Why Do Doctors Push Dangerous Pharmaceuticals on Patients?

The medical industry has done a remarkable job of hijacking our innate desire to "help" others.

When the COVID-19 vaccines entered the market, although I expected the vaccine to have a lot of problems, I was completely unprepared for the deluge of injuries that would be shared with me by friends and patients immediately following its rollout. In turn, I felt I had a civic duty to document them (in the first year of this campaign, I came across approximately 50 similar deaths following vaccination) and one of the earliest articles I wrote here was that yearlong compilation.  

I mention this because I asked one of the California physicians I spoke with to share the most noteworthy COVID-19 vaccine injuries they had come across. These cases were very similar to what I observed within my log and what many here have observed as well. In previous times, either of our logs would have been sufficient to at least pause the vaccine program; instead, they joined the countless other safety signals that were also ignored by every Western government. The cases the doctor shared with me were as follows:

•I have a 90-year-old female patient in good physical health that I have been seeing weekly for years. One week when she came in, I noticed she had Bell’s Palsy, leading me to immediately suspect she had had a stroke in the previous week. Her cognitive function had also abruptly declined to the point she had brought a written list of the issues she’d experienced during the week so that she could recall them during the visit (before this she always had excellent mental acuity). I suspected a vaccine reaction, so I asked her if she had received a vaccine in the last week, but my patient had no recollection of having done so.  

I then contacted her children to ask for a copy of her vaccine card because I "needed it for her chart." Her card confirmed that she had received the first Pfizer vaccine in the week preceding her visit. I had to phrase the request in this way because I knew my patient had not wanted to get vaccinated (she had already made her position clear to her primary care provider), but her children had strong-armed her into getting it, so they were unlikely to be receptive to any suggestion that I disapproved of the vaccine. 

Since I have worked with her, I have been able to reverse some of her brain damage, but she still has some memory deficits, she has developed anxiety and is very frustrated that she has lost the ability to keep track of her thoughts. Her cranial nerve damage has also improved, but she still has some issues with drooling because her lip will not come up to keep her mouth closed, she can’t hold air in her cheeks for prolonged periods, and her tongue will deviate to the right.

•One of my very close friends had a 69-year-old father who lived out of the area and had a history of sarcoidosis. Given that sarcoidosis can affect the heart, some believe this condition increases one’s risk of complications from COVID-19 (this study found that was not the case), whereas I believe it increases the likelihood of a severe vaccine complication (sarcoidosis has also been observed to onset follow vaccination and this reader’s aunt died a few months after the vaccine reactivated a dormant case of sarcoidosis). The father did not want to be vaccinated. However his cardiologist, likely for the previously mentioned reasons, thought he needed to be vaccinated, and after months of being pressured by his cardiologist, got vaccinated.

Following vaccination, he had immediate symptoms of discomfort and shortness of breath. He went home and three hours later went to the ER where he was admitted for rapid onset pneumonia (his lungs were filling with fluids). He died less than 2 weeks later. This one hit home for me because he was a really good friend.

•One of our friends worked at an upscale coastal nursing home. Before December 2020 (their date of vaccination), there were no deaths in the facility from COVID-19. On the day of vaccination (with the first Pfizer) 47 residents got the vaccine, and 2 died within 3 hours. The next morning 10-11 hours later there was another death. This is similar to another incident Steve Kirsch reported, and one that happened in Norway. Unfortunately individuals rarely noticed when our elderly die of “natural causes” in these homes since everyone assumes they will die anyways of “old age.” Keep in mind that the elderly are amongst those least able to resist medical coercion and that in the future, you too will likely be in their situation. 

•We knew a 14-year-old male who was on the track team through his classmate. Shortly before Thanksgiving last year he was vaccinated and taken to the emergency room 1 or 2 days later because he was very weak and felt sick to the stomach (where he received assurance nothing was wrong). By Sunday he could not walk, talk, or swallow and was having some breathing difficulty so he was admitted to the pediatric intensive care unit. He was in the hospital for several weeks and left in a wheelchair but can get up if he uses a walker (note this sounds like Guillain-Barre syndrome, something that has been observed by many, including myself, following COVID-19 vaccination, but my source was never able to confirm that diagnosis).

•A 36-year-old male who was one of my patients was formally diagnosed with Guillain-Barre syndrome after mRNA vaccination. After the first dose, he experienced some weakness and an increase in back pain. After the 2nd dose, he developed numbness and tingling in his legs, and difficulty walking and standing. 

Following prolonged treatment for 4 months, he has mostly but not fully recovered. This individual did not want to be vaccinated but was threatened with his losing his employment if he did not vaccinate. Since his wife was disabled and needs his support, he finally caved in and was vaccinated in the spring of this year.

•I had a patient who had long-haul covid and then was vaccinated. Following his first Pfizer, his long-haul COVID became worse, and I encouraged him not to get the second vaccine but was unsuccessful as so many other people in his life were pushing him to. After the second vaccine he crashed, and his symptoms became so debilitating that he can no longer work (he used to be a successful real estate broker). His symptoms include severe headaches, brain fog, fatigue, extreme exhaustion, severe back pain and often being unable to open the eyes because of how sensitive they are to light. The saddest thing is that he can no longer pick up his baby daughter because doing so causes severe pain for him. When I last heard from him, he was trying alternative therapies in the hope one might work.

As I reviewed these cases, I saw they raised a key question I have not yet addressed here. What on earth drives people, particularly doctors to fanatically push the (frequently lethal) vaccine onto those who so deeply trust them? 

After I thought this over, I realized I have avoided that topic because it’s a difficult one to tackle and I am ultimately not sure how to answer that question. Since that is not a good excuse, I consulted quite a few mentors and colleagues over the past week, and this article will be a composite of our ideas.

The Ghosts of Medicine

As best as I can tell, since the 1700s (and likely earlier), the medical profession has been defined by aggressively pushing toxic pharmaceuticals of dubious value onto the public and then denying any harm could have arisen from the drug. Frequently after the fact, the drug is widely accepted to be inappropriate to administer, but there is always an inability by the medical field to believe any of the drugs presently in use are like those of the not-too-distant past that are now widely recognized as quackery.  

Mercury for instance was in use well before the 1700s and throughout its use, severely injured countless numbers of people.  Nowadays mercury is viewed as one of those silly remedies from the past that medicine, by virtue of its continual scientific progress, discarded. This history is important to remember because Western medicine will always insist that quackery could have only happened in the past. This is particularly ironic since mercury still retains a few “safe” medical uses such as for dental fillings and multidose vaccines which have persisted to the present day because an economically viable substitute has not yet been found for them.

Whenever I review historical accounts of patients being severely injured by these medications, I immediately notice how similar they are to everything I see occurring in the present day. Likewise, in the same way the COVID-19 vaccines have been dishonestly labeled as safe and effective while all of their severe reactions are covered up, I have also seen the same occur throughout my life with many other drugs. In most cases, the public never becomes aware of this body count, but because of just how many have been harmed by the COVID-19 vaccines, this forgotten side of medicine has at long last reached the public’s awareness.

So, in trying to answer the question of why many doctors push dangerous drugs on patients, we must consider what could have also created the same motivation so far back in the past. 

At this point in time, I believe there are three explanations to consider:

 1. The same psychological needs inherent to the human condition have been possible to meet in each era by pushing pharmaceutical drugs.

 2. Relatively similar external incentives to push pharmaceutical drugs have existed in each era.

 3. Some type of collective consciousness has emerged within allopathy that will always fanatically support the use of pharmaceuticals.  

Medical Blindness

In most cases, a doctor will not prescribe a medication to a patient if they believe the risk of the medication outweighs the benefit. Given that it is often quite easy to tell (both from anecdotal experiences and a literature review) if the risk of a toxic medication outweighs its benefits, this begs the question of "Why can doctors never see this?"

Many in my life have had disastrous medical injuries known to be associated with a specific pharmaceutical and yet over and over, have been told by almost every medical professional they spoke to that their injury was without question, not related to the drug. Because this is a personal issue for me (medical gaslighting is horrific to experience), I wrote a series on the topic I would recommend those of you who have direct experiences with medical gaslighting to read.  I would particularly recommend article below as it expands upon many of the themes covered today:

Why Do Doctors Close Their Eyes to Medical Injuries?

The key points of the series are as follows:

 •Most doctors are well-intentioned human beings who have been acclimated to a system that conditions this harmful behavior and fosters an inability to recognize anything is wrong with it. I often repeat this theme and it is not to defend my profession, but rather to emphasize that any of us could become a gaslighter if we went through that same medical education.

  •Our religion of science conditions people to doubt their own observations and instead defer to “scientific evidence.” I would instead argue that provided one can distinguish a strong correlation from a weak correlation (e.g. in one day seeing three people who had a severe or fatal reaction following COVID-19 vaccination versus meeting one person who developed a sore throat after the vaccine), strong correlations must be treated as demonstrating a causal relationship until it is proven that they do not. Unfortunately, by the current societal convention, the burden is instead placed on proving causality, and because of this, an impossible-to-meet standard is created that results in many things that are clear as day being dismissed as claims that are “without evidence” by a corrupt scientific establishment.

•Since there is so much information out there you need to use in your day-to-day practice of medicine, it is nearly impossible to sufficiently research the safety and efficacy of each medication you use. To address this challenge, doctors will typically default to trusting authoritative guidelines produced by corrupt groups whose assessments always ignore the harms of pharmaceuticals while exaggerating their benefits. Although widespread corruption exists, there is still a lot of good evidence in the scientific literature, but almost all of it gets filtered out by guideline committees. Additionally, many penalties exist for doctors who deviate from the recommendations of those committees, making it even harder to go against them.  

 •Because of how complex the human body mind and spirit are, that complexity is almost always overwhelming for the human mind to fully perceive or sensibly comprehend. To address this challenge, each medical system throughout history has developed models to simplify the practice of medicine to something comprehensible its members can utilize to treat disease. Unfortunately, no model can encompass everything, so conditions will always exist that are outside the scope of each model. In Western medicine for example, it is very common for patients to present with signs of an illness the doctors were never trained to look for, and as a result, in most cases, the doctors cannot “see” the illness (instead it blends into the incomprehensible complexity of the human body).  The origins of medical blindness are further discussed here.

•Doctors have strong psychological motivations to dismiss the possibility of a medical injury occurring.  I believe the primary reason is that they do not want to believe the art of medicine, they worked so hard to learn to help the world could have directly harmed their patients. This is a response I would expect almost anyone to exhibit, especially those with a strong psychological need to help others; the humility to recognize you made a profound mistake that violates your values is rare to come across. Additionally, there are many legal and financial incentives to deny the possibility that a medical injury occurred. The reasons doctors close their eyes to medical injuries are further discussed here.

However, while the inability of doctors to recognize medical injuries helps to explain how a well-intentioned doctor could decide to push an unsafe treatment on a patient, it does not explain what motivates them to do so. If I had a patient who did not want to take a treatment, I believed they should take, I would tell them the consequences of their actions were on them and leave it at that. In some areas like lifestyle medicine (e.g. smoking cessation, exercising, or having a better diet) we do just that, but in the case of pharmaceuticals, we go a step further and compulsively demand the patient take them. Why is this?

Conflicts of Interest

Many of the colleagues I spoke with believed conflicts of interest needed to be taken into account when considering this question. Blatant conflicts are easier to understand, so we will start there, but it must be remembered that these only apply to a portion of physicians in practice.  

The way physicians are currently compensated is a historic abnormality. In the past, doctors and most other professionals received a fraction of what doctors receive now (nonetheless this much more meager amount was still sufficient to convince the medical profession to abandon their skepticism of the unproven smallpox vaccine and aggressive push a disastrous vaccine they were paid to administer onto the entire world).  Doctors in the current era believe they are paid as much as they are because they “deserve” it, whereas I believe it is a product of them serving as the figureheads of the medical industry (prior to the catastrophic mishandling of COVID-19, doctors were the most trusted professionals in the United States).  

Because doctors serve as the trustworthy figureheads of this massive industry, there is an immense amount of lobbying behind the scenes to ensure they retain this status and to structure the medical system so that doctors can lavishly fund it. For example, we currently operate under a fee-for-service model where doctors are “paid” based on how many billable procedures they perform each day, and in almost all cases, the amount each doctor is paid is proportional to how much profit the profiteers of the health care systems also receive from that procedure being performed (e.g. with surgeries, although the surgeon is paid well, most of the money goes to parties besides the surgeon).

Doctors hence are incentivized to compete for medical specialties with the highest reimbursement per procedure and once board certified, to do as many of those procedures as possible, regardless of the harm they create. Fortunately, most doctors do not end up in these specialties, and those who do often conduct their practice with integrity. Nonetheless, there are also many cases of doctors who prioritize trying to perform as many surgeries as possible at the expense of patient safety (e.g. a colleague knew this victim of a deliberately overbooked neurosurgeon), and in most cases, their conduct is protected by the hospitals they work for since they generate so much money for the institution. 

Because direct bribery of physicians was outlawed within the United States, most bribery is instead directed at financially incentivizing the procedures themselves and paying off the expert physicians other members of the specialty defer to. For example, oncologists make 60-70% of their salary from selling marked-up chemotherapy drugs and enormous amounts of money is spent to lobby the academic “experts” of each medical specialty to recommend pharmaceuticals to their specialty.  For those wishing to learn more, this is an excellent account of how these perverse incentives distort the practice of medicine, and I can cite quite a few times in my life I witnessed a doctor aggressively push a bad drug that he was clearly being paid off to sell.

In a recent series on medical ethics within the context of abortion, I argued that the one consistent principle within medical ethics seems to be whatever results in a billable procedure is the ethical choice. For example, pediatrics argues the choice to vaccinate is always ethical regardless of who objects to it.  Simultaneously, a conventional pediatrician’s practice cannot sustain itself unless it sells a lot of vaccines, which is the reason why parents are always badgered to bring their children in for well-child visits.

These visits consist of a few quick checks of the child, weighing them (using charts made by formula companies that erroneously label children as being underweight so they can be started on extremely unhealthy infant formula), and giving numerous vaccines at each visit.  One consequence of those vaccinations is sudden infant death syndrome, and when the COVID-19 lockdowns paused the nonessential well-child visits, it was predicted that would lead to a historic drop in both vaccination and infant mortality, which was exactly what happened.  

Most fields of medicine that do not provide these extravagant billable procedures have been forced to adopt a model of very short patient visits so that at least 20 (and sometimes 30) can be billed per day to make up for the loss of the more lucrative procedures. A major consequence of this model is that it is almost impossible to make a tangible impact on many illnesses in such a brief period (some doctors can, but they are rare).

However, while it is impossible to do very much that is helpful in 15 minutes, it is possible to make a cursory diagnosis and write a prescription. Rather than feeling cheated in these situations, patients typically will feel that they got their money’s worth from the visit, whereas were a drug not to be given, the patient would instead feel upset nothing was “done.” This dilemma is especially true in psychiatry where the allotted visit time does not allow for talk therapy so providing a highly dangerous psychiatric medication becomes the only option available.

In addition to the pressure to prescribe from patients, every administrator also puts pressure on physicians working within a clinic or hospital to maximize their productivity and shorten their visit times. Many insurance companies (and medicare) have come up with metrics to improve the “quality of care,” and not surprisingly, many of these metrics reflect what proportion of their practice doctors can convince to take certain pharmaceuticals (e.g. statins or flu shots).  Administrators in turn penalize doctors who fail to meet these metrics because they did not effectively push these “essential” medications on their patients.

In short, the modern practice of medicine forces physicians to be boxed into a model of selling prescribing pharmaceuticals to their patients; if they don’t, they can’t make a living—there often is no time in the current practice model to address the underlying causes of a patient’s illness. In my own practice, I never prescribe (excluding a few medications I order directly and provide at cost). My patients do well with this safer approach to medicine, which to me argues against the current model of overprescribing and focusing on each disease rather than cultivating health.

However, while these systemic (and I would argue deliberately engineered) conflicts of interest can explain the external motivations doctors face to prescribe and many of my colleagues endorsed this explanation, many others did not.  This is because they recognize the majority of doctors are compassionate human beings who genuinely want the best for their patients and would not willingly choose financial interests over the well-being of their patients.

I Don’t Know

When a patient asks me a question, I frequently answer “I don’t know,” and explain my best guess to answer the question or propose a strategy for how I may be able to find the answer. What has always surprised me is how often after I say this, the patients in turn remark that I am the first doctor who has ever admitted their lack of knowledge and that my doing so significantly increases their trust in me.

Initially, I viewed this to be a consequence of knowledge making you humble; the more you know, the more you realize you don’t know. Conversely, the Dunning-Kruger Effect shows that the less people know, the more they believe with absolute certainty that they are right (this sadly explains a great deal about our society).

As I began to see how differently others related to the world in comparison to me, I realized that for many, their identity is based upon projecting to others that they are “right” and “know.” This is particularly easy to see with individuals in positions of authority, as they will always dig their heels in to avoid admitting fault or ignorance so that they can protect their status.  

For example, throughout my life, I have seen many individuals within the alternative communities attract a following and then become trapped by the “truth” they created a following with, which prevents them from ever admitting a belief they had previously espoused was wrong. In recent times, I have seen many members of this movement (e.g. Alex Berenson refusing to consider ivermectin works, or leading virus debunkers refusing to consider evidence viruses exist) fall into this same trap. From the day I first observed this phenomena, I have always felt quite sad for these individuals and the shackles they had placed upon themselves.

For me, true personal freedom is one of the most important things in life. A key reason why I write anonymously is so that I am both free to speak what I believe and more importantly to admit when I was wrong. I try quite hard to avoid espousing falsehood and to be transparent in my uncertainty, but at the end of the day, unless you are omnipotent, it is almost impossible to not be wrong about something on a regular basis.  

To some extent, you can avoid ever being wrong by refusing to commit yourself to a position on something (which colleagues have confided to me they do for precisely that reason).  Alternately, if one follows the opinion of a crowd, people rarely remember what you said when the crowd is later proven wrong.

To share an example of hiding in the crowd: in the early days of Vioxx (an unsafe advil-like drug that was pulled from the market after it killed approximately 50,000 Americans), my friend went to the VA for back pain. His doctor offered him a prescription of Vioxx which my friend declined because he had a gut feeling it was not safe, leading to her belligerently berating him for the rest of the appointment and leaving a nasty note about him in his medical record about his non-compliance (this is the actual term doctors use).  A few years later when Vioxx was pulled from the market, he saw the doctor again and asked her if she recalled how aggressively she had pushed him to take a potentially lethal medication. She denied this had ever happened, so he requested for her to pull up the chart where she had documented her conduct. At that point, she sheepishly dodged the subject and never discussed it again.

I suspect we will see many very similar things with the mRNA vaccines in the future as their harm comes out into public view. This is a key reason why I believe it is important to hold the people responsible for COVID-19 accountable; otherwise the crowd-seeking behavior will repeat long into the future.

More Drugs

One of the more common derisive slogans I hear directed against doctors is “M.D. stands for More Drugs,” and for many doctors, since most of the therapeutic knowledge for Western medicine base revolves around prescribing drugs, that is what they will do regardless of the fact it often cannot help the patient before them. Just as a surgeon must always cut to practice their craft, prescribing drugs is central to the identity of a doctor.  “To a man with a hammer, everything looks like a nail,” and in many cases, doctors have nothing they can offer besides drugs and the faith that they will work.

Since the medical industry makes sure physicians are placed on a pedestal, it is immensely difficult for them to admit they are wrong or do not know an answer to something.  In clinical practice, doctors must quickly do something that creates a measurable effect (pharmaceuticals excel at creating both good and bad effects).

In addition to those time constraints, doctors are frequently presented with situations where they do not know what to do and like many humans before them, will grasp at anything that has the possibility of offering a decent result. Pharmaceutical drugs are particularly convenient in this regard because their widely perceived legitimacy gives the doctor who does not know what to do the cover to appear knowledgeable while simultaneously not being accountable for any bad outcome or lack of improvement that follows the drug’s administration.

When I was a medical student, I had an inkling some of the doctors I trained under were asserting things they didn’t know to their patients to save face, but this was hard to recognize because I did not yet share their medical knowledge.  Once I attained an equal footing during my post-graduate medical education, I frequently recognized my fellow residents were asserting things as iron-clad truths to their patients or coworkers which I knew they had thought up on the spot and had no real basis for arguing nor any evidence to back up their claim.  

There have always been numerous internal pressures (e.g. supporting your self-identity) and external pressures (e.g. a doctor being expected to be the expert in medicine) that place a burden on human beings to “know” something and for many, those pressures can be overwhelming. In turn, it must be recognized that almost every tradition throughout history has observed it is immensely difficult for human beings to admit they “do not know” something, which is a situation doctors frequently encounter when their pharmacologic model of medicine fails them.

Ego and Identity

As I continued exploring my question, everything kept on coming back to asking why doctors are so bothered when someone does not want the drug they recommend rather than just letting the whole thing go. As I examined this question, I realized the outbursts I had seen at patients and the ways doctors got knotted up inside when a prescription is challenged were identical to what I had learned throughout my life to associate with someone having their identity be directly challenged.

Becoming a doctor requires making a massive investment of 12 years of your life, and because of both that investment in becoming an “expert” and the social mythology that has been crafted around being a doctor, it is understandable that doctors often have large egos. Because of the incestuous relationship between big pharma and medicine, medical training largely revolves around prescribing pharmaceuticals and not surprisingly, a doctor’s ego is frequently tied to the wonders of pharmacology.  

A key belief underlying modern medicine is that doctors are the experts that patients must seek out for advice, and as a result, if a patient rejects that advice, it challenges the doctor’s expertise and in turn their identity. Having a patient tell the doctor they don’t buy what the doctor is selling and reject the doctor’s prescription can be a bitter pill for those doctors to swallow. As a result, doctors often double down on their prescriptions to assert their expertise and show they know best when their advice is challenged.

Consider this example shared by a mentor: 

I have treated numerous physicians with complex issues none of their conventionally trained colleagues could address through using alternative modalities like homeopathy and I have had numerous times where the doctor completely cut me off once I got them better. The existence of efficacious therapies outside their body of knowledge is very threatening; it makes the doctors feel diminished, and from what I’ve seen they often default to acting like the whole ordeal was a bad dream that never happened rather than to consider the possibility that their model is incomplete.

Years ago, while discussing the nature of karma with a spiritual teacher, he told me:

Many of the terrible things people do in life are not a result of them being evil. Rather they are just the result of a fixation that was never let go.

Oftentimes when we have fixations, they cut to the core of our identity, and control us on such a deep level that the fixations are often quite difficult to even recognize but we will nonetheless hold onto them as tightly as we can. Many individuals who go into the healing fields have experiences earlier in life where their identity becomes tied to medicine being an incredible art and tied to the desire to be the one who can take pride in healing others.

This pattern is frequently found in doctors, and the pharmaceutical industry exploits this by tying that self-image to the act of administering pharmaceuticals (for example if they saw a medical drug save someone when nothing else could have during childhood, a faith in pharmaceuticals can persist for the rest of one’s life).  

At the same time, this pattern is not exclusive to doctors and is continually observed in many health care workers who do not use drug-based therapies such as acupuncturists and massage therapists. If you expand the scope beyond the practice of medicine, you can also see this same attachment to embodying an internal identity in other fields such as athletes and coaches becoming fixated on training over and over, many times to the point they overwork the body and create significant health issues that can end an athletic career.

The Church of Medicine

Many organized religions expect blind obedience to their faith (“just trust us, the vaccines are safe and effective”), and when their authority is challenged, hostility is always directed towards the heretic. Many have made the case that Western medicine is our society’s religion (M.D. is also sometimes associated with “Minor Deity”), and as the classic Confessions of Medical Heretic shows, Western medicine has been structured to contain the key components of the previous faiths (e.g. white coats are its priest’s robes, vaccines are its holy waters).

This is often difficult to spot since Western medicine hides behind a veneer of credibility bestowed by its evidence. However, when that evidence is critically examined, it is inevitably discovered to rely upon a large amount of inaccurate, non-replicable, or fraudulent research that is selected just as arbitrarily as the dictates of faith (hence why it is almost impossible to study or publish the overwhelming evidence of vaccine harm).

When I discussed my original question with colleagues, the religious aspects of medicine often came up as they felt the fanaticism with prescribing was just a part of the ideological culture of medicine. Those discussions then circled back to how complex the human body is, how difficult it is to know anything about it with certainty, and our distrust of anyone who claims they know everything (e.g. I remember one instance of a surgeon saying “I know everything about the mind” to sell a surgery to his patient).  We all shared the belief our profession needs to let go of its religious zeal that causes our members to continually claim they understand the nature of reality solely based on the authority they believe the status of being a doctor grants them.

Without question, a collective group think towards the pharmaceutical model exists within medicine and the cult mentality behind that approach has persisted for centuries. In each place I’ve searched to try to uncover why this has happened, I continually get the sense some type of malignant collective consciousness is exerting a significant influence on the medical field. Given that collective consciousnesses tend to emerge from the religions, I believe it is helpful to note a few ways they have been described throughout history:

 •Carl Jung, within transpersonal psychology developed a similar idea known as the “collective unconsciousness,” and noted these could exist at the level of the entire species or within specific tightly linked groups. 

 •Within occult circles, it is believed that the shared collective thoughts of a group can create an “egregore,” thoughtforms or entities that assume a life of their own and then guide the direction of the group.

 •Within eastern spiritual systems, one conception of karma is collective karma, where the effects of one event create a wave that ripples out far into the future and influences the actions of many that it contacts.

Conclusion

Acupuncturists like to share that in ancient China, acupuncturists worked on an economic model of being paid only if their patients stayed healthy, and not while they were ill. Although I am not sure if this would be economically viable in the current era, I do believe it represents part of the shift that needs to be imagined if we are to move away from the disastrous fee-for-service model (direct primary care is presently the best bridge we have).

The perversity of the fee-for-service model is ingrained into each doctor throughout our training. I genuinely believe most doctors start off as well-meaning and gifted individuals, but the entire educational process is remarkably well designed to break them down into automatons who internalize that it’s much easier to accept the status quo than question anything.  Additionally, many of those who go into medicine carry decades of trauma and (particularly within psychiatry) are seeking a way to heal themselves, so they often project their own issues onto their practice of medicine. The attachment to “fixing” someone is incredibly alluring (“if my patient would only take this mRNA vaccine he could be saved”), but it is not spiritually sound or helpful.  

I and many of my teachers believe the ideal mindset when practicing medicine is to do the best you can with the tools you have, recognize your limitations, and accept what ultimately happens to your patient. It is fine to look for other tools if it’s clear your tools won’t do the job, but once you cross the line to believing you are the being who can control the patient’s fate, an important line is crossed that should not be crossed.

I had an older patient I was quite attached to who was developing severe issues from smoking I knew would eventually be fatal. Although we saw eye to eye on many issues and he respected my judgment, he was not willing to give up his habit, and I while I never gave up on trying to change his mind, I also did not feel it was my place to berate him since he had repeatedly heard my point and clearly understood it.  Recently, while I was out of the area he was hospitalized for an acute complication of smoking and after about a week passed away. I am presently in transit to visit the widow and looking back on this situation, I repeatedly question if I should have pushed him more or if the way I handled the situation was appropriate.  

Although I disagree with many of the premises the church of pharmaceuticals is founded upon, I also must recognize that doctors regularly see challenging patients who subsequently die from conditions that may have been possible to prevent with the medication the doctor wanted them to take. As my own story and this article illustrate, finding the appropriate balance on how aggressively to advocate for your patient’s wellbeing is often an extremely difficult task to navigate and I do not know if there are any “right” answers to it.

Finally, the first thought that likely comes to many readers from reading this is that these financial incentives are the driver behind the COVID-19 vaccination program. Although these incentives exist (e.g. the media received a lot of money to promote the vaccines), at a provider level they are relatively small (40 dollars per injection from medicare plus a slight bonus for at home administration or a 17% salary increase in England and bulk payments for each nursing home vaccinated). I thus do not believe it can be argued reimbursements were the driving force behind the fanaticism to vaccinate. Conversely, the hospitals did receive a massive financial incentive to diagnose patients with COVID-19, administer remdesivir rather ivermectin or hydroxychloroquine and to place patients on ventilators. Here, I do believe the payoff was large enough to argue it influenced medical decision making.

If you have any thoughts on what you feel I got right and wrong here I would also appreciate hearing them. Thank you again for taking the time to read this and sharing it with those you believe could benefit from hearing (e.g. on Gab or GETTR).