By A Midwestern Doctor
The Forgotten Side of Medicine
July 26, 2025
Every now and then, regardless of how difficult things are or how much you begin to doubt what you are doing, you will come across something that reminds you that what you are doing matters and you need to continue.
That happened to me today when I saw a recent JAMA study surveying pregnant mothers and parents of young children, which found:
That study, in turn, concluded with:
Given the high decisional uncertainty during pregnancy about vaccinating children after birth, there may be value in intervening during pregnancy to proactively support families with childhood vaccination decisions.
As COVID had been such a severe overreach, I had hoped that the COVID cartel's greed would awaken people to the issues with vaccination and prompt significant skepticism against the existing pediatric vaccines. However, I did not expect such a large shift to occur so quickly. To briefly put this in context:
First, while there has been an overall loss of trust in vaccination (which I consider to be absolutely profound), the drop in confidence is much greater among the youngest generation, who are actually making the decisions to vaccinate their children. Consider for example, the results of this January survey, where far more than 37% of all Americans fully trusted and intended to follow the CDC schedule.
Second, a total of 37% of American parents fully trust the schedule, which represents a massive drop compared to the historical baseline. Specifically:
• In 2000, 19% of parents had "concerns about vaccines"
• In 2003, 28% of parents had "vaccine hesitancy," of whom approximately two-thirds delayed or refused only certain vaccines.
• In 2009, 50% of parents had "concerns about vaccines" and 11.5% had refused at least one vaccine for their child (most commonly refusing the injurious HPV vaccine)
• In 2010, 89% of pediatricians reported at least one vaccine refusal by a parent each month, with yearly childhood flu shots being the most commonly refused vaccine.
• In 2011, 13% of parents followed an alternative vaccine schedule (e.g., skipping or delaying some vaccines)-most of whom had originally followed the CDC schedule, along with 2.2% skipped all vaccines.
• In 2013, 9% of parents declined or postponed all immunizations, and 32% had concerns about vaccine safety.
The key context to understand about these figures is that they were alarming to the medical field, as their baseline had been to expect almost all parents would vaccinate without complaining and if someone dared to step out of line by doing something as simple as delaying vaccines (as more vaccines close together at a young age increases the likelihood of an injury) they were crucified by the medical field and often lost their licenses. As such, if you consider the figures they were alarmed by, and then compare them to the current reality, the difference is essentially "night and day."
Third, a major way vaccine compliance is enforced is through social pressure (e.g., "everyone else is doing it, so you must be crazy or a bad parent if you aren't") and mandates. Both of these are predicated on the majority of the population being vaccinated, which essentially is why the medical industry was so concerned about vaccine use dropping below 90%.
As such, I believe a key reason why so many unconscionable and aggressive childhood mandates were pushed across America in 2019 (e.g., the California ones), despite widespread public protest, was because the vaccine industry realized they were losing the majority necessary to justify (an unscientific and unconscionable) vaccine program and hence had to default to forcing them to vaccinate.
Note: in 2020, I realized a very aggressive marketing campaign was being made for the COVID vaccines which would "save us from the lockdowns." Because of that, I concluded that the vaccine campaign would go through a series of escalating stages (e.g., mass promoting the vaccine as a miracle then selling it on scarcity, remove the scarcity to catch everyone else who'd been pulled in, give gifts for vaccinating, create soft mandates through social restrictions on visiting public areas or businesses, introduce hard mandates at certain companies, create nationwide mandates). This was because the later mandates were unviable unless most of the population was already vaccinated (e.g., if 10% of America was vaccinated, restaurants would never ban unvaccinated customers), so it was critical to vaccinate as many people as possible before trying to push the previously inconceivable workplace mandates. In parallel, one of the only things which has ever gotten California to back down on certain school mandates (e.g., for the COVID vaccines) was so many parents refusing and being willing to pull their kids out of the schools that the state could not afford to lose the Federal Education dollars that would have resulted in.
Fourth, if you look at the recent July results, you will notice that many parents are, to varying degrees, "undecided." What this means is that we have a real chance to permanently change the vaccine paradigm if we can provide both direct stories of tragic vaccine injuries (especially if the injured party is within the parent's community) and if we can continue to provide trustworthy and balanced information that clearly shows the actual risks and benefits of vaccinations.
Many like me are doing that, and I believe we are having a real impact. More importantly, RFK Jr. is working with the HHS to release the gold standard evidence on vaccine injury, and once that comes out, the foundation has been laid for those rejecting vaccines to become the majority. This is extremely important, particularly since many are still advocating for vaccine mandates (e.g., I've received numerous concerned emails from readers that Hawaii's left-wing physician governor will soon remove religious exemptions and hence mandate them, 1, 2, 3 just like California's Dr. Pan did). However, none of that can happen if the majority of America does not trust the vaccines and hence sees vaccines as a corrupt assault on their health and liberty.
Note: these trends are also 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
Vaccine Propaganda
The actual evidence against vaccines is atrocious (e.g., independent studies all show they make you 3-10x more likely to develop a variety of chronic illnesses, and there is over a century of literature showing they cause profound neurological injuries). Because of this, the only viable way to maintain the vaccine market has been to prohibit all independent research on vaccine safety (which is why RFK's government studies are so important) and gaslight the country.
At its core, propaganda exists to sell "unsellable" ideas to the public. To accomplish this, the sale must be emotional rather than logical, as indefensible ideas quickly dissipate when exposed to debate. As such, propaganda relies upon a variety of tactics which are emotional in nature but often masquerade as being scientific.
For example, much of propaganda revolves around using words that elicit emotional responses in people and having the media collectively reinforce that emotional reaction. As such, many debates, regardless of the arguments put forward often devolve into those emotionally charged slurs (e.g., "you're a racist," "you are a climate change denier," "you don't believe in science" "you're an anti-vaxxer" "you are a peddler of dangerous conspiracies" "you're a quack"). Because of this:
• Non-scientific positions are often erected by having a few false slogans to defend them which are shouted until they drown out any competing arguments (rather than the arguments being seriously considered).
• A lot of work goes into sculpting the most emotionally manipulative phrase (or imagery) which can support a desired narrative, at which point it is blasted throughout the entire mass media and then adopted by everyday people who come to believe the phrases were their own ideas.
More importantly, propaganda takes advantage of the fact people are naturally hesitant to stray from the crowd, and as such, if they hear the same message everywhere (particularly if their peers also adopt it), most will quickly adopt it too. Because of this, the mass media will collectively parrot the same messages, collectively denounce those who deviate from them, have an endless stream of "experts" on to defend the status quo, and most importantly, never allow the other side to be heard.
In turn, many of the major problems with medicine in our country ultimately from from a 1997 decision by the FDA to legalize television pharmaceutical advertisements, at which point, the pharmaceutical industry became the mass media's largest advertiser. Soon after, that financial influence was leveraged to suppress media scrutiny, gradually eliminating news reports questioning the pharmaceutical industry-especially those about vaccines-making it nearly impossible to imagine critical news programs like those that once aired existing today.
Note: news anchors who witnessed this shift, like Sharyl Attkisson have attested to it.
Because of the blank check this monopoly on truth gave them, the vaccine industry became increasingly brazen in its actions (e.g., pushing more and more injurious vaccines onto the market, enacting more and more censorship, and then implementing more and more mandates). Fortunately, like many who suddenly rise to power, they overstepped and created a significant backlash, which has arguably left the industry in its worst position ever.
This is because, in addition to the mounting injuries (as the more vaccines children get, the more injuries they will have), an even larger backlash was occurring against the mass media in general, making it much harder for them to maintain control over unpopular narratives like vaccination.
Note: in recent decades, especially the last one, the media has gotten more and more aggressive in asserting its narrative (regardless of how nonsensical it is) while suppressing all dissenting ones. Since the internet has become integrated into the fabric of society, and well produced content (e.g., those debunking mass media lies the public is against) can rapidly go viral, the existing model no longer works. If anything, the more that it is doubled down on, the more people lose trust in it.
Contorting Medical Injuries
One of my morbid hobbies has been studying how pharmaceutical drugs injure and disable people and within this spectrum, I find the ones that create psychiatric issues alongside physical ones to be particularly cruel.
For example, SSRI antidepressants have many common side effects (e.g. sexual dysfunction, bipolar disorder, emotional numbness, terrible withdrawals and at times psychotic violence), many of which cause the individual to feel as though they are "losing their mind" and desperately want to stop the drugs. However, rather than recognize the drug is injuring them, the doctor will often tell the patient those side effects are due to the patient's own mental illness rather than being a commonly recognized side effect of the drugs.
As such, the patient will be told to continue taking their drugs. Furthermore, since "mentally ill" patients are often deemed to lack the capacity to make their own judgment, whereas psychiatrists are seen as authority figures, I have seen more cases than I can count where everyone (e.g., the patient's family and the courts [which frequently mandate treatment]) side with the psychiatrist rather than the patient, in turn all insisting those side effects are due to the patient's mental illness and force the patient to take even more psychiatric drugs.
Note: this gets even more challenging for the patient when they begin to lose their grip on reality from the side effects of the drug and start questioning their own judgment, or if they should give up on themselves and just blindly trust the authority figures around them.
Some of the classic ways psychiatry gaslights patients include:
• Telling them that any symptom that emerges is due to the pre-existing mental illness.
• When a patient experiences adverse effects from a drug, the dosage is increased rather than acknowledging the side effects.
Note: this is a story commonly seen immediately preceding catastrophic school shootings, but unfortunately, since there is widespread denial in the psychiatric field that SSRIs can make patients turn psychotic, it is rarely recognized (hence leading to it happening over and over again).
• When a patient experiences withdrawal reactions (which is very common and one of the most insidious issues with the SSRIs), telling the patient that those side effects prove the patient "needed" the drug (as it was treating their mental illness) rather than it being recognized as a dangerous withdrawal effect.
• When a patient develops new psychiatric symptoms (e.g., mania) patients are told the drug did not "cause" the symptoms, but rather, that the drug "unmasked" a psychiatric disorder that had always been there (even though it would have never been "unmasked" if the patient had not used the drug in the first place). For example, bipolar disorder is a debilitating condition which a round 25% of longterm SSRI users develop (hence leading to an epidemic of bipolar disorder ever since we started mass medicating with SSRIs), and since it is so common, the "unmasking" story has become the party line most psychiatrists use to rationalize the harm being caused to their patients.
Sadly, gaslighting is not unique to psychiatry. For example, throughout many of the clinical trials for the more toxic drugs on the market, trial participants developed severe side effects, but to ensure the pharmaceutical's approval, those reactions were hidden both from the trial participants and the government by the clinical trial investigators. For example, I've detailed the appalling degree to which this was done in:
• The SSRI clinical trials.
• The HPV vaccine trials.
• The COVID vaccine trials.
Note: many were appalled by what whistleblowers shared happened in the COVID vaccine trials (e.g., everyone telling them a clear injury they had wasn't "real"), but as I tried to illustrate in those articles, these are actually long standing problems in clinical trials (as they cost so much money to conduct, the pharmaceutical sponsors will do everything they can to "prove" the trial showed the drug was "safe and effective").
Since doctors are trained to believe an injury is only "real" (rather than an anecdotal coincidence or simply imagined in the patient's mind) if the injury is proven to exist within "unbiased" clinical trials, the gaslighting you see in the clinical trials sets of a chain of gaslighting as doctors around the world will believe what the clinical trials showed is true and hence dismiss the same injuries in their own patients which were covered up the clinical trials (and hence never made it to the final clinical trial report).
Note: since many different drugs cause neurological injuries (particularly in susceptible people) that are misdiagnosed as psychiatric injuries, this creates a huge problem, particularly since those patients are often fed into the psyche funnel, at which point they get put on even more neurologically destructive medications.
What is Gaslighting?
One of the classic ways an abuser controls their prey is to manipulate the environment so that the abused individual begins doubting their own observations, regardless of what is occurring in front of them.
In the 1944 movie Gaslight, this was accomplished by the villainous husband (played by Charles Boyer) adjusting the intake to gas-powered lights (causing them to flicker) and simultaneously denying that any change was occurring to his mentally abused wife (played by Ingrid Bergman). The term gaslighting originated from this classic movie.
In modern times, this is accomplished by having medical providers (and often mass media) all echo the same message that a patient's injury has nothing to do with the pharmaceutical (or other medical procedure in question), and often blame it on the patient's own psychiatric issues.
Before we go any further, I want to emphasize just how miserable this is to go through as an injured patient. Imagine what it would be like if (due to the medical injury) the world you had previously known collapsed around you and every single person you trusted (including your friends and family who defer to the judgment of "experts") told you that it was all in your head and you just needed psychiatric help. It's a perfect recipe for going insane.
For example, let's consider the experiences of Maddie De Garay in the pivotal Pfizer trial that was used to argue for the safety of the COVID-19 vaccines in the adolescent population:
Pierre Kory, MD MPA @PierreKory
Pfizer's trial only vaccinated 1,131 children so a single serious injury would have made the vaccine too dangerous. Maddie's story shows just how far medicine will go to betray and gaslight patients who threaten its narrative. We may never know who else was swept under the rug.
11:36 PM ∙ Jan 11, 2023--8,153Likes4,030Retweets
Although Maddie's experience was atrocious, it was sadly not unique, and many others had similar experiences in the COVID-19 vaccine trials. Similarly, I have heard many similar stories from other people who were harmed by the medical system, as most pharmaceuticals have a degree of toxicity that will injure certain patients.
Since that toxicity has always been inherent to the practice of allopathic (Western) medicine, the profession has gradually come up with a playbook to prevent its inevitable medical injuries from sabotaging business. This has essentially been accomplished by doing the following:
•Telling patients the adverse events they experienced either are not occurring or are unrelated to the toxic pharmaceutical.
•Developing an elaborate scientific apparatus that provides evidence refuting the link between these injuries and pharmaceuticals on the market, while concurrently training the population to defer to the scientific consensus rather than trusting their own observations.
•Making competing forms of medicine that lack a similar degree of inherent toxicity illegal, therefore making the only choice within the existing medical marketplace be a toxic form of medicine (similarly consider how modern medicine is always considered to be the best form of medicine every other approach must find a way to measure up to).
This is also why we have the doctrine in medicine that every treatment has risks and the treatments are chosen because its benefits outweigh its risk (as opposed to just exploring systems of medicine without those risks).
All of this in turn results in the tragic phenomenon known as medical gaslighting, or as some like to put it "allopathic medicine gaslights you to death."
Why Can't Doctors Diagnose Medical Injuries?
I have found numerous documented examples of medical gaslighting stretching back to the late 1700s, and in each case, typically only a minority of the medical profession was willing to acknowledge that the injuries that were occurring could be linked to their pharmaceuticals.
At the same time, it's rare for me to meet doctors I consider to be evil; on the contrary, most tend to be remarkably intelligent and well-intentioned individuals who genuinely want the best for their patients.
At this point, I believe medical gaslighting is a natural consequence of our training. Since the therapeutic toolbox of allopathic medicine is quite limited, most doctors cannot practice their craft without administering unsafe pharmaceuticals to their patients, and thus for the sake of their self-identity, they must fully believe in their pharmaceuticals (discussed further here).
Becoming a physician is an enormous personal investment, and it is extremely difficult for someone who has gone through that process to acknowledge that much of what they learned is highly questionable.
Similarly, no well-intentioned doctor wants to harm a patient, and since they often do, the reflexive psychological coping mechanism is to deny the possibility of each injury that occurs.
This first dawned on me when a doctor inserted a tirade against anti-vaxxers into his lecture and concluded his argument with "... and just think about it. Do you really think pediatricians would vaccinate their patients if they thought vaccines could harm them?"
Although widespread denial of the harms that Allopathy causes likely explains some of my profession's predilection for gaslighting, I do not believe it is the primary issue. Instead, I believe it is a result of the training doctors receive making them unable to recognize medical injuries.
The Origins of Medical Blindness
Because the human body is immensely complex, humans in every era face significant difficulties in being present to everything that is occurring within a human being. Most medical systems address this challenge by creating diagnostic models which simplify the immense complexity present in each patient down to the key things that must be focused upon to positively affect patient wellbeing.
The downside to this approach is that there will always be things in each patient that lie outside the diagnostic model being used to evaluate them. When this happens, those things understandably will not be recognized unless the medical practitioner is a very talented and open-minded observer.
In the case of standard medicine, we are taught a diagnostic model that is excellent for identifying many things (particularly indications for prescribing pharmaceutical drugs). However, our model also fails to account for many other factors that are critical to health and wellness.
For example, much of medicine is taught by having a series of lists to memorize that are plugged into linear algorithms. Because this requires breaking many complex subjects into a binary "yes" or "no," many important things that lie between these two polarities get lost in translation.
This is the easiest to illustrate with the nervous system (but the issue is by no means exclusive to it). When evaluating it, one of the things we are all taught to do is quickly check if the twelve cranial nerves are functioning normally (e.g., can you swallow, smile, or follow a finger with your eyes)?
Frequently, although the cranial nerves are "generally normal" they will have some difficulty firing (e.g., at some point in the motion arc as the eyes travel side to side, they will jump instead of moving smoothly). These "minor" deficits ( which frequently follow microstrokes from vaccine injuries) often have a significant impact on a patient's quality of life, but in most cases (except when evaluated by experienced neurologists or neurosurgeons), the function of those nerves will be noted as normal and ignored, and as such, doctors who can see the vast number of vaccine injuries around them are ostracized and dismissed by their colleagues.
Simplifying Illness
The cranial nerve example unfortunately is only one of many areas where a complex presentation of symptoms is simplified into a box that excludes an inconvenient diagnosis from ever being recognized. Another common way this boxing occurs is when an authoritative diagnosis is used to deny a complex phenomenon without actually stating what it is.
For example, many disorders in medicine are simply symptoms written in Latin. Dermatitis quite literally translates to "inflammation of the skin," and in most cases is simply treated with a cream that suppresses that inflammation rather than an attempt to understand why the inflammation is there.
Conversely, in many other medical systems, inflammation of the skin is recognized as a crucial sign that something is amiss in the body, and the exact character and location of the inflammation are closely examined to identify and address the underlying cause of that inflammation.
Note: to some extent this is recognized in dermatology, but even there it occurs nowhere to the degree that it should.
In turn, I find that many common illnesses patients struggle with often have one or a few common causes; yet, in most cases, the underlying pathology is not examined or understood throughout their medical journey, even when top specialists in the field examine them. All of this, I would argue is a result of the medical system is not being structured to incentivize trying to understand the unique context of each person's illness (rather doctors just get a few minutes to prescribe treatments targeting the patient's symptoms in the hope one eventually works—which simultaneously often ignoring the harms of those pharmaceuticals).
Framing the Iatrogenic Debate
Iatrogenesis is the term for any type of illness or medical complication resulting from a bad reaction to medical care (e.g., a complication from a surgery or a pharmaceutical). A common pattern I've observed for decades is everyone denying a particular iatrogenic complication exists (e.g., "there is no evidence"), and then once overwhelming evidence exists that it does, it will be acknowledged.
Once this happens, the harm from the drug will be reframed so that only the accepted harm can be bad, and an underlying assumption is created that nothing else is a possible complication.
For example, fluoroquinolones (e.g., Cipro) are fairly toxic antibiotics that can severely harm people and are frequently given for many minor infections (e.g., urinary tract infections) where their corresponding toxicity is simply not justified for the potential benefit offered.
In medical school, everyone learns that a tendon rupture (something unique and hard to ignore) is a side effect of these drugs, and as a result, when doctors evaluate for harms, they will look for that but not be able to recognize most of the other well-documented complications from the fluoroquinolones.
Recently we saw this reframing occur with the J&J COVID-19 vaccine. At the start of Operation Warp Speed, I hypothesized that a major goal was to get mRNA technology onto the market since it held the promise of trillions of dollars in future revenue for the pharmaceutical industry (but since there were safety challenges with it, nothing short of an "emergency" would be able to break the barrier to human testing).
Because of this, I suspected that once vaccine safety concerns emerged, a non-mRNA COVID-19 vaccine would be thrown under the bus to make the mRNA technology look "safe." This is what then happened with the J&J vaccine, when six cases of an extremely unusual blood clot were linked to that vaccine, causing the FDA and CDC to pause its administration for 11 days.
By doing so, it created the perception that the FDA was monitoring for vaccine side effects with a fine-tooth comb and was willing to pull the vaccine if it caused a rare side effect in a very small number of people.
Nothing could be further from the truth, as the mRNA vaccines have caused far more blood clots than the J&J vaccine. Similarly, investigation after investigation shows the FDA is ignoring the endless deluge of red flags from the COVID-19 vaccines.
Unfortunately, this ploy worked (temporarily), and for over a year in the odd instances where I hear a doctor willing to debate the safety of the vaccines, one of the most common arguments they would utilize is that if the FDA was willing to temporarily pause J&J after six blood clots, there is no possible way a larger unaddressed problem exists with the mRNA vaccines.
Likewise, the CDC has continually insisted there are no significant side effects from the COVID vaccine, but eventually was forced to concede that it could cause myocarditis. At that point, a pivot was made that said the myocarditis is very minor ( which is not true), and that COVID-19 is more likely to give you myocarditis than the vaccine (so overall the vaccine actually prevents you from getting myocarditis)—which again is not true. As such, many attempts have been made to reframe the side effects of the vaccine to "the only issue with it is that it occasionally gives you brief myocarditis, but you do know it's very minor and the actual myocarditis issue is from COVID-19."
Psychiatric Complications and Iatrogenic Injuries
As the above points have shown, a variety of factors work against doctors being able to recognize the presence of medical injuries. The question then becomes, how will the injuries that inevitably occur be explained?
As you might imagine, the default strategy is to fold the injury into an amorphous diagnosis which can then take the blame for the medical injury and then put that label on everyone with the injury. Typically this is done with psychiatric diagnoses, but recently COVID-19 infections have also been appointed to that role (both of these diagnoses were used to gaslight patients in the clinical trials for those vaccines).
The earliest references to this gaslighting I have found were at the time of Freud, where his new model of psychoanalysis was used to explain the complex symptoms observed within patients that doctors otherwise had difficulty making sense of. However, as detailed in The Age of Autism: Mercury, Medicine, and a Man-Made Epidemic, an outside evaluation of Freud's case studies suggests many of those patients' problems actually arose from mercury poisoning.
Mercury, despite being extremely toxic, was used by the medical profession for centuries (and to some extent still is). Frequently, individuals with mercury poisoning would develop a wide array of complex diseases that included neurological and psychiatric complications (which, like many other conditions, were often attributed to " female hysteria").
Freud's message that these complications were the fault of the patient (e.g., as a result of unresolved sexual desires) rather than the physician, was an immensely appealing message to the medical profession, and as a result, became the party line.
Ever since this time there has been a systemic failure to recognize that neurologic damage can produce psychiatric symptoms. Instead, neurologic symptoms are viewed as a manifestation of a pre-existing psychological illness that must be treated with psychological counseling and psychiatric medications.
One of the best examples of this issue is "Functional Neurological Disorder" (FND) which recognizes that something is wrong with the brain, but since no explanation can be found, it is then assumed to have been due to pre-existing psychiatric conditions.
If you review the National Institute of Health's description of FND, you will see that the above description is no exaggeration, and it is extremely sad to hear about the experiences vaccine-injured patients go through since FND is one of the most common diagnoses they receive.
When I look at FND cases (e.g., those characterized by seizures), the cause of the disorder can frequently be found, but since neurologists ( including friends of mine) do not want to consider the actual cause, the tests needed to diagnose it are often not ordered or even known about by the doctors attending to the patient.
If you review Maddie's story, you will note that this is also exactly what happened to her and her permanent paralysis from the vaccine was labeled as FND resulting from a psychiatric condition. Because of this gaslighting, she was not able to get appropriate care when her neurological reaction to the vaccine was occurring (that likely could have prevented permanent disability).
I believe this occurred because the chief investigator was fully aware that a severe neurologic reaction to a single participant would have made the vaccine too dangerous for children to take, so he decided to gaslight Maddie so her injury would not need to end up in the trial. Sadder still, Maddie's experiences were not unique, and the testimonies we've received from trial participants clearly show there was systemic fraud in the COVID vaccine trials.
Another common symptom doctors place the blame for medical injuries on is "anxiety." The two major problems with this process are:
Failing to recognize that having a life-changing injury will normally create distress, and similarly failing to recognize that being collectively gaslighted by medical providers is not good for anyone's mental health. Worse still, pharmaceutical injuries frequently cause tissue damage that will trigger anxiety.
Note: furthermore much of the mass media controls us through creating anxiety about the future to sell the current product or narrative.
Sadly, very few doctors recognize that damage to the nervous system (which is a common toxicity of pharmaceuticals) can also create psychiatric disturbances. Instead, they can only recognize that psychiatric distress can often worsen neurologic symptoms, but do so without also realizing that it is much rarer for psychiatric distress to be the originating cause of a neurologic issue.
Similarly, many common psychiatric disorders have organic causes (e.g., chronic undiagnosed infections, traumatic brain injuries, or nutritional and metabolic deficiencies). However, in most cases, psychiatrists prescribe medications based on the symptoms a patient presents with (e.g., you are depressed so you need Prozac) rather than looking at the underlying cause.
I believe this is because doing the former pays well, but the latter typically does not and is not emphasized in a psychiatrist's training.
In addition to neurological damage frequently creating psychiatric complications (e.g., vagal dysfunction creating anxiety), damage to other organ systems can as well (Chinese medicine does an excellent job of mapping these correlations out). One of the best examples I have seen with the COVID-19 vaccines relates to the heart and I have had variations of the following conversations multiple times since 2021:
Friend: I have been having severe anxiety attacks since I got the vaccine. My heart starts beating rapidly, and I start to have pain in my chest. I never had this problem before, but now everything makes me anxious and it's so hard for me to be calm.Me: You should get your heart looked at.
Friend: What do you mean? Everyone told me it was anxiety due to stress.
Me: Trust me, you need to get your heart looked at.
(Time passes)
Friend: How did you know I had myocarditis?
Damage to the heart (or the vagus nerve) will often create an irregular heart rate and chest pain, and these palpitations often provoke anxiety. Unfortunately, since these symptoms are also triggered by anxiety, when they are observed, doctors will often default to a diagnosis of anxiety and look no further.
Note: while I find this gaslighting is extremely common and problematic, it's also important to acknowledge that there are psychiatric patients who are delusional (or dishonest) and see things that are not there. As such, challenging patients with very real medical injuries will often be placed into the same bucket as those patients, and even well-intentioned doctors who are aware of this will still sometimes encounter situations where they aren't completely sure which scenario applies to their patient.
Medical Paternalism
There are essentially two models of medical practice that are followed:
The paternalistic model (where you are expected to unquestioningly trust and comply with everything the doctor tells you).
The collaborative model, where the physician is your partner in working towards health.
Although the paternalistic model was the standard for most of Western medicine's history, in recent times, there has been a push for the collaborative model. Presently, many patients are seeking out collaborative physicians (especially since system doctors have to spend so much time going through checklists that there is little time for actual engagement with their patients), and the market is economically rewarding physicians who are making this change.
A key misconception much of the public holds about doctors is that we are infallible beings (which is a key justification for the paternalistic model). In reality, once you peer behind the lab coat, we struggle with many of the same issues you all do too. Being able to genuinely recognize this and respectfully treat the physician you see as a fellow human being is one of the most effective strategies for initiating a collaborative doctor-patient relationship.
Although doctors sometimes gaslight injured patients for self-serving reasons (e.g., to protect Pfizer's vaccine in its clinical trials or under the severely misguided belief it will protect a doctor from a lawsuit), I believe the majority of cases occur because the doctors simply cannot see the injury occurred. As a result, these doctors believe they are doing the best for the patient when in reality they are just gaslighting them.
One of the largest issues in our modern era is how disconnected we have become from ourselves and others. Within the doctor-patient relationship, this disconnection makes it much less likely a physician will be able to recognize what is happening in a patient (e.g., a medical injury) or feel compelled to go to bat for them while every other healthcare provider is gaslighting them.
When people ask me for their best options to avoid being gaslighted, I thus suggest pursuing one of the following options:
1) See a physician whom you pay directly (rather than one who takes insurance). This business model matters because it forces the doctor to have a collaborative doctor-patient relationship and stay in business (no one will pay to see them if they just get gaslit). I am a big believer in the statement "you get what you pay for" and if you only see system doctors who base their practice around insurance payments, you often do not get a good outcome.
For example, shortly before I wrote an earlier draft of this article, I had a patient with what I felt was a relatively straightforward problem that had significantly impacted his life for 25 years. When I reviewed his history, he told me he had seen a dozen (insurance-taking) doctors, many of whom promised they could fix the problems with elaborate procedures from their specialty (all of which did nothing or made his issue worse).
What was striking about his story was that only one of them had ever even performed an extensive evaluation to try to figure out what was causing the problem.
2) However, while seeing a private-pay physician often is an excellent investment, many patients simply cannot afford to do so. In this case, the ideal scenario is to find an insurance-taking physician through word of mouth who has earned a reputation for forging collaborative doctor-patient relationships. Unfortunately, these recommendations are hard to come across, and typically these doctors will have full practices that are hard to get into.
3) The third (and often the only available option) is to take the initiative to forge a collaborative relationship with the doctor through having a respectful demeanor where you treat the doctor as a fellow human being rather than "the doctor."
In general, this approach will be the most effective on doctors who recently completed their medical training (everyone becomes more rigid with age, plus early on, their practices are not yet full), and in medical settings where the doctors get longer per visit (you can't really build a collaborative relationship in 10-15 minutes).
Regardless of the option you choose, it is also often important to provide the documentation to support the occurrence of your medical injury. This includes records establishing a timeline of the injury following the medical therapy and scientific literature substantiating the link between the two.
Physicians in turn (especially younger ones) will be the most receptive to considering this link if it is presented in a composed and thoughtful way rather than a confrontational manner, because like every other human they tend to become defensive. Given how upsetting the process of being gaslighted is, maintaining this demeanor can be extremely challenging.
Sadly though, it is necessary because doctors are trained to see pharmaceutical injuries as being psychological in nature, and a patient expressing their completely justifiable feelings about the situation will often feed into the doctor's erroneous perceptions about the patient's mental health.
Conclusion
Whenever governments are decaying, the audacity of their lies will increase more and more, which we likewise are seeing throughout the media (both with the vaccines and with our entire political process). While this approach can be quite effective (consider how many people still believe the narrative), at the same time, once it passes a certain point, everyone begins to wake up, especially if they have a framework to place those lies into context.
Put differently, many of the social changes we are now seeing are because people have become so fed up with the mass media's over the top gaslighting about what we can see is happening in front of us with our own eyes. Since there are only two options for the media to address this (either more gaslighting or telling the truth), still, they aren't willing to give up their power (or money) by telling the truth, they've boxed themselves into a downward spiral in public trust by continuing to double down on gaslighting.
Medical gaslighting is one of the things I despise most in medicine, and as such, it is one of my primary goals with this publication to bring attention to this concept. It has hence been incredibly encouraging to see that the fallout from COVID (and the profound gaslighting both patients and doctors received about their vaccine injuries) has made there be much more receptivity to the possibility of iatrogenic injuries, particularly from the COVID vaccine—what is happening now is completely different from anything I've seen in my lifetime. That is largely because each of you, and I am profoundly grateful that we may at last be moving to a point where medical gaslighting will end—particularly since the medical industrial complex is now losing so much money from lost trust, it is being economically forced to begin telling the truth to regain lost business.