Do You Still Trust Your Physician?

From WebMD: “Comorbidity is a medical term that you may have heard your doctor use. It describes the existence of more than one disease or condition within your body at the same time. Comorbidities are usually long-term, or chronic. They may or may not interact with each other.”

“JC Dodge” posted a thought-provoking article at American Partisan. For example:

Although we are all dealing with COmorVIDities, anyone who has COmorVIDities from the vaccine can place them purely at the feet of the medical community. You might say, “But JC, the government and companies required it of Employees.”. Although this appears true on it’s face, if the medical community had stood up and acted on the, “First do no harm.” oath they took as medical providers, the government and businesses wouldn’t have had anywhere to go but “STOP”.

One of the COmorVIDities I now have, is a fear that anything I am told by any medical provider, whether for my kids or myself, is BS and aimed at padding their pocket. The majority of them have proven they will take kickbacks from the GOV or Big Pharma, over providing quality medical care.

I actually questioned my Child’s Pediatrician, when she was getting a normal childhood vaccine, because it didn’t sound like the ones my other three kids had received over the last 24 years. Why? Because I no longer trust them to do the right thing for their Patients.

Although I know some good Doctors and Nurses, I believe most of them were forced out of what is considered, “The Medical Community”, because they weren’t foolish enough to get the vaccine, or wanted to be able to prescribe “Non-Approved by Big Pharma” treatments. Most of those left are getting their “30 Pieces of Silver” from Big Pharma and the GOV, and couldn’t be happier.

I am a hospitalist. Most of the physicians I know are frontline in-the-trenches doctors taking care of patients and in no position of authority over hospital administrators, business administrators, and public health authorities.

I remember only two things from the first day of medical school, spoken by an Asian professor:

  • “If you’re sitting here today, you probably have an IQ of at least 120.” (So don’t worry, you can handle the workload.)
  • Mention of Sir William Osler’s Aequanimitas essay.
  • “Every day not sunny day.”

Most of medical school, which typically lasts four years, involves memorization of massive amounts of information, which you regurgitate and on a test and have mostly forgotten a month later. It is not fun, to say the least. Medical students have actually done more analytic thinking while acquiring their undergraduate degrees and in high school. After med school, physicians spend at least three to five years in a residency that also requires incredible memorization, but you tend to retain more since it is clinically relevant. Much of the actual thinking of a practicing physician revolves around establishing a diagnosis and formulating a rational treatment plan. Even then, much of the diagnosis is made by high-tech imaging and blood tests, so the doctor has to do less thinking than our predecessors of 40 years ago. Similarly, we have “clinical practice guidelines” that are composed by “authoritative” committees, telling us how to treat specific conditions. If we follow those guidelines, we may be more likely to retain our jobs, earn a salary bonus, and prevail in malpractice lawsuits. Physicians who think and question the guidelines are too often seen as trouble-makers. Unlike 40 years ago, a majority of physicians are not independent, but are employed by large organizations that tend to control them via a paycheck.

My point is: Many practicing physicians don’t have to do much thinking, so they don’t. Sad, but true.

So JC Dodqe is right to question his child’s pediatrician.

Steve Parker, M.D.

PS: One of the reasons for specialization is that there is so much to learn in any given field, there’s just no time or mental capacity to keep up with less pertinent aspects of medicine. An orthopedic surgeon doesn’t need to know much at all about heart failure, diabetes, and anemia. That’s my job.

2 Comments

Filed under Coronavirus

2 responses to “Do You Still Trust Your Physician?

  1. Emlee Lage

    50/50. My primary care doc pushed the covid vaccine after I had covid (and is afraid to be on the same side of the room as me) and my opthamologist screwed up my eyes. However, my gynecologist and the orthopaedic doc who repaired my shoulder after a car wreck are both caring and skilled.