Skip to main content

Think All Doctors are Trustworthy? Read This

Let me start by saying that I think most doctors are decent people who want to help their patients. But sometimes I struggle to fathom the way they think. Dr. Michael Eades says most doctors aren't critical thinkers, so maybe that explains it. (Eades is a former civil engineer. If you can't solve problems, you don't last long in engineering school.)

First, I have to wonder about the common sense (let alone critical thinking) of physicians, who in general can't transform a six-figure income into large nest egg. Yes, physicians have expenses, but so do the rest of us. Why don't they just start an IRA with Vanguard and set up automatic payments? How does this concern you if you're not a doctor? Where there's money, there's motive. Prescribing statins, PPIs and diabetes drugs and recommending ADA and AHA diets sounds a lot easier, and more profitable, than revisiting  endocrinology textbooks, learning to interpret medical studies, and working with patients to improve their lifestyle. ADA and AHA high-carb diets will make diabetics worse and keep them coming back for more appointments, more services and more prescriptions. The same diet will keep GERD patients (I was one) coming back periodically for a new prescription.

Digestive tract issues bring me to my second point. For reasons I can't begin to fathom, two doctors, Robert Wilcox, MD and Okay H. Odocha MD, subjected a suspect to fourteen hours of invasive procedures at a hospital to find drugs. The suspect was stopped for not coming to a complete stop at a stop sign. The good doctors didn't find any drugs, and the hospital has billed the man $6,000 for raping him. The search warrant wasn't valid for the county where Wilcox and Odocha of the Gila Hospital of Horrors were on duty. (To the medical profession's credit, the first doctor the cops went to refused to do a search, saying it was unethical.) The colonoscopy the man went through carries risks of a "Hole or tear in the wall of the colon that requires surgery to repair, infection needing antibiotic therapy (very rare), and reaction to the medicine you take to relax, causing breathing problems or low blood pressure."

Didn't the doctors think anything beyond an x-ray was excessive? Or that performing medical procedures for non-medical reasons was inappropriate? Didn't they read the warrant, or wonder if fourteen hours of poking someone's rectum against his will was an invitation for a lawsuit?

The Basic Laws of Human Stupidity by Carlo M. Cipolla opines that "reasonable people have difficulty in conceiving and understanding unreasonable behaviour....Nobody knows, understands or can possibly explain why that preposterous creature does what he does." All you can do is think for yourself and protect yourself. Or file a multi-million dollar lawsuit.

Comments

tess said…
i hope the "suspect" tears them ALL a new one -- pun intended. [grrrrr]
Lori Miller said…
It's like something you might see on "Better Call Saul."
Well I'm speechless.

What a world this is at times.........

All the best Jan
Lori Miller said…
At least this sort of thing still evokes outrage.
JanKnitz said…
Given the mounting evidence that statins are not only of no use to large segments of the population for whom they are prescribed and also that they carry serious side effects for many, I'm appalled that doctors continue to prescribe them--a little critical thinking would go a long way there. I DO understand the pressures physicians are under from the fear of law suits for failing to follow "standards of practice", from their colleagues, from insurers who penalize physicians that don't prescribe so called "preventative measures" like statins, etc. So I do understand if they make the recommendation--they are under the gun.

What I DO NOT understand is physicians who INSIST that their patients MUST take statins and sometimes even fire patients who refuse, physicians who use scare tactics to convince perfectly healthy people that they will soon die of heart problems if they don't take statins, and physicians who simply refuse to recognize the serious side effects with no appreciable benefit. These doctors are no more trustworthy than the doctors you describe.

I'm fortunate to have a physician who agrees to disagree about statins and is willing to work with me to monitor my health and advise me on how to remain healthy despite my lack of statins. HE is worthy of my trust!
Lori Miller said…
Admitting they're wrong--that by prescribing statins to people that have been harmed for no good reason--would be painful. The book Calculated Risks mentions physicians in Essen, Germany who amputed breasts of women who for the most part didn't have breast cancer. When this was proved, one of the physicians set fire to his records and then himself.

A patient can accept a written prescription if the doctor needs to write one to cover himself, but doesn't have to fill it.

Popular posts from this blog

An Objective Book about Other Childhood Vaccines

Today's decision by the CDC to add COVID shots to the schedule of childhood vaccines has some people concerned about the rest of the vaccines on the schedule. Contrary to fact-checker claims, adding COVID shots to the schedule means children will be required in about a dozen states to get a COVID shot to attend public school. Indiana isn't one of them--our childhood vaccination law doesn't mention the CDC and such a requirement could run afoul of our ban on COVID vaccine passports. But even freewheeling Indiana has some vaccine requirements and this kerfuffle has people wondering how safe those vaccines are.  There's a book called Vaccines: Truth, Lies and Controversy  by Peter C. Gotzsche, DrMedSci and co-founder of the Cochrane Collaboration, about the safety and efficacy of all those vaccines, including COVID and others. Cochrane was founded to "to organise medical research findings to facilitate evidence-based choices about health interventions involving healt

Blog Lineup Change

Bye-bye, Fathead. I've enjoyed the blog, but can't endorse the high-fat, high-carb Perfect Health Diet that somehow makes so much sense to some otherwise bright people. An astrophysicist makes some rookie mistakes on a LC diet, misdiagnoses them, makes up "glucose deficiency," and creates a diet that's been shown in intervention studies to increase small LDL, which can lead to heart disease. A computer programmer believes in the diet and doesn't seem eager to refute it because, perhaps, scientists are freakin' liars and while he's good at spotting logical inconsistencies, lacks some intermediate knowledge of human biology. To Tom's credit, he says it's not the right diet for everyone, but given the truckload of food that has to be prepared and eaten, impracticality of following it while traveling (or even not traveling), and unsuitability for FODMAPs sufferers, diabetics and anyone prone to heart disease (i.e., much of the population), I'm

Not Only Cheaper, But Easier

A while back, I wrote about saving money on break time coffee and snacks. I haven't done very well putting it into practice. But a post by James Clear today got me thinking about it again: Warren Buffett uses a two-list system to prioritize things. Check it out --and follow the instructions. Using Buffett's two-list system, two of the goals I ended up with were taking care of myself and saving $400 more per month than I already am. As I said, I've been wanting to save money, and the system made me really focus on this. I came up with 11 money-saving ideas, six of which had to do with food. Buying hamburger in bulk. Ranch Foods Direct sells one-pound packages of 80% lean pastured ground beef in bundles of 20 for a lot less than Whole Foods. Sprouts only carries super-lean beef that's grass-fed, and it's more expensive, too.  Not driving to Whole Foods. Whole Foods is out of my way, and saving a weekly trip saves gas. Coffee at home, tea at work. Tea is fr

This Just In: Yogurt Doesn't Improve Health

A recent study from Spain finds "In comparison with people that did not eat yogurt, those who ate this dairy product regularly did not display any significant improvement in their score on the physical component of quality of life, and although there was a slight improvement mentally, this was not statistically significant," states López-García. Most yogurt is pretty much pudding with a little bacteria . Pudding is a sugar bomb. Hard to believe the stuff doesn't improve health outcomes, isn't it? But as usual, researchers are calling for...more research. "For future research more specific instruments must be used which may increase the probability of finding a potential benefit of this food."

1972: Carole King, M*A*S*H and...Food for 2014?

I feel well enough to try Atkins induction again. The palpitations are gone, even without taking potassium. My energy level is back to normal--no more trucking on the treadmill early in the morning  to burn off nervous energy or emergency meat, cheese and mineral water stops after yoga. It's back to lounging around to Chopin and Debussy in the morning and stopping at the wine bar for pleasure. I'm using the original Atkins book: Dr. Atkins' Diet Revolution from 1972. While looking in the book for a way to make gelatin (which is allowed on induction, but Jello(TM) and products like it have questionable ingredients), I felt the earth move under my feet : those recipes from 42 years ago look delicious and they're mostly real food. It makes sense, though: the cooks who wrote the recipes probably didn't have had a palette used to low-fat food full of added sugar or a bag of tricks to make low-fat food edible. Anyone who writes a recipe called "Cottage Cheese and