George Mallory
As most of you know, I am a retired physician and am astonished and troubled at how much respect and credibility the physician community has lost in the last three years within the US lay community. Most physicians went on taking care of patients and practicing their usual diligence but deferred to spokespeople and department and hospital leaders for policy and general recommendations. Now, ironically, the last institutions to give up marginally necessary masking are doctors' offices and hospitals.
Physicians are well educated but really ignorant about what is going on in the public marketplace and what my fellow substack readers write about the medical community. Our "representative" organizations like the American Academy of Pediatrics have shamelessly issued policy statements and perspectives with zero effort or interest in finding out what the average pediatrician or pediatric specialist really thinks. The transgender clinics and movement, in my opinion, represents the greatest medical malfeasance of recent memory and there is no forum or pediatric organization to discuss the issues at hand. This is catastrophic.
With respect to COVID, take the totally reasonable Great Barrington Declaration, which reads better and better with age, and how "our leaders" imposed censorship and shaming on its authors. There have been no apologies from the establishment medical leaders. Few practicing physicians protested and how would they have? There is no forum for independent discussion by physicians. It is now up to us physicians to radically change our representation. We absolutely need to demand dissenting opinions and minority interpretations of data that Alex Berenson and Vinay Prasad are so good at. Physicians have been trained to read the medical literature critically but more and more journals like JAMA are publishing opinion pieces as objective reports. Sadly, the CDC is publishing marginally respectable articles without inviting dissenting opinions. The recent publications on Long COVID are such an example.
It will take extraordinary effort for physicians to regain the respect of the American lay public. I believe that it is deserved. The quality of cancer care, care for, people with cystic fibrosis, therapy for pulmonary hypertension and advances in organ transplantation — all of which I have participated in as patient or physician — deserve recognition and appreciation. The ethical boundaries between the physician community and the pharmaceutical industry are higher and more strictly enforced than when I started my career in the 1970s. Extraordinary people populate the ranks of academic medicine but that system operates in a strictly hierarchical structure with Presidents and Deans of medical school having strict control over all employed faculty. Few academic physicians desire to put their careers at risk in a system that rewards strict obedience. I established my role as an iconoclast before my retirement but most colleagues toed the line. I will continue to voice my independent opinions for interested readers.