the truth ministry comes for doctors
FSMB to become your medical monarch?
The Federation of State Medical Boards (FSMB) approved a medical misinformation and disinformation policy at its annual meeting in New Orleans last weekend.
The guidance, written by FSMB's Ethics and Professionalism Committee, provides recommendations both for state medical boards when drafting their own policies, and for licensees regarding best practices.
"More than 2 years into this pandemic, the largest threat next to the spread of the virus itself is the spread of disinformation and misinformation," Humayun Chaudhry, DO, CEO and president of FSMB, said in an interview with MedPage Today.
Chaudhry noted that the first line of the document "sets the tone -- that truthful and accurate information is central to the provision of quality medical care."
indeed and high time!
i, for one, look forward to seeing all these purveyors of mendacious misinformational menace brought to heel!
WHO shall we start with?
or perhaps the fiendish folks that sold us on “two weeks to flatten the curve” lockdowns that stretched to years despite clearly doing no good and running contrary to 100 years of evidence based pandemic guidelines?
or perhaps the mask zealots whose outright lies and made up pseudoscience spread with such rapidity and rancor? these nattering ne’er do wells cannot even keep their stories straight!
or perhaps these notorious sources of vaccine mis and disinformation?
or mayhap the dastards who closed the schools or shunted the sick into high vulnerability places like nursing homes or who killed thousands with ill advised “vent early-vent hard” treatment plans that were pushed to hospitals?
so much wrong and so little accountability.
round ‘em up and banish them all from the realm say i!
huzzah!
as, of course, this is unlikely to be the case and that instead this august band of rapacious regulators is certain to support these false narratives and the legions of liars who propagated them and to threaten any who disagree with revocation of licensure and loss of livelihood in the fine tradition of stalin and lysenko, i fear i am unlikely to get my wish and so i’d like to point something out:
doctors get it wrong. a lot.
medical boards are worse.
and public health agencies worse still.
the practice of medicine has a long and terrifying history of quackery, mis and maltreatment of patients, and just plain being wildly, catastrophically incorrect about literally everything.
no one should consume medicine uncritically. ever.
look at any set of medical practice from 50 or 100 years ago and this becomes obvious.
benjamin rush, america’s doctor and signatory of the declaration of independence and for whom who knows how many medical centers and schools today are named was an outlandish and dangerous quack.
this is what passed for “bleeding edge” medicine:
and i say bleeding because that was his common prescription. blood letting, purging with toxic calomel, and that oldie but a goodie, “tobacco smoke enemas.” (yes, really)
the AMA has a statue of this guy in DC.
this was the sort of person who was dictating “the science” from the top down.
he probably killed george washington by treating his “inflammatory quinsy” (likely a bacterial infection causing a sore throat) by draining 80oz (2.4 liters) of blood. though this is debated, the most common defense is not “wow, what a sounds treatment idea!” but rather, “well, it was common practice at the time and thus not medical malpractice.”
that rationale should give serious pause.
because the idea that “we know stuff now and this time our medical science is sound!” is always the conceit of the present. those doctors in 1799 thought they had it figured out too.
they always do.
they are always wrong.
medicine is and ever shall be will be a moving target.
anyone who claims otherwise is selling something dangerous.
a useful mental experiment when considering some new practice or limitation in any system is “what would the world look like had we imposed this at some point in the past?”
if we had picked some top folks way back when and let them (as they would have been happy to do, rush was toweringly arrogant and loved what he did) dictate policy and censure and de-license doctors who disagreed, where would we be today?
yeah.
so maybe let’s don’t do that. because it’s not going to look any smarter 50 or 100 years from now than it would seem today to have the folks from 1918 who were treating soldiers with spanish flu with a new wonder drug and then wondering why young, fit men were dying of multiple organ failure still dictating treatment. they figured “wow, what a doozy of a flu! look how it causes kidney and liver failure!” the reality is that taking 3 bottles of aspirin at once will do that to you.
those were “the authorities.”
medicine is a process of discovery and discovery is best done in markets. imagine what covid would have been like if every family doctor, right from the start, had been forced to adopt the insane and inaccurate beliefs of “authorities” who thought it was fomite spread and distancing and mask preventable and who wanted to push track and trace for a respiratory virus and to engage in involuntary china style forced quarantine. (a practice they still support and are seeking a new WHO deal to be able to push by force.)
what if no one had been able to even discuss vitamin D, zinc, and proning instead of hard ventilation?
what if you could not discuss or report vaccine side effects or risks and has to pretend they stopped spread when they clearly don’t?
having a couple people far from the action decide what can and cannot be tried or even discussed is how you stifle progress and adaptation. imagine trying this in any other market. only the move czar can decide what to make movies about. only the federal fun board can decide what children should play with.
this cannot be a way forward.
imagine these zero covid loons whose pretense that an aerosol virus can be stopped in charge and sensible solutions like the great barrington declaration banned and success stories like sweden unmentionable.
if you want to see how “the authorities” reach their medical pre and proscriptions, take a spin through the RED DAWN emails complied by brownstone. it will unbalance your splenic humors.
it was invented twaddle and hokum.
because it always works like this:
All they needed to do to accomplish this was to tap into a premodern and unscientific (and essentially childish) penchant to believe that the right way to deal with a virus is to run and hide from it, as if human beings didn’t evolve with viruses in a complicated dance for a million years. Forget everything we’ve learned from science over the 20th century; instead, we should behave like Prince Prospero in Edgar Allen Poe’s short story Masque of the Red Death.
To this end, society gave up all its ideals: concern for the poor, high regard for civil liberties, opposition to biases against The Other, its celebration of the arts, and even its attachment to public schools and personal privacy. Other ideals were given up too: limited government, the Constitution, and human rights all had to bow to the great agenda of virus control.
so let’s keep medicine free.
let’s keep speech free.
let’s keep society free.
the greatest risk here is that we’ve become so acculturated to these endless assaults on our rights, reason, and sanity that they barely even register anymore.
“oh look, it’s just another bureaucrat playing at tin hat dictator. what are they trying to take from me today?”
having that seem normal should terrify you.
they push until you resist. then they stop for a minute. they let you calm down. then they push again. inch by inch the encroachment increases. the ratchet is one way and one day you find yourself altogether captured as the slippery slope steepens and grows ever greasier.
“just a little” or “just for now” are deeply dangerous concessions.
it’s how they push you off your spot and into the abyss.
push back.
take back the ground.
it has become manifestly clear that we cannot trust these people.
when regulatory bodies become repressive, it is time that we remove them.
if not now, when?
if not you, who?
now and always the response to their overreach is simple:
During my medical training, one of my attendings who did a fair bit of teaching used to parrot the same 3 bits of advice. He rose to relative prominence as the first Chief Cancer Control Officer of the American Cancer Society and I remember my interactions with him as generally favorable. His advice was spot-on, in a humorous way.
His 3 points of advice:
1. Eat plants - okay, few would argue 25 years later that this is largely good advice
2. Estrogen replacement is a fountain of youth - Oopsies! Turns out it increases the risk of breast and uterine cancer as well as cardiovascular disease. So...that bit of advice changed maybe 15 years ago now.
3. Half of all we teach you in medical school will be proven wrong.
Kudos to our instructor as 1 and 2 proved 3 correct - though a small sample, for sure. The third point is the most important advice you can give in medicine - "This is my best advice with the information available to me now".
No hubris that we are always right.
This disinformation nonsense is anti-science. Arguing that the science is settled is only true until disproven. The first step in the scientific method is the observation that something is not as it should be based on prior assumptions and knowledge. This leads to a hypothesis that is counter to the common belief, and then to a study (or studies) pursuing the truth.
Anti-science is denying the scientific method, not denying those using it. The thought that medical boards are going to police when and how the "truth" can be challenged is an almost unthinkable premise. You want more doctor shortages? Start slapping the wrists of those willing to challenge convention by trying to move the needle of knowledge. Watch the rats continue to jump from the sinking ship.
Laughing at Rachel here. A few weeks ago a guy In our industrial neighborhood was chest banging to me that he was *proud* that he was triple vaxxed. I asked him if he took the flu vaccine every season. He says “ hell no!”. Ok I’m doubting his intelligence at this point. Yesterday he walks up the alley all masked up , low energy body language. He stops 15 feet away. “ I have COVID” he says. I want to laugh, but I humor him a little bit. I said, “ I thought you were vaxxed?…. so the vaccine doesn’t work?”. Then he got angry with me, “ of course you can get it if you vaxxed!” Ok. I asked what the symptoms were. “ like a bad cold” he replied. “ but I took got some Tamiflu and it helped.”
WTFing bloody hell! I’m going insane surrounded by STUPID people!!!!