Distrust Of Most Healthcare Professionals

[Nigel Forester]

i remember taking my grandma to a doctor many years ago before she passed. She had sores on her legs and the doctor literally had to pull out a medical textbook and look up pictures to compare. For some reason this bothered me, but I can give it a pass because consulting a text isn’t a sign of incompetence. It was a gut feeling tho.

Many years later I went to the same doctor for my own issue. I was taking a medication (foolish thing to do in this case) which was causing me side effects. I went to doctor to figure out a way to treat the sides because I felt taking the medication was worth it for long term health (it wasn’t). I incorrectly thought it would reduce my risk for prostate cancer, as well as some other benefits. The doctor told me “we all have to die of something” and it struck me as odd that such a statement made me lose respect for him as a professional. Of course what he said was true in our current state but what struck me most was he seemed more resigned to it rather than understanding my focus to optimize life and healthspan.

Many times since I have encountered doctors who simply know very little or have what I consider backwards ideas to health. The GP who put my mom on blood thinners and gave her a cortisone shot for aching hands without asking her about diet or lifestyle. The doctor who told my dad he doesn’t believe in the effectiveness of non pharmaceutical drug remedies, like herbs and foods. “I don’t believe in that stuff” is apparently what he said. I get it, they are working in a system of efficiency and lowest common denominator, but it’s all so tiresome.

Even the vets I take my dog to seem behind on progressive treatment options. Without even a scan or palpating her joint effectively, he starts talking about surgery costs.

That is all, just how I feel about it

 

[lampofred]

I was critical at first but then I realized these people are the ones most likely to be eating only unsaturated fat instead of saturated, avoiding sugar and refined carbs, eating plant protein instead of animal protein, etc. Every doctor/nurse I have shaken hands with has had cold hands. Diet really plays a huge role in attitude towards life, I had just one meal of PUFA several days ago and it felt like my brain just shut off (and I still haven't fully recovered), so if they are eating "healthy" every day then it's unavoidable that they will not care about exploring new things. Not to mention the majority of them are in massive debt. The system is at fault, not the doctors.

 

[Blossom]

People working in the medical field usually become very jaded from seeing the worst case scenarios day in and in day out with very few positive outcomes. Many ‘patents’ want to be fixed by a pill or some other magic bullet and without putting in effort unlike most of us here so that’s discouraging for the few practitioners in medicine that are open to diet and lifestyle intervention.

As we all know the standard diet and exercise recommendations don’t usually work either so people (medical providers and consumers) often give up. The system is broken for most things and only marginally helpful for some emergencies, select surgeries and critical care. It’s sad all around and I think the best thing to do is use the system for desired labs and diagnostics but otherwise try to stay healthy avoid the medical system as much as possible.

 

[Jib]

I distrust most healthcare professionals, if not all of them.

In the few spats I've gotten into with medical doctors, they seem to have a tendency to be extremely close-minded and elitist, as if their education makes them better than everyone else, and more capable. And somehow gives them an automatic understanding of what is "correct"; they seem to be more concerned with being "right" than having an actual debate or discussion.

I remember sharing a Ray Peat article on Facebook some years ago. An acquaintance of mine who was in school, training to become a primary care physician, commented "Don't trust medical celebrities. There is also no peer reviewed research cited here to back up any of his claims." (paraphrasing)

I found it funny that he called Ray Peat a "medical celebrity," and also completely dismissed all the studies cited in the article as being worthless without actually looking at any of them.

Similarly, I've been treated like an idiot by my psychiatrist, and looked at with squint-eyed suspicion if I ask ANY questions about a particular medication, like how long should I expect to go on it, and what negative repercussions could there be from going off of them. He had literally nothing to say in response to me bringing up SSRI discontinuation syndrome, which is a real thing; he looked at me as if I was crazy and just stayed silent when I expressed concerns about it. He simply said I could try it and then go off of it if I don't like it, and when I expressed concerns about potentially permanent damage from even a "trial" of these drugs, again....squint-eyed suspicion.

All the best information I've come across, for both physical and mental health, has been in the alternative and independent realm. Robert Smith's "Faster EFT" for example, which I used to do with people, has a direct goal, and a very clear method of establishing whether that goal has been achieved or not. Compare that with traditional talk therapy which can just go on endlessly for years with no real improvement of the conditions it's intended to treat.

It's a huge mess. For me, the worst part about healthcare professionals is their elitism and their VALUING of their elitism. In just about 100% of healthcare professionals I've met, that elitism takes precedent over a passion for healthcare, a passion for genuinely helping people, and a passion for learning, questioning, improving skill sets, etc.

It seems as if ALL of them think like this: I paid my dues by going to medical school, and now I'm the expert. I deserve a big check, and I deserve for everyone I work with to defer to me. Period. I did my time and all that's left is to reap the rewards. There is nothing left for me to learn. And anyone who doesn't have the same degree of education that I do has no right to question me about anything, and are idiots or hypochondriacs for doing their own research. I'm the only one who can do research, because going to medical school taught me how to do research, and if anyone who didn't go to medical school does research, it doesn't mean anything because they're not smart enough to understand it.

So yeah. I don't have a high opinion of healthcare professionals at all and for the most part think that they're all ***holes. I'm biased from bad experiences. I would love to be proven wrong.

For acute medical emergencies, such as life-or-death situations, healthcare professionals can be great. If you're dying of an injury or sepsis or something then getting to a hospital can be great for you. That's fine.

But we've all gotta die of something. Lol. You could use that same phrase to argue that no one needs healthcare professionals. Everyone is aware that they're going to die eventually, and all we can hope for is that we can make dietary and lifestyle changes that will have the highest probability of preventing health catastrophes like cancer. And the highest chance of giving us a high quality of life for the longest amount of time possible.

Overall, it's pretty dismal. The complete lack of focus on preventive medicine is a huge red flag as well.

"You can't get a man to understand something whose salary depends on not understanding it."

Anyway, that's all for now lol. I'm very bitter and could keep going but I'll spare everyone that. tl;dr = not thrilled with healthcare professionals.

 

[Rafael Lao Wai]

The doctor who told my dad he doesn’t believe in the effectiveness of non pharmaceutical drug remedies, like herbs and foods. “I don’t believe in that stuff” is apparently what he said.

Lol the whole thing is a joke. It's like taking your malfunctioning car to the car mechanic and then him not checking the tires, the engine, or the fuel that was being used, and then saying that the car is completely fine and it's all in your head or putting harmful substances in the fuel tank and saying "now it's all good". It's ridiculous. One would think that it's obvious that the environment( including nutrition) plays a huge role in health. The brainwashing must be insane in medical school for them to be so clueless about almost everything. I mean, it's basic physiology. How are your cells going to perform things like glycolysis, Kreb's cycle, Electron Transport Chain, Urea Cycle, etc. without nutrients? That doctor saying that he doesn't believe in the effectiveness of food is severely delusional. What's next? Saying that he doesn't believe that the sky is blue?

And doctors are lenient with the system, therefore they are part of the problem too, in my opinion. From Disturbing Facts About The Failure Of Vaccines:
-The February 1981 issue of the Journal of the American Medical Association found that 90% of obstetricians and 66% of pediatricians refused to take the rubella vaccine.
-In 1990, a UK survey involving 598 doctors revealed that over 50% of them refused to have the Hepatitis B vaccine despite belonging to the high risk group urged to be vaccinated. (British Med Jnl, 27/1/1990)

If they refuse to be vaccinated, why do they let their patients get the shots?! And why do they get paid a sum of money for every patient they fool into accepting vaccination?It's not like they're innocent.

 

[Rafael Lao Wai]

I remember sharing a Ray Peat article on Facebook some years ago. An acquaintance of mine who was in school, training to become a primary care physician, commented "Don't trust medical celebrities. There is also no peer reviewed research cited here to back up any of his claims." (paraphrasing)

I found it funny that he called Ray Peat a "medical celebrity," and also completely dismissed all the studies cited in the article as being worthless without actually looking at any of them.

As I understand it, peer reviewed can be completely meaningless, since it depends on the people who are reviewing the study, and they can be shilling for some industry( vegetable oil, veganism, etc.). I think that's how they made meat look bad: most of the people reviewing the meta- analysis were seventh- day Adventists, and they didn't say anything about the fact that the researchers omitted from the meta- analysis the studies which showed benefits from eating meat( cherry- picking).

 

[yerrag]

If they refuse to be vaccinated, why do they let their patients get the shots?! And why do they get paid a sum of money for every patient they fool into accepting vaccination?It's not like they're innocent.

As in all things, honesty comes at a heavy price. Not just losing a high income job, but not being to pay for their college loans, and losing a girlfriend/wife (funny I don't know if I'm PC not saying "losing a boyfriend/husband") and children ending up with a broken family. I can imagine most spouses would berate the worse half for being honest and naive, and not knowing how the world really works.

 

[Jib]

As I understand it, peer reviewed can be completely meaningless, since it depends on the people who are reviewing the study, and they can be shilling for some industry( vegetable oil, veganism, etc.). I think that's how they made meat look bad: most of the people reviewing the meta- analysis were seventh- day Adventists, and they didn't say anything about the fact that the researchers omitted from the meta- analysis the studies which showed benefits from eating meat( cherry- picking).

This is true. "Peer review" is esteemed as some kind of holy grail, as if it's infallible, not considering that the "peers" doing the reviewing can be biased shills.

Unrelated to peer review, but:

Staff at 'appalling' German animal test lab say they were told to fake results | Daily Mail Online

Whistleblowers who said they worked for private testing firm LPT at two sites in northern Germany alleged that managers told them to alter data, modify doses and replace dead animals with live ones without informing the company's clients.

It's a pharmacology/toxicology lab, and not an insignificant one at that. I remember reading somewhere about falsified reports being used to "prove" that glyphosate is safe, for example.

As if the animal torture was not bad enough, they had to go and cover up obvious toxicity that caused death of the animals, by cutting off parts of the animals that died with their ID numbers, and grafting them onto new animals.

Truly unbelievable.

 

[Rafael Lao Wai]

As in all things, honesty comes at a heavy price. Not just losing a high income job, but not being to pay for their college loans, and losing a girlfriend/wife (funny I don't know if I'm PC not saying "losing a boyfriend/husband") and children ending up with a broken family. I can imagine most spouses would berate the worse half for being honest and naive, and not knowing how the world really works.

It does. Doctors would be in a bad situation if they tried to do the right things. But that does mean that they are choosing day after day to cause the destruction of the quality of life of many people, and it's not just about vaccines. It's statins, metformin, cortisone, braces, unnecessary removal of organs, bad advice( eat PUFA!), estrogen, SSRIs etc. These things mess with the behavior of people. By recommending all this bad stuff, they're surely causing great harm to many families. If a children becomes autistic or their parents's behavior changes for the worse, the entire family will suffer. Not to mention that iatrogenic deaths happen a lot.

And it's sad, because they( if they aren't psychos) have to either choose to keep harming people in order to get money, or abandon their career. They would probably be seen as wackos who read too much alternative medicine if they tried to actually do something to stop the madness. I guess this is more in the hands of the people. They have to realize that medical advice is almost always wrong, and have to start looking into the strategies with scientific evidence behind it. Poorly designed studies, as well as the media, make this harder.

This is true. "Peer review" is esteemed as some kind of holy grail, as if it's infallible, not considering that the "peers" doing the reviewing can be biased shills.

Unrelated to peer review, but:

Staff at 'appalling' German animal test lab say they were told to fake results | Daily Mail Online

Whistleblowers who said they worked for private testing firm LPT at two sites in northern Germany alleged that managers told them to alter data, modify doses and replace dead animals with live ones without informing the company's clients.

It's a pharmacology/toxicology lab, and not an insignificant one at that. I remember reading somewhere about falsified reports being used to "prove" that glyphosate is safe, for example.

As if the animal torture was not bad enough, they had to go and cover up obvious toxicity that caused death of the animals, by cutting off parts of the animals that died with their ID numbers, and grafting them onto new animals.

Truly unbelievable.

That's awful. Straight up fraud too.

That's probably why some studies show "benefits" to taking statins. It's possible that they just faked it.

 

[ecstatichamster]

Doctors are morons.

 

[burtlancast]

There's a simple fact no medic will ever admit, but it explains everything.

The lie of modern medicine resides in the way it's being taught: students are informed from the start medicine is allegedly and EXACT SCIENCE (just like physics or chemistry).

Since it's an exact science, failure of the drugs is never mentioned to students. And the patients failing to respond are in consequence seen as annoying contrarians.

Of course, even the most deluded student understands medicine is a HUMAN science, where absolutes don't exist, and thus any taught treatment should be backed by precise statistics compiled at the bed of the patient, and these things SHOULD be discussed extensively during +10 years of formation.

And that's where it all goes horribly wrong: teachers simply refuse to discuss failure or provide statistics compiled in the population.

"Just prescribe what you've been taught, and don't ask too many questions".

To insure this, the medical student will never be exposed to the reflections of a senior folk doctor about what in his long career has worked or not. These doctors not part of teaching institutions are never introduced to them.

Never ever.

So, as a student, you either go along with the hypocrisy, and ignore those not responding to your treatment, or you look for another line of work.

This is even more unbelievable since OUTSIDE medical schools, failure is always advertised and used as a motive to public funding.

There's an urban saying: "When all the good people have quit in disgust, you'll be left with the disgusting ones".

 

[yerrag]

Any field that pretends to adhere to science seeks to attain the ambiguity of language, and the imcomprehensibility of key concepts. The attainment of higher learning and discovery of deeper truth gives way to circumlocution in which expertise is a pretension given legitimacy by titles conferred by cabals of emperors with no clothes.

 

[ecstatichamster]

Four worthwhile medical advances are:
Aspirin
Antibiotics
Insulin
Emergency medicine

The rest are a scam.

 

[postman]

don't trust anyone at face value, especially not authoritarians

 

[tca300]

Seeing several doctors in my mid teens for various ( based on intuition ) serious health problems and having them disregard my issues as normal is what pushed me to learn for myself. Haven't been back in almost 14 years now.

 

[Blossom]

Not everyone has eyes to see what’s happening around them. For those that do the system is set up so that short staffing keeps workers too hectic and frazzled to have time to reflect at a deeper level on the gross inadequacies. The medical world is also so fragmented and divided into specialties and sub specialties that there’s little coherent understanding of the big picture. It reminds me of the things you hear about how top secret military operations are based on a need to know basis which makes sense since the medical system we have today was founded during wartime operations. HIPPA in the US is supposedly about patient privacy but I wonder if there’s a deeper agenda. It’s highly stressed these days that medical providers only look at the bare minimum information they need to know to do their job.

 

[LucyL]

The medical world is also so fragmented and divided into specialties and sub specialties that there’s little coherent understanding of the big picture. It reminds me of the things you hear about how top secret military operations are based on a need to know basis which makes sense since the medical system we have today was founded during wartime operations.

This. My dear departed obgyn told me back in the day he could have been my single doctor, and looked at my thyroid and other various complaints, but now he was limited to the constraints of his profession. He was a rare doc.

i remember taking my grandma to a doctor many years ago before she passed. She had sores on her legs and the doctor literally had to pull out a medical textbook and look up pictures to compare. For some reason this bothered me, but I can give it a pass because consulting a text isn’t a sign of incompetence. It was a gut feeling tho.

I asked the head doc in the NICU if it would be ok to put breastmilk on the skin of my preemie (I was thinking about fat absorption etc) and she literally said there had been no studies and she couldn't tell me.

 

[tankasnowgod]

That's probably why some studies show "benefits" to taking statins. It's possible that they just faked it.

This is something Anthony Colpo has pointed out extensively. First, only men under 65 with a previous heart condition have ever shown any improvement when taking statins. Never any benefits to women, anyone over 65, and anyone without a previous heart condition. That happens to be about 92% of people who are prescribed statins, so right there, that's an issue.

Beyond that, no Statin trial after 2005 has ever shown any benefit to anyone. That was after some rules regarding clinical trials were tightened up. So, the drugs either magically stopped working for the 8% of people that saw benefits after 2005, or the earlier results were based on fraud.

 

[Nigel Forester]

Maybe worthwhile for th

This is something Anthony Colpo has pointed out extensively. First, only men under 65 with a previous heart condition have ever shown any improvement when taking statins. Never any benefits to women, anyone over 65, and anyone without a previous heart condition. That happens to be about 92% of people who are prescribed statins, so right there, that's an issue.

Beyond that, no Statin trial after 2005 has ever shown any benefit to anyone. That was after some rules regarding clinical trials were tightened up. So, the drugs either magically stopped working for the 8% of people that saw benefits after 2005, or the earlier results were based on fraud.

On a wellness site I read a doctor once wanted to have statins put in the water supply.

 

[Rafael Lao Wai]

This is something Anthony Colpo has pointed out extensively. First, only men under 65 with a previous heart condition have ever shown any improvement when taking statins. Never any benefits to women, anyone over 65, and anyone without a previous heart condition. That happens to be about 92% of people who are prescribed statins, so right there, that's an issue.

Beyond that, no Statin trial after 2005 has ever shown any benefit to anyone. That was after some rules regarding clinical trials were tightened up. So, the drugs either magically stopped working for the 8% of people that saw benefits after 2005, or the earlier results were based on fraud.

Helps putting things into perspective. My uncle never had any heart condition and was put on statins, because he had high cholesterol. So even by the so called evidence, he wouldn't benefit from it anyway.

Thanks! Very interesting.