One of my longstanding curiosities has been what universal laws govern the reality we inhabit, and I have gradually concluded one is “the law of equilibrium,” which states:
•Any process we observe is the product of competing forces balancing each other out to an equilibrium point.
•While it is sometimes possible to shift the equilibrium point (e.g., by mass poisoning the world with COVID vaccines), in most cases, systems will typically return to their equilibrium point.
•While the equilibrium sometimes rapidly re-establishes itself, it can often take decades, if not centuries, to do so. When viewed over time, these forces propagate across generations and eventually return to their equilibrium.
Furthermore:
Beyond Labels: A Docto...
Best Price: $9.56
Buy New $17.60
(as of 09:31 UTC - Details)
•Humans throughout history continually overestimate their ability to suppress the equilibrium’s restoration and engage in a variety of extreme but ultimately futile tactics to prevent it.
•The internet has rapidly accelerated the speed at which at which societal equilibria reassert themselves, and as the speed of the internet increases, so does the speed of the “reequilibration.”
COVID Distorts The Equilibrium
Throughout my life, I have watched a gradually increasing encroachment on our health by predatory entities that prioritize profits over people (e.g., synthetic agriculture, processed foods, chemical manufacturing, and the pharmaceutical industry). Each of these follows the same pattern—something new gets introduced as “safe and effective,” people notice the issues and object to it, science, media and the government conspire to suppress those objections, and then once it’s normalized, something even more egregious is done the next time.
In turn, I’ve tried to show here that the unbelievable things we saw with the COVID vaccines were, in truth, simple repetitions of an existing pattern, that began over a century ago with the smallpox vaccine (which arguably were worse and whose mandates more widely protested than the COVID vaccines). Sadly, while healthy skepticism existed towards vaccines and the media to varying degrees called out the government’s disastrous vaccines programs (e.g., the hot polio lots they released or the rushed and unnecessary swine flu vaccines), in 1997, the FDA legalized direct to consumer drug advertising, allowing the pharmaceutical industry through the mass media to dominate the narrative, at which point the only places these objections could be aired were the alternative media, where they in turn were dismissed as “fringe conspiracy theories that no credible outlet would touch.”
Note: the HPV vaccine (approved in 2006) had many of the same issues the COVID vaccine had and when the injuries piled up, the FDA and the CDC simply did everything they could to sweep them under the rug just like COVID. Likewise, this issue is not unique to vaccines. For example, the SSRIs had serious issues with mind-altering suicidal and homicidal behaviors and rapidly became the most complained about drugs in America, but the FDA instead fought all efforts to give a basic safety warning on them and gagged their scientist who confirmed they caused children to kill themselves.
Depending on how you look at it, the good or bad thing about COVID was that it was the most extreme version we’ve seen of the previous pattern (e.g., ridiculous, over-the-top, and hateful vaccine marketing coupled with the first adult vaccine mandates our generation had experienced), and it happened to be both an incredibly dangerous, unneeded and ineffective vaccine.
Because of this, it was a shock that woke a lot of people up to something being seriously wrong with our medical system, and created a loss of trust in our institutions and medicine which has never been seen before in my lifetime—best demonstrated by a recent large JAMA study of 443,445 Americans, which found that in April 2020, 71.5% of them trusted doctors and hospitals, while in January 2024, only 40.1% did.
In short, I would argue, the medical industry got “too greedy” and effectively killed their “goose that laid the golden eggs” through their conduct during COVID, which was further worsened by leading Trump to go all-in on a vaccine before the election and then delaying it at the last moment, as Biden was presumably a more profitable president for the industry—an approach that worked until Trump was re-elected.
As such, I would argue the above illustrates how a distorted equilibrium will reassert itself, and the major mistake the COVID cartel made, like many before them, was thinking that with enough force, intimidation, and suppression, that they could stop it from happening, particularly since they had already planted so many seeds from earlier campaigns that they were able to sprout into a full-fledged resistance against them once the soil was right.
Questioning Doctors
Calley Means recently shared something quite noteworthy about the loss of trust in medicine that I felt merited further discussion.
I recently had a conversation with a friend who runs a clinic network of 1,000+ MDs.
She said the main conversation among doctors is frustration that patients are asking about the “root cause” and “more natural cures” for their conditions.
She said 0% of patients asked these questions five years ago, and now 80% of patients do.
Her doctors see this trend as a negative thing, and spend their time deriding the MAHA movement and social media personalities in the break room.
These clinics focus on dermatology and make money selling drugs and procedures. Many dermatological issues are tied to root cause issues (diet/lifestyle) and not a lack of cream or injection.
On Reddit boards, countless medical professionals are decrying these “root cause” questions.
I think this represents a major shift/dynamic happening in medicine that should be openly discussed. Are patients right to be asking more questions about the root cause, or are the doctors right to be deriding Americans for taking health into their own hands? To be asking about food, exercise, over-medicalization, and lifestyle habits…
Should patients trust their doctors on chronic disease management? Can patients actually reverse their conditions and thrive if they explore the root cause? Are the answers simpler and more under our control than we believe?
I think the answer is clearly yes. I hope the trend of patients asking doctors for the root cause doesn’t slow down, and it not only changes how we practice medicine, but also changes our culture to be more empowered.
If you have an acute condition that will kill you right away, see your doctor and listen to them. Our system is a miracle at addressing these acute issues. But that’s less than 10% of our spending.
Our system’s failure at chronic disease management has economic, national defense, and spiritual effects that are existential.
We need to have respect for our food and our soil. We need to cherish breastfeeding and natural food… We need to ensure kids are away from their phones and outside running around… We need to rejuvenate a grounding in the spiritual…
These are the messages our healthcare leaders should be repeating again and again – and that light is starting to shine through, despite aggressive resistance from hard-working doctors whose income and identity are undeniably tied to the broken status quo.
Beyond the fact this again represents the equilibrium reestablishing itself, it also raises many important points I felt merit discussion.
Physician Reimbursement
One of the major dilemmas in healthcare has been how to appropriately reimburse for it, as:
• If it pays too little, healthcare workers will not be willing to do it, particularly society’s “cream of the crop” who, based on academic merit, are selected to enter our medical schools, and in turn, they help establish medicine’s credibility by having the most (academically) talented members of society lead the profession.
Note: since most of the “humanistic” aspects of a medical application are very easy to fake by saying all the standard buzzwords, the medical school process tends to select for high performers who are too “in their heads” (rather than their hearts), some of whom are only going into medicine for the money.
• If it costs too much, many people (or eventually the government) will not be able to pay for it.
• If specific services are reimbursed for at a high rate, physicians will inevitably gravitate their practices towards doing as much of them as possible to increase their incomes (e.g., here I showed how numerous neurosurgeons at one hospital each billed over 50 million dollars in 2015—something which can only be done by rushing and majorly cutting corners on surgeries which often were not needed in the first place).
Note: another field this is a huge problem is in orthopedics, as orthopedic surgeons make their money off their surgeries, and in many cases will operate when the surgery is not appropriate. In contrast, the most ethical ones I know tend to work for HMOs like Kaiser where their salary is set rather than being dependent on how many surgeries they perform.
• Likewise, many medical specialties have bread and butter procedures (e.g., pelvic exams in gynecology or vaccinations in pediatrics) which are routinely done at visits to support the practice’s income. While some of these are relatively benign and have some value (e.g., ENTs cleaning a patient’s ears) others often cause more harm than the benefit they provide. In the case of
Note: In many studies I’ve reviewed, the benefit of these routine screening exams or treatments is far less than portrayed (to the point the justification of paying for them is highly suspect), but at the same time, they are arguably justified as they subsidize the doctor staying in practice (and providing care to the area) and more importantly, noticing if something else is significantly wrong with the patient which would not have been recognized had they not seen the doctor.
Over the decades, I’ve seen various attempts and debates to address this conundrum, but in my eyes, they’ve essentially made things worse. For example:
• They’ve let the American Medical Association have a committee that effectively sets the government reimbursement rates for specialities. To some extent, this is a valid approach, since every speciality needs adequate reimbursement to be sustained, and specialities which require more training (e.g., becoming a neurosurgeon requires 11 or more years of medical training)—all of which the government would be unlikely to do correctly. Unfortunately, this process is also ripe for exploitation and conflicts of interest, so not surprisingly it has led to massive increases in speciality reimbursements.
Note: one of the many important policies RFK has advocated for is reforming this process so the medical profession cannot set their reimbursement rates.
• Switching from paper charts to electronic medical records (EMRs) was touted as the solution which would address all the problems in healthcare, but in reality, it just made doctors take way longer to write their notes rather than spending it on care (hence why doctors spend so much of their visits with you in front of the computer), and often they would copy paste the same thing into each one.
Note: per my understanding, the government push for EMRs (despite them harming patient care) came from them taking longer for doctors to fill out, and hence reduced their ability to submit insurance charges (saving the government money), a trend that may change as AI makes it possible to rapidly generate generic medical notes.
• Numerous regulations and requirements designed to make medical care ‘better’ have led to increasingly onerous practice requirements for doctors to comply with, making more and more medical spending to go to things besides healthcare (e.g., administrative compliance) and it has become nearly impossible for many doctors to maintain their own private practices. Because of this, more and more of them have been shifted to corporate employment where they have far less autonomy in what they can do (e.g., most knew they could not object to the COVID vaccines as they risked termination or being reported to the medical boards) and those employed are constantly under pressure to see more and more patients in shorter times—making patients “who want the root causes” non-functional for their practices as it takes up too much time.
Unfortunately, as we all know, these attempts have not been successful, and as time goes on, healthcare consumes an increasing share of the economy (currently 17.6% of GDP) as our population becomes sicker.
Standard Medicine
No matter how you dice it, medical education is quite challenging as there is simply too much to learn, and even the “brightest” students adopt a triage mentality where they cut out things that aren’t necessary (or low-yield) for exams so they can pass and get a degree. Because of this medical education typically:
• Covers many aspects in a superficial manner (e.g., just learn the classic indications, simple mechanisms of action and commonly recognized side effects of drugs).
Note: this is quite problematic as many of those simplistic facts students memorize aren’t always entirely correct (or become evidently contradictory once you take the time to understand them). However, since students are under such pressure to memorize them, they take the facts as verbatim facts they don’t question and become quite haughty towards those who do.
• Focuses on the key medical products (e.g., how to use pharmaceutical drugs along with the key microbes and their pharmaceutical treatments, understanding what aspects of the body each speciality is responsible for, how to interpret imaging studies, and how to understand surgery well enough to want to go into it or refer patients to it) along with basic skills necessary for being a doctor (e.g., being able to recognize potentially life-threatening conditions, conducting a physical exam with enough details to complete a medical note and writing billable medical notes).
Note: there is also a strong focus on anatomy and physiology, which along with recognizing key diseases and medical emergencies, in my eyes represent some of the most valuable aspects of conventional medical training.
• Cuts out a lot of the subtle aspects of medical science and doctoring that make you an effective clinician (e.g., medical ethics). Because of this, there is always a subset of medical students who have that inherent capacity and excel at being clinicians but very few learn it through their training. Put differently, standard medical training doesn’t really cover what is needed to make people healthy as there is never enough time for that and again and again, I hear stories of medical educators who try to incorporate it but get pushed to the side due to limited curriculum time.
Home Doctor - Practica...
Best Price: $44.99
Buy New $37.00
(as of 09:01 UTC - Details)
Additionally, while I can’t prove this, I also strongly suspect a key reason why they aren’t lifestyle treatments and natural therapies aren’t focused on is because they aren’t possible to monetize, whereas endless prescriptions and referrals for medical services feed the industry. This point is commonly referenced in regards to most medical schools for having minimal training in nutrition (which is actually arguably a good thing since what’s done tends to focus on processed food dogmas, such as cholesterol being bad for you). However, it extends to far more, and is often encapsulated by the concept “Western Medicine is the only medical system in human history that does not recognize an innate health within the body that facilitates healing.
Note: I believe one of the major reasons the medical community has had such a great focus on DEI is because it gives them an easy scapegoat (the reason our medical system is abjectly failing America, particularly the poor, is because we don’t have enough diversity in our doctors, rather than any of the actual issues the system does not want to discuss).
In contrast, many natural schools of medicine put a much greater focus on training doctors to facilitate actual healing in their patients. Unfortunately, I find graduates from these programs often can’t recognize critical medical conditions (as their training doesn’t focus on it) and in many cases, their training tends to be fairly linear and reductionistic (much like conventional medicine) so, while they are more equipped to heal, the same problem tends to emerge where the practitioners have the same things they do over and over and won’t go outside their box to try and have a broader understanding as to how heal the patient.
Additionally, in many cases, to earn acceptance from mainstream medicine (and access to reimbursements) these professions sometimes shift to a much more conventional model (e.g., many of the leading naturopathic medical schools were not willing to criticize the vaccines and even mandated them despite the founders of naturopathy being vehemently against vaccination).
