians aren’t willing to risk it.
Apologies for the essay. I have a bit of a chip on my shoulder about it.
I’m with you completely. I have discovered that if I don’t aggressively direct the course of my treatment, there’s going to be too much trouble. I’m on my way to the dentist, and I know I will have to repeat many times that my body processes the anaesthetic very fast because I’m Slav, and to please not wait for 20 minutes after the shot.
Nutrition advice – just forget it. I was told by a local nutrition nurse that boxed cereals are great to lower your blood sugar.
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PS: I do not think that most docs care about their patients and genuinely want to help. It may be somewhere on their priorities list, but it’s so far down below their paychecks, their reputations, and their professional standing, as to be irrelevant. What good are nice feelings toward patients, if you refuse to act on them? That’s like wanting to be svelte and athletic, but never bothering to exercise. It doesn’t make you a nice person, it makes you a total hypocrite.
At this point I avoid the local medical profession like the plague. The local hospital is rated as one of the top 20 worst hospitals in the US. As gallows humor has it, you have a 5% chance of dying just by entering the doors of the hospital. Patient or visitor your odds of death are automatically increased by 5% simply by going inside and it gets worse from there. Most of the medical profession here are nice people, but not exactly folks I would trust my health in the hands of.
The nursing staff are mostly hired from the local college which would be good except the local college had a choice between incompetence and corruption a few decades ago and decided to go with both. The nurses they are turning out now….well they are mostly nice people, but…. there are almost no standards at this point. As for the docs, well the hospitals administration decided that diversity was not just our strength, but for the sake of some unknown reason it would be best to hire docs from 3rd-5th world countries and have them make up about 80-ish percent of the docs on staff. Again mostly nice folks…. just not well trained at all, and in the case of my grandmother, came very close to killing her which led to the doc in question getting on the last plane out of town and quite literally flying to the other side of the country before my grandfather could find said doc and express his annoyance. Post Note:my grandmother was there to have something minor looked at, she should have been out in 2 hours or so, she got a really bad blood infection (probably un-sterilized equipment as she did not have it coming in,) and the doc in question kept making things worse until another doc kicked him out and took over. But for a couple of days she came quite close to dying, which was why my gp, wanted to toss said doc out the 5th floor window, and why that doc transferred to the other side of the country and flew out that very night.
The administration of said hospitals doesn’t actually care about running it. They have been busy playing monopoly against a local large church for control of the city. It sounds like I’m making it up right? I’m not. Seriously that hospital has spent the better part of the last 50 to 60 years buying out every single independent medical practice around town, then they started buying up tons of properties around town, then they have fought tooth and nail to kill any attempt to build another hospital within something like and hour and a half around town. They somehow managed to buy out their opposite number, where your odds of success were actually pretty good, and then proceed to basically shut it all down. I kid you not, the hospital in question does its best to toss its patients out within hours of surgery due to not having enough rooms while at the same time owning another hospital roughly 2/3rds the same size, that was fully up to date when acquired that is now being left empty and unused, despite how much they paid to acquire it. There is a standing joke here, if you ask who owns a building in this city its generally the hospital, because at this point they probably own a good 20-ish percent of downtown.
I think the docs and medical community here are a bit worse that the standard, but one thing I do want to point out. At the office we speak to a fair amount of docs and nurses, and administrators and almost all of them lean left, vote left, and support leftist policies. Most of them don’t really understand cause and effect when it comes to financial issues. We have actually had several docs express dismay that they were paying more in taxes and not understand that the reason they pay more in taxes is because they kept voting for the people who were saying they were going to raise taxes.
Suffice to say that while mostly decent folks, a large segment don’t really have a firm grasp of cause and effect. And I’m not even going to touch the issue of the not-vax, they are quite blind in their support for it and masking, but then I really don’t expect anything less out of them. So yea I tend to avoid the lot of them like they had the plague.
What a great comment, William. I love your sense of humor.
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….and if one of the cooks or delivery persons test positive for COVID-19?
That would automatically render this guy’s recommendation moot in an awful hurry.
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