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Ethics in Medicine are a Dead Letter: Silencing Doctors about your Personal Health Care
Related: ethics in medicine, gear, gears of the machine, health, SARS-CoV-2 aka COVID-19 aka Coronavirus
re: Odds of Being Reinfected with COVID are Nil
re: natural immunity
re: ethics in medicine
Real science is never settled, and anyone who has certainty on such things is not qualified to discuss it.
Free and open discourse are a dead letter everywhere. Coming soon to a doctor near you.
See also: Noise: a Flaw in Human Judgement @AMAZON, by Daniel Kahneman.
AEIR: Good Medicine Requires Second Opinions
August 14, 2021, by Barry Brownstein
....Judgements about Covid have been noisy. During the pandemic forecasts for the spread of Covid, the impact of masks, lockdowns, and other measures has been consistently wrong. This is not a surprise. As Kahneman reports, most forecasts are not reliable.
Dr. Fauci is not a superforecaster. There is little evidence that he works in “perpetual beta,” gathering and synthesizing perspectives. On the contrary, he attacks those he disagrees with, such as the authors of the Great Barrington Declaration. Real leaders listen to others; they don’t dominate others.
When it comes to the medical profession, we want to believe we can rely on our doctors. Many people want to believe Dr. Fauci.
Yet, the medical profession is especially noisy. Kahneman reports,
“Faced with the same patient, different doctors make different judgments about whether patients have skin cancer, breast cancer, heart disease, tuberculosis, pneumonia, depression, and a host of other conditions. Noise is especially high in psychiatry, where subjective judgment is obviously important. However, considerable noise is also found in areas where it might not be expected, such as in the reading of X-rays.”
Isn’t reading an X-ray or biopsy an objective fact on which nearly all competent radiologists and pathologists would agree? The answer is “No.” Kahneman explains...
Coercion Blocks Discovery
During this pandemic, open-mindedness, self-criticism, and the gathering and synthesizing of perspectives have been actively resisted. The “official” version on lockdowns, masks, and vaccines cannot be questioned. The news and social media actively censor opinions contrary to the “official” version, calling it misinformation. Treating Covid patients with ivermectin has been made very difficult.
And now the Federation of State Medical Boards (FSMB) is setting a policy to keep doctors in line with the “official” versions of health authorities. The FSMB has stated, due “to a dramatic increase in the dissemination of COVID-19 vaccine misinformation and disinformation by physicians and other health care professionals on social media platforms, online and in the media,” strict action is needed. They warn, “Physicians who willfully generate and spread COVID-19 vaccine misinformation or disinformation are risking disciplinary action by state medical boards, including the suspension or revocation of their medical license.”
President and CEO Humayun Chaudhry of the FSMB ominously added, “I hope that physicians and other licensees get the message.”
...If a person experiences Bell’s palsy after taking the first dose of the vaccine, would it be advisable to get a second shot? Apparently, a physician who advises a patient not to get a second shot would violate official guidance. How about a teenager who experienced myocarditis after their first shot? Again, official guidance is to get the second shot. The FSMB policy puts physicians in an ethical dilemma and incentivizes self-censorship.
Are one-size-fits-all health policies consistent with what we know about biochemical individuality (explained in this essay)? Would a physician face disciplinary action for considering the patient’s age, occupation, underlying health, diet, and exercise pattern when advising on vaccination?
...
WIND: this is the end of trusting your doctor, who cannot afford to express his/her own views on your personal medical care.
We have entered a truly Orwellian age, where “misinformation” means only that it is not the official government position.
It was a sort-of-free country for a few centuries. We’re done with that. Now you have to ask for permission for all sorts of things in your life.
But the medical profession is de[endable and well-intentioned, right? (See Unaccountable).
Before Covid, famed Johns Hopkins physician Marty Makary wrote Unaccountable: What Hospitals Won’t Tell You and How Transparency Can Revolutionize Health Care. The unwillingness of the medical profession to root out incompetent physicians and those physicians with addictions prompted Makary’s book.
Makary left medical school after seeing a patient die from an operation she didn’t want or need. He observes that healthcare is “an industry that does not abide by the same principles of accountability for performance that govern other industries. Instead, our health care system leaves its customers walking in blind. All while simply rewarding doctors for doing more.”
Eventually, returning to finish medical school, Makary has become a leading reformer. During the pandemic, Makary has challenged the orthodoxy on masks, herd immunity, and natural immunity.
In his book, Makary reports on how medical boards, hospital administrators, and other doctors protect their profession and fail to root out bad doctors. He observes there are “grossly impaired physicians, doctors with horrible skills, hazardous judgment, ulterior motives, or who suffer from substance-abuse or other problems that make them dangerous. Society ought to be able to deal with this better, not sweep it all under the rug.”
Indeed, Makary “never heard of anyone losing their license from a state medical board’s action.” Makary points to California:
“The Medical Board of California, like all others, is responsible for licensing and disciplining physicians. On three different audits conducted during the 1980s, the California auditor general found that the board wasn’t doing its job. Apart from that announcement, no further action was taken. The board went eighteen years without another audit until 2003, when University of San Diego Law School professor Julie D’Angelo Fellmeth became the medical board enforcement monitor. Then she blew a whistle. Testifying to a Senate committee in 2008 after years of trying to sound alarms, she said the Medical Board of California routinely ‘failed to promptly remove from work physician participants who tested positive for prohibited substances.’
The board had five out of five failed audits. Still, rather than address the substance abuse among its staff, it instead decided to terminate its physician substance-abuse program completely.”
In short, Makary considers how licensing boards mainly serve “the interests of their stakeholders—doctors:”...
Boards who have turned their backs on incompetent and addicted doctors are now threatening doctors who differ from the Covid vaccine orthodoxy.
Makary reports, “The vast majority of major medical mishaps result from breakdowns in communication.” In many organizational cultures, nurses are rewarded for following orders, and self-censorship is rampant. He explains,
“The hospital can be an intimidating place for a health care worker. It has a strong hierarchy. Following orders promptly is valued the same way it is on the battlefield. Defiance is unheard of and punishable with harsh penalties. The nurses and residents taking the orders often don’t have as much expertise as the ordering doctors and might question their own knowledge if they are feeling something isn’t right.”
Censorship and self-censorship kills. Bad ideas only drive out good ideas when bad ideas are granted legal tender. The FSMB is strangling the medical discovery process and threatening the health of those they claim to be protecting.
...
WIND: “trust your doctor”, “talk to your doctor”. We’ve all spoon-fed that twadle everywhere.
