Medicine's Return to Paternalism
Reflections at Midpoint (Part 1)
LuAnne and I have been attending physicians since 2005 and 2006, respectively. An attending is a physician who has completely finished all formal training and is now completely “on your own.” My journey to that point formally began in 1991 at Shippensburg University, followed by getting married and transferring to James Madison University in January 1993. We left the Shenandoah Valley in 1996 for the foothills of Colorado, where I completed a master’s in biblical counseling in 1997. From there, it was on to England, where LuAnne joined me in medical school through 2002. Then it was three years of family medicine residency at Penn State Hershey and Good Samaritan Hospital. So, it does feel like I’ve been practicing medicine most of my life!
If I practice for another 17 years, I’ll be 72. One of my mentors in residency practiced at least part time until age 90! It’s likely fair to say I’m at the mid-point of my career, plus or minus 5 or 10 years! It is a known fact that it’s hard for physicians to retire; we become possessive of our patients and aren’t sure we want someone else “messing” with them!
My next several Stacks will be on transitions I’ve seen during the years I’ve been in practice.
PATERNALISM
Our training was very patient-focused. In contrast to perhaps the “Golden Age” of medicine in the 70s and 80s where “I’m the doctor and you do as I say,” medicine was very much driven by patient preferences. In fact, you should never tell the patient what they should do, and God forbid if you ever mentioned anything about faith! I never believed this latter dictum; my senior resident project was on “Health and Spirituality.”
As I recall, this was termed cultural competency, with a focus on understanding the culture you served and then adapting to that. This was not unlike “when in Rome, do as the Romans do.” Because our residency was in a large Amish and Mennonite community, I helped residents understand that community. Our residency was given a grant to teach residents how to speak Spanish (since there was also a large Latino population). Because I sensed my calling was to the former and not the latter, I refused to participate in that training, as I came to residency to learn family medicine and not Spanish! I would have taken up Pennsylvania Dutch, had that been offered. But you get the point—the focus was on the patient population you served. It was patient-centered, not provider-focused. And that is still how we practice medicine.
I recall a college biology professor assuming that I had a creationist position as opposed to an evolutionary one. But I don’t recall suffering academically for that position. There was generally a free exchange of ideas, and opposite opinions were respectfully engaged.
One such story highlights this. LuAnne and I arrived at the Oxford and Cambridge Club in London in the fall of 1997 to meet the Board of Trustees of Kigezi International School of Medicine. (It was here that LuAnne was invited to enter med school.) I was wearing the Mennonite “plain suit” and no necktie. The porter stopped us at the door and refused admittance. He said he could provide a tie. When I told him I was part of a religious group which prohibited the wearing of a necktie, he said “well come right on in”!
That’s how things were then. Differences were tolerated if not even respected. I sensed a crack in this foundation at a medical conference during the first decade of being an attending. The lecture was on the HPV vaccine, and the presenters went out of their way to make anyone in the room who had reservations about this vaccine (and we strongly did) feel like a total fool. At another medical conference a few years later, the last lecture of the day was rather boring until I realized the presenter was advocating a needle-exchange program!1
However, we continued to practice our profession with conscience and dignity. But then along came Covid, as we say. I wrote about eight Covid “lies that blind” back in May. Unfortunately, those lies are as false today as then. I still remain aghast at how many doctors went from genuinely caring for people to positively harming them. Instead of practice being patient-centric, it became “paternalism on steroids.” It was no longer, “I’m the doctor and you do as I say.” It was now, “I’m the doctor and you WILL do what I say, or you are not welcome here and you may never come back.”
We’ve had hundreds of patients transfer to our office over the past four years, and I’ve heard countless stories of angry, belligerent, and demeaning doctors who refused to engage with patient questions and whose offices refused to see patients who weren’t Covid-jabbed. Pediatric offices dismiss(ed) parents who declined childhood vaccinations. Surgeons and dermatologists recommended Covid jabs in their consult notes (pre-Covid, that would never have been the case). Hospitalists patently refused to administer safe and effective drugs like hydroxychloroquine and ivermectin to Covid patients. For example, pre-Covid, any reasonable doctor would have said:
There’s no benefit to wearing a mask for disease prevention. (After all, Fauci told us around January 2020 that Americans should not go out and buy masks as they provide a false sense of security.)
If you’re sick, by all means come to our office to be seen.
At least some of my patients have been on HCQ 200 mg bid for decades for rheumatoid arthritis.
The discoverers of ivermectin received the Nobel prize in 2015 for its role in curing African river blindness (see lie #6 above).
Our treatment options look pretty grim as is, so why not give it a try? Remember, the first rule of medicine is nonmaleficence (primum non nocere, or “first, do no harm”). The second rule is beneficence, loosely translated as “do some good.”
The CDC is a source of information and recommendations.
Post-Covid, most (unreasonable) doctors said:
Make a mask out of a scarf hanging in the back of your closet. (You probably remember the Surgeon General explaining how it was done.)
If you’re sick, stay home! And if you can’t breathe, go to the ER (where in many cases they’ll ventilate you and you will die).
HCQ is toxic, associated with dangerous cardiac arrythmias, and one of the most dangerous drugs on the planet.
Ivermectin is horse medicine! Remember the FDA tweet?
We will not treat you with what you are requesting, period!
The CDC is a government agency with enforcement powers, and you must do what the CDC says. (Even the church broadly took this position.)
It did appear that for the most part, independent doctors largely took the reasonable approach and non-independent, corporate-employed doctors took the unreasonable approach (although not exclusively). Or dare I say that independent doctors were freer to think for themselves? But that still does not explain the extreme pendulum shift back to paternalism on steroids.
The Epoch Times published an article this weekend entitled “Doctors, Dictators, and the Medical Autocracy” which may provide a clue to this question. They cite a correspondence piece in The Lancet (September 9, 2017) entitled “The physician as dictator.” They surveyed 1,254 leaders from 176 countries over 71 years and discovered that those who were trained as physicians or who had a healthcare background “tended to be more autocratic.” For example, the Syrian president Bashar al-Assad was trained in London as an ophthalmologist but was responsible for the deaths of 400,000 of his own people in a nerve gas attack in 2017. “No one thought he would turn out to be a mass murderer,” writes Ranjana Srivastava in a Guardian opinion piece.
The Lancet authors write:
Our results reveal a disturbing correlation that associates leaders who are physicians in the modern era with more autocratic regimes than leaders who are not physicians…These findings are most likely a result of multiple, complex factors; however, considering the trope of the physician-god complex, these sobering data offer an opportunity for crucial self-reflection. In this regard, a shift away from the authoritarian physician toward a model based on shared decision making represents a promising measure. Such efforts could safeguard against any dictatorial tendencies physicians might harbour, and ensure they fulfil the medical profession's commitment to patient autonomy and dignity.
I left out this sentence in the ellipsis above—“However, this trend is not true for leaders who are scientists, who, like physicians, have non-traditional paths to political power”—because it does appear to be true these days. Just witness WHO Director-General Tedros, trained as an Ethiopian microbiologist, and “the organisation’s first leader without medical qualifications,”2 who has been accused of aiding genocide in Ethiopia.3 And consider the WHO pandemic treaty, due to be voted on this coming May, which essentially overturns national sovereignty. Now our own Senator Casey (D-PA) has assured me that “nothing in the WHO draft agreement would infringe upon the sovereignty of the United States” and that “the WHO also has no enforcement body, so compliance with its agreements is necessarily nonbinding by design.”4 This sounds remarkably similar to this Representative’s response:5
Now either the government is right, and we have nothing to worry about, or they are wrong, and we have a lot to worry about! I would favor the latter, in deference to Ronald Reagan’s famous quote, “The nine most terrifying words in the English language are, ‘I’m from the government and I’m here to help.’”6
To read more about the WHO pandemic treaty, I recommend the following:
The Midwestern Doctor’s “How We Can Stop the WHO’s Horrific Pandemic Treaty.”
Meryl Nass, the Maine physician who is an international expert on bioweapons and who lost her license for prescribing ivermectin (yes, you read that write), now has time to travel and inform the world on this. She has written extensively. Here is just one example and is a compilation of slides from a lecture given in Milan, Italy in January.
The Heritage Foundation’s “The Pandemic Treaty That Won’t Prevent a Pandemic.”
To sign a petition against it, visit Sovereignty Coalition.
The above may have seemed like a rabbit hole, but it’s crucial to engage with the striking reality that many doctors and scientists these days act exactly as autocratic dictators.
And would it be correct to say that those doctors and scientists who have advocated for Covid mandates and have recommended and actively participated in Covid jabs are also complicit in global crimes against humanity? To answer that question, consider the following summary points by Dr. Peter McCullough in his “Four Year Anniversary of COVID-19 Pandemic.” If you’re not familiar with Dr. McCullough’s presentations, almost all of his observations are supported by primary source citations in the medical literature.
Somewhere between 5 & 10% of those Covid-vaccinated individuals have cause for great concern over the next 5 to 15 years. The negative effects are associated with hyper-concentrated genetic fragments as well as significant contamination, independently tested and verified at various labs. Yet the CDC and FDA have refused to look at the vaccine vials/lots in question.
Prior to the vaccine rollout, there were NO randomized, double-blinded, placebo-controlled trials showing:
the duration of time the vaccine, specifically the spike protein, stays in the body (it has now been shown to stay in the blood for 1 to 6+ months and in the heart and lymph nodes for at least several months).
reduction in severity of illness, transmission of disease, or hospitalizations (it was later shown to be ineffective in any of these categories).
uptake in major organs such as heart, lungs, brain, kidneys, adrenal glands, and reproductive organs.
“The major vaccines were the genetic code for the spike protein. The spike protein is the lethal part of the virus, and there were no assurances or mechanism of what was going to shut off production of the spike protein.”
“It was the most dangerous proposition in all of humanity to mass vaccinate with the genetic code for a lethal protein that was devised in a Chinese biosecurity lab and have that in everyone’s bodies.”
Four major disease categories now exist specifically as a result of the jabs:
CARDIAC: the vaccines cause myocarditis (heart inflammation) which leads to cardiac arrest. They also accelerate the atherosclerotic process in vessels, leading to blocked arteries.
NEUROLOGIC: both ischemic/thrombotic CVAs (strokes), Guillan-Barré syndrome, small fiber neuropathy, seizures, blindness, and hearing loss.
BLOOD CLOTS: fibrous clots from ankle to hip have been identified by multiple morticians around the world. These are clots unlike any ever seen before.
AUTOIMMUNE: vasculitis, renal failure, joint issues, and skin rashes, along with rapidly accelerated cancers presenting in advance stages.7
Dr. McCullough has devised the Spike Protein Detox Protocol, which I’m including below for those who have been vaccinated and for those suffering long-COVID.
Remember, we’re discussing paternalism. There is absolutely no way that any of the COVID craziness could have happened in a non-paternalistic atmosphere. Paternalism flourishes in the following intellectual environments.
You can’t ask.
Contrary to the environment in which I was trained, it no longer seems acceptable to ask questions. Or at least the only questions that you are allowed to ask are those sanctioned by The Establishment.
This really gets to the heart of how one arrives at truth. I teach an all-day seminar in April on this very topic, and so I’ll save reflections on this for the future.
If one does ask a legitimate question that is not in keeping with the dominant narrative, one is immediately labeled a racist, a white supremacist, a Christian nationalist, and other such terms which are completely concocted and meaningless in an intellectual discussion. (Thow the conversation back to the 1960s and you’ll see the dramatic irony in calling conservative Justice Clarence Thomas a racist!)
You can’t disagree.
If you do disagree, you get visited by the Department of State or the Department of Justice or by the FBI. You may have your medical license revoked, be thrown in jail, be fined, or other sundry tactics of totalitarian regimes.
Because the totalitariat cannot abide dissent!
Journal articles get retracted. Social media accounts get canceled. Bank accounts get locked down. All things we’ve seen dozens of times in the past four years.
You must “trust the science.”
We heard this repeatedly to defend all sorts of now-dunked lockdowns and dangerous and lethal jabs. As if science always has only one side. You recall Dr. Fauci stating in response to criticism of him, “…they’re really criticizing science because I represent science. That’s dangerous.”8
Recently, LuAnne asked me whatever happened to the null hypothesis? For those unfamiliar, the null hypothesis is the opposite of what you hope to be true and the thing you want your research to disprove. That’s how scientific research has advanced for years. In the case of a new drug, for example, the null hypothesis is that it is no better than placebo. You hope that your research will disprove that null hypothesis and therefore show the superiority of your drug or therapy over placebo.9
In the case of the Covid jab, the null hypothesis—that a “vaccine” has no effect whatsoever on Covid—was completely ignored. In fact, it appears to be ignored in almost all scientific studies these days. I was delighted to see Dr. McCullough address this very fact in a recent fascinating interview with physician, sociologist, and university professor Claudia Chaufan,10 MD, PhD, Dr. McCullough.
As it turns out, the “science” that we’re supposed to be following usually doesn’t end up being science at all. That’s the “rat” LuAnne and I smelled in early April 2020. It ends up being more correctly called scientism, which is a “religion” all of its own. I would highly recommend reading A Midwestern Doctor’s “The Deadly Rise of Scientism: We All Suffer Once You Can No Longer Debate ‘The Science’.”
In summary, we must insist that our healthcare providers remove the god-complex of paternalism. We must insist the same of our church leaders and our politicians. Without unfettered and open exchange of ideas, a free society will die a thousand deaths, until there is no recourse but destruction.
One Final Caveat
Everything I’ve written above is dismissed by The Establishment as misinformation or disinformation. That was the World Economic Forum’s #1 agenda/concern this year. (Here’s Steve Kirsch’s—the Silicon Valley entrepreneur who has offered anyone from the “other side” a million bucks to openly debate him on Covid—take on that.) In fact, the NIH’s National Library of Medicine now has an entire division dedicated to “confronting health misinformation.” Remember who was head of an NIH subdivision called NIAID until 2023, whose most recent memoir due to be published in June is entitled On Call, despite not having been “on call” as an attending physician since 1968?!
I will continue my “reflections at midpoint” by exploring other topics in future Stacks.
Needle-exchange programs seek to address drug addiction by providing “safe places” and needles for addicts to continue their addiction.
Letter to me dated May 15, 2023.
Stated at a news conference on August 12, 1986; you can watch it here.
Four Year Anniversary of COVID-19 Pandemic (substack.com), March 11, 2024. These are my notes from listening to his interview, with a few of my own editorial comments.
It is no secret that Big Pharma funds their own studies and publish the research that makes them look favorable. This is addressed extensively in the 2021 documentary “Medicating Normal.” I recommend watching the full 1 hour 18-minute documentary on Vimeo (there are abbreviated versions available elsewhere). It is also true that 85% of medical studies cannot be replicated, as reviewed by Mattias Desmet in his testimony before Senator Johnson’s “Federal Health Agencies and the COVID Cartel: What Are They Hiding?” on February 26, 2024. That clip can be viewed embedded in this summary of that Senate panel.
Indoctrination of Vaccine Ideology was Successful on College Campuses (substack.com), Febuary 11, 2024; this segment begins at minute 11:44.
Thank you Dr.Joel Yeager,MD. We respect you and LoAnne so much and have people looking for a place there.We are doing well ,and Guy has had two knee replacements with a Christian doctor.We are hoping to find something soon.We did not! Take those shots. We are hoping we can remain your patients. God Bless your work. Guy & Emma JoAnne Jackson
Thanks Joel. Always good to read some common sense which, unfortunately is not so common these days.