There are still some good doctors out their whose first priority is the health of their patients, but it’s in spite of and not because of their medical training and accepted industry practices. From Randall Bock at malone.news:
Exposing Medicine’s Blind Spots
Cross-post from Randall Bock
One of the big outstanding COVID crisis questions is “How did the medical care system get things so wrong?.” This excellent essay from Dr. Randall Bock uses personal experience and anecdotes from a lifetime of primary care practice spanning rural W Virginia to big city Boston to illustrate and illuminate the sickness at the heart of modern western medicine. I first met Dr. Bock right after the recent election when he reached out to interview me about USG HHS, government contracting, and BARDA. We have had many conversations since, and I have become a fan of his work and perspective. But I had no idea of his personal history. What this essay reveals is the systemic medical system dysfunction seen throughout the US and western medicine during COVID was part of a much broader problem. –
“Chemistry – well, technically chemistry is the study of matter. But I prefer to see it as the study of change…. But that’s all of life, right? It’s just the constant, it’s the cycle…. It is growth, then decay, then transformation. It is fascinating. Really.”
— Walter White, Breaking Bad
Like Walter White, I started as a chemistry major. During medical school summer breaks, I taught organic chemistry at Yale. That subject (which for most premeds involved “rote” memorization) is better tackled gleaning structure; finding coherence in complexity; crossing pathways of learning a language and mastering circuitry. I co-majored in physics as both disciplines demand clarity, logic, proof.
College, for me, had been a time of free-form exploration: fear, discovery, curiosity, and the exhilarating process of learning how to make propitious use of time with so many diversions possible. Medical school, by contrast, was a shock. I had imagined a deeper dive into science; what I found instead was regimentation: biology boot camp. The emphasis wasn’t on understanding but on discipline– on memorizing vast catalogs of facts before smartphones made the world’s knowledge a thumb-swipe away. It was a jarring adjustment. You weren’t guided to think critically so much as force-fed– like the goose in the pâté de foie gras process– stuffed with information until deemed ripe. Then tested.
