I could not agree more. The clinic is a politics free zone for me. In fact, my life is a politics free zone. Except for local politics, where I can have a large influence on how we maintain our roads or how much tax relief we give to the elderly, for example, I do not discuss politics. I have yet to see any good come from it for anyone and have seen many ruptured relationships. I think I have lost one patient because of this stance. Maybe more have quietly found doctors who will spend precious appointment time discussing these matters rather than diabetes and cancer screenings.
John, I agree with you. In our role as physicians, we are responsible to focus on the patient in front of us whenever we are functioning as physicians. Every physician I know complains that they don't have enough time to meet the needs of the individual patient during their visit. It is irresponsible of us to use our time or take the patient's time and expose them to our political biases. Thank you for all of your work. Best, Steve
My doctor subscribed to the covid PC perspective completely. I never challenged his position, but it has destroyed my trust in his judgement. The evidence is clear that masks and covid vaccines have no effect on transmission, but he insisted on pushing both during visits that had nothing to do with them. I still accept the depth and breadth of his knowledge relating to medicine, but I no longer have the degree of trust I had in his judgement in evaluating the science.
As a patient I've bitten my tongue so many times during the COVID charade. And it did absolutely destroy my confidence in the competence of most of my doctors.
Absolute truth - I experienced the same with my doctor, and with my twins’ doctor - as a physical therapist, I am definitely not as smart or intelligent or wise as our doctors, but I do realize that many doctors don’t do their own research into topics related to public health and just trust the “experts” - so when these so called “public health experts” are politically captured, or captured by the pharmaceutical industry, then the breakdown of trust trickles down to those doctors who just abide by what they are told to abide by… and sadly, the covid “pandemic” really exposed which doctors we can trust and which we cannot… and sadly, here in Southern California, it is almost impossible to find a doctor who isn’t captured by the public health authorities…
Thank you for this article. Professional behavior- like good manners- reminds us it’s not all about “us” but about “others”- others needs, feelings, sensibilities. Professionalism demands that we put aside our wants in order to best care for those in need. If someone isn’t willing or able to behave professionally (and that includes caring deeply and well for all those in need), step aside. Deployed, I cared for/operated on “the enemy”. And I did my work with complete devotion. It’s the only way.
I've practiced medicine for 40 years. if my patients want to talk politics with me, I'm happy to do so but I will never ever express it to them first. In fact, as the president of a group we made it pcrystal clear that when you put on the white coat or the shirt with the Practice emblem, you have no political views. If the shirt says your name on it and it's your business and you are the sole owner, you could say whatever you want. When it's our group, we keep our mouth shut so if you're working for someone else and you want to be political views or if you're not paying the paychecks, be ready to be unemployed.
One of our physicians was complaining about the policy mentioned above. He talked to an administrator who was gay and said so you would be upset if I wore the Austin Heart shirt to a gay pride parade? The administrator was fantastic looked at him and said I will march with you in the gay pride parade, but you will be unemployed if you wear the company logo while you're marching. Our job is to practice medicine. Our job is to welcome every patient no matter their political views. People have to feel safe in the doctors office and if they feel someone is disagreeing with them, they're going to feel unsafe. If you want to express all your views, you can do so but then you pay all the bills you take all the risk don't do it from the cheap seats while someone else is guaranteeing your income..
Its appauling to me that people have lost sight of work etiqutte. Their personal agendas seem to be allowed out to run amok. Covid nonsense brought out the worst in many areas.
This anecdote also begs the question... if GAYS are SO confidante in their life style, why is it they seen to need the world to march in their parade?
“JAMA Network Open recently published a survey study showing a substantial loss of trust for doctors and hospitals in the past few years. It is bad news for our profession. The reasons for this are unknowable, but part of the trust issue may be that we in healthcare overstepped our jobs.”
You’re joking, right? You really don’t know why people don’t trust their doctors any longer? Allow me to offer a simple answer: you lied about COVID and the vaxxines and caused immeasurable harm and death to your patients.
Sorry, going to disagree. If you don’t know what you are prescribing, you don’t prescribe, end of story. I’m not an MD and I knew not to take a rushed, experimental vaxxine using untested mRNA technology.
Agreed. Nobody can know everything, but as providers honesty requires us to be, well, honest about that.
The lack of trust didn’t come from unknowable positions. Nobody distrusted a doctor who admitted that transmission after vaccination wasn’t tested but we had no reason to believe it wouldn’t stop transmission (even though that turned out to be wrong).
It’s lying though to claim things are proven when it was known at a level all healthcare providers should know that those questions weren’t tested. Or with masks, that those questions WERE tested and the opposite result was found.
It’s not lying to say “we don’t know, but here is our educated guess” and few patients hold it against their provider when that’s wrong. It IS lying to claim something is proven when it clearly wasn’t. And THAT destroyed trust. Will be very hard to get that trust back.
I guess they're busy. Most of my doctors have had no idea of what side effects come from meds they've prescribed. I used to think I was extraordinarily sensitive to meds. Now I think most people get the same side effects but never realize it's the drugs that have ruined their lives.
You are being too charitable and nice. It is precisely the doctor's business to know everything important about drugs or treatments they prescribe. First do no harm is the fundamental principle.
The loss of trust came from Dr's insisting patients take an experimental drug. As a veterinarian the entire covid debacle has left a bad taste in my mouth for all things pharmacological. I used to be an early adopter of new treatments but as of the introduction and purposeful burying of data in the name of profit by these companies specifically for vaccines they new to be unsafe, I now stick with tried and true meds and wait for data before recommending anything new to the market.
I totally agree with you. Doctors are not experts on politics, or business, or real estate. They have their opinions and I have mine. I am paying a doctor to work for me on health, not give me a political opinion.
Getting political with patients is probably the worst thing you could do. Because if you spout Democrat stuff, your Republican patients are going to be afraid to challenge you, because they'll be afraid of the treatment they get as a consequence. Likewise if your views are the other way around. It doesn't matter: politics makes things get ugly, fast.
I taught physics at a state university campus for the better party of twenty years. Only once did I burst out into my views on the outcome of an election. And by the look on the face of one of my students I saw what I'd done: I felt like I'd just bullied him. After class I apologized. That still bothers me.
Any time there's an inequality in power in a relationship be it doctor-patient or teacher-student we should keep our political views private.
Generally true. But if the patient has “blue” beliefs and the doctor is wearing an Ukraine pin, odds are trust will be established.
It’s when those pin wearers start promoting voting for “saving democracy” in the red areas of blue states (where I mostly work) that trust creation becomes much more difficult.
Of course I’m of the belief that if your views are biased enough that you have to promote them to people who are in vulnerable positions (patients seeking care) there is something wrong with your ego and your judgment.
I saw your tweet last night (I follow you on X) and while I “liked” it, I didn’t comment because I wasn’t in the mood to attract a rabid pile-on on myself. Especially since I’m an NP not an MD.
I completely agree with you John. I am "BLUE" living in a "RED" state. I honestly cannot understand how the other side thinks and believes. But this is irrelevant to providing medical care. I strive to remain outwardly "neutral" — and NEVER bring up politics. It will not help (I have not yet been able to convince a single soul that "my way" is better) — and trust becomes impossible once debate of political views enter the scenario.
Even as a medical professional I already have a well deserved low level of trust of my physicians. If they promoted politics I would fire them and go on the internet to share why. Unfortunately they have been trained to be "activists" since grade school.
When I was in high school in the late 1960s,my doctor was an active Democrat in a Republican town in Vermont. But politics were different then. He was a fairly conservative Democrat and the Republicans were generally liberal. Not the same today.
As to the political leanings of the vast majority of people today, it is the same. If you could draw a center line for the parties and policies I would bet that 90% of us fall within 10 points on the dead center. The media though has worked extremely hard at making the public see this center line as though it were the Grand Canyon and not an invisible line.
The reasons are not unknowable, all you have to do is ask people why they have lost faith in doctors. You could also look at extremely popular Substack’s like A Midwestern Doctor or Robert Malone or Steve Kirsch.
It’s not because doctors overstepped their boundaries, it’s because the medical profession has failed to advocate for the best interests of patients and during Covid that happened at such a large and egregious scale that people could no longer ignore the fact that the American healthcare industry is designed to make a lot of people lots of money (most of those people are administrators and work for drug companies and are not in the trenches doctors) and it’s not designed to promote or encourage health.
The medical establishment continually promoted terrible pseudoscience and then pushed so that people could not pursue the treatments they wanted. The fact that the medical establishment pushed Remdesivir and Covid shots and made it impossible for people to be treated with Ivermectin and then eventually monoclonal antibodies was unforgivable. Pushing the vaccines across all age groups but especially in healthy children and pregnant women was unforgivable.
Refusing to acknowledge not only the obvious harm caused by the Covid vaccines but also the harm caused by the current CDC vaccine schedule is unacceptable.
The profession pushing the medical transition of children when it means permanently altering the bodies of children who will mostly grow out of their identity issues resulted in a loss of trust. Doctors supporting stupid claims like men can have periods too or men can get pregnant or calling pregnant mothers “birthing people” causes a loss of trust. Posting pronouns causes people to lose trust, I’m not trusting any doctor who can’t tell the difference between a boy and a girl when the average two year old can accurately identify the differences.
I promise you those of us who have lost our faith in doctors are not shy about explaining why. Try asking.
I could not agree more. The clinic is a politics free zone for me. In fact, my life is a politics free zone. Except for local politics, where I can have a large influence on how we maintain our roads or how much tax relief we give to the elderly, for example, I do not discuss politics. I have yet to see any good come from it for anyone and have seen many ruptured relationships. I think I have lost one patient because of this stance. Maybe more have quietly found doctors who will spend precious appointment time discussing these matters rather than diabetes and cancer screenings.
John, I agree with you. In our role as physicians, we are responsible to focus on the patient in front of us whenever we are functioning as physicians. Every physician I know complains that they don't have enough time to meet the needs of the individual patient during their visit. It is irresponsible of us to use our time or take the patient's time and expose them to our political biases. Thank you for all of your work. Best, Steve
My doctor subscribed to the covid PC perspective completely. I never challenged his position, but it has destroyed my trust in his judgement. The evidence is clear that masks and covid vaccines have no effect on transmission, but he insisted on pushing both during visits that had nothing to do with them. I still accept the depth and breadth of his knowledge relating to medicine, but I no longer have the degree of trust I had in his judgement in evaluating the science.
As a patient I've bitten my tongue so many times during the COVID charade. And it did absolutely destroy my confidence in the competence of most of my doctors.
And justifiably so.......
Absolute truth - I experienced the same with my doctor, and with my twins’ doctor - as a physical therapist, I am definitely not as smart or intelligent or wise as our doctors, but I do realize that many doctors don’t do their own research into topics related to public health and just trust the “experts” - so when these so called “public health experts” are politically captured, or captured by the pharmaceutical industry, then the breakdown of trust trickles down to those doctors who just abide by what they are told to abide by… and sadly, the covid “pandemic” really exposed which doctors we can trust and which we cannot… and sadly, here in Southern California, it is almost impossible to find a doctor who isn’t captured by the public health authorities…
Ditto. DITTOOOOO
Thank you for this article. Professional behavior- like good manners- reminds us it’s not all about “us” but about “others”- others needs, feelings, sensibilities. Professionalism demands that we put aside our wants in order to best care for those in need. If someone isn’t willing or able to behave professionally (and that includes caring deeply and well for all those in need), step aside. Deployed, I cared for/operated on “the enemy”. And I did my work with complete devotion. It’s the only way.
I've practiced medicine for 40 years. if my patients want to talk politics with me, I'm happy to do so but I will never ever express it to them first. In fact, as the president of a group we made it pcrystal clear that when you put on the white coat or the shirt with the Practice emblem, you have no political views. If the shirt says your name on it and it's your business and you are the sole owner, you could say whatever you want. When it's our group, we keep our mouth shut so if you're working for someone else and you want to be political views or if you're not paying the paychecks, be ready to be unemployed.
One of our physicians was complaining about the policy mentioned above. He talked to an administrator who was gay and said so you would be upset if I wore the Austin Heart shirt to a gay pride parade? The administrator was fantastic looked at him and said I will march with you in the gay pride parade, but you will be unemployed if you wear the company logo while you're marching. Our job is to practice medicine. Our job is to welcome every patient no matter their political views. People have to feel safe in the doctors office and if they feel someone is disagreeing with them, they're going to feel unsafe. If you want to express all your views, you can do so but then you pay all the bills you take all the risk don't do it from the cheap seats while someone else is guaranteeing your income..
Its appauling to me that people have lost sight of work etiqutte. Their personal agendas seem to be allowed out to run amok. Covid nonsense brought out the worst in many areas.
This anecdote also begs the question... if GAYS are SO confidante in their life style, why is it they seen to need the world to march in their parade?
“JAMA Network Open recently published a survey study showing a substantial loss of trust for doctors and hospitals in the past few years. It is bad news for our profession. The reasons for this are unknowable, but part of the trust issue may be that we in healthcare overstepped our jobs.”
You’re joking, right? You really don’t know why people don’t trust their doctors any longer? Allow me to offer a simple answer: you lied about COVID and the vaxxines and caused immeasurable harm and death to your patients.
I don't know if I'd call it lying in most cases, but uncritical thinking and misplaced trust.
Sorry, going to disagree. If you don’t know what you are prescribing, you don’t prescribe, end of story. I’m not an MD and I knew not to take a rushed, experimental vaxxine using untested mRNA technology.
Agreed. Nobody can know everything, but as providers honesty requires us to be, well, honest about that.
The lack of trust didn’t come from unknowable positions. Nobody distrusted a doctor who admitted that transmission after vaccination wasn’t tested but we had no reason to believe it wouldn’t stop transmission (even though that turned out to be wrong).
It’s lying though to claim things are proven when it was known at a level all healthcare providers should know that those questions weren’t tested. Or with masks, that those questions WERE tested and the opposite result was found.
It’s not lying to say “we don’t know, but here is our educated guess” and few patients hold it against their provider when that’s wrong. It IS lying to claim something is proven when it clearly wasn’t. And THAT destroyed trust. Will be very hard to get that trust back.
I guess they're busy. Most of my doctors have had no idea of what side effects come from meds they've prescribed. I used to think I was extraordinarily sensitive to meds. Now I think most people get the same side effects but never realize it's the drugs that have ruined their lives.
You are being too charitable and nice. It is precisely the doctor's business to know everything important about drugs or treatments they prescribe. First do no harm is the fundamental principle.
And it's fun being told I'm being too charitable and nice. I've seldom been told that!
Waiting to prescribe at least a year after approval of a med then looking at reported side effects might alert a doctor to what can happen.
That would be a sound policy.
The loss of trust came from Dr's insisting patients take an experimental drug. As a veterinarian the entire covid debacle has left a bad taste in my mouth for all things pharmacological. I used to be an early adopter of new treatments but as of the introduction and purposeful burying of data in the name of profit by these companies specifically for vaccines they new to be unsafe, I now stick with tried and true meds and wait for data before recommending anything new to the market.
On top of this, the forcing of experimental COVID drugs resulted in more people reading up on others and learning that this trend wasn’t new.
I totally agree with you. Doctors are not experts on politics, or business, or real estate. They have their opinions and I have mine. I am paying a doctor to work for me on health, not give me a political opinion.
Getting political with patients is probably the worst thing you could do. Because if you spout Democrat stuff, your Republican patients are going to be afraid to challenge you, because they'll be afraid of the treatment they get as a consequence. Likewise if your views are the other way around. It doesn't matter: politics makes things get ugly, fast.
I taught physics at a state university campus for the better party of twenty years. Only once did I burst out into my views on the outcome of an election. And by the look on the face of one of my students I saw what I'd done: I felt like I'd just bullied him. After class I apologized. That still bothers me.
Any time there's an inequality in power in a relationship be it doctor-patient or teacher-student we should keep our political views private.
Generally true. But if the patient has “blue” beliefs and the doctor is wearing an Ukraine pin, odds are trust will be established.
It’s when those pin wearers start promoting voting for “saving democracy” in the red areas of blue states (where I mostly work) that trust creation becomes much more difficult.
Of course I’m of the belief that if your views are biased enough that you have to promote them to people who are in vulnerable positions (patients seeking care) there is something wrong with your ego and your judgment.
I saw your tweet last night (I follow you on X) and while I “liked” it, I didn’t comment because I wasn’t in the mood to attract a rabid pile-on on myself. Especially since I’m an NP not an MD.
I completely agree with you John. I am "BLUE" living in a "RED" state. I honestly cannot understand how the other side thinks and believes. But this is irrelevant to providing medical care. I strive to remain outwardly "neutral" — and NEVER bring up politics. It will not help (I have not yet been able to convince a single soul that "my way" is better) — and trust becomes impossible once debate of political views enter the scenario.
Absolutely agree with you on this John, which is why I still read your posts even though I don’t always agree.
Even as a medical professional I already have a well deserved low level of trust of my physicians. If they promoted politics I would fire them and go on the internet to share why. Unfortunately they have been trained to be "activists" since grade school.
When I was in high school in the late 1960s,my doctor was an active Democrat in a Republican town in Vermont. But politics were different then. He was a fairly conservative Democrat and the Republicans were generally liberal. Not the same today.
As to the political leanings of the vast majority of people today, it is the same. If you could draw a center line for the parties and policies I would bet that 90% of us fall within 10 points on the dead center. The media though has worked extremely hard at making the public see this center line as though it were the Grand Canyon and not an invisible line.
The reasons are not unknowable, all you have to do is ask people why they have lost faith in doctors. You could also look at extremely popular Substack’s like A Midwestern Doctor or Robert Malone or Steve Kirsch.
It’s not because doctors overstepped their boundaries, it’s because the medical profession has failed to advocate for the best interests of patients and during Covid that happened at such a large and egregious scale that people could no longer ignore the fact that the American healthcare industry is designed to make a lot of people lots of money (most of those people are administrators and work for drug companies and are not in the trenches doctors) and it’s not designed to promote or encourage health.
The medical establishment continually promoted terrible pseudoscience and then pushed so that people could not pursue the treatments they wanted. The fact that the medical establishment pushed Remdesivir and Covid shots and made it impossible for people to be treated with Ivermectin and then eventually monoclonal antibodies was unforgivable. Pushing the vaccines across all age groups but especially in healthy children and pregnant women was unforgivable.
Refusing to acknowledge not only the obvious harm caused by the Covid vaccines but also the harm caused by the current CDC vaccine schedule is unacceptable.
The profession pushing the medical transition of children when it means permanently altering the bodies of children who will mostly grow out of their identity issues resulted in a loss of trust. Doctors supporting stupid claims like men can have periods too or men can get pregnant or calling pregnant mothers “birthing people” causes a loss of trust. Posting pronouns causes people to lose trust, I’m not trusting any doctor who can’t tell the difference between a boy and a girl when the average two year old can accurately identify the differences.
I promise you those of us who have lost our faith in doctors are not shy about explaining why. Try asking.
I agree. It’s similar to when you visit with friends who have the opposite view on politics. You keep your views private to remain friends.