The Dangers of Playing Doctor

Why Playing Doctor Is One of the Most Dangerous Things You Can Do

I received a lot of questions about my recent blog post on How to Dump Iron as to why we would want to dump iron (donate blood) in the first place.

This post and the one following it are the answers to that question.

These posts consist of two excerpts from my book, Dying to Be Free.

The first is on The Dangers of Playing Doctor. You can pick up a full copy of the book here. I have omitted the references here due to formatting constraints (and because I am busy actually taking care of patients).

Enjoy!

“The reason doctors are so dangerous is that they believe in what they are doing.”

-Robert S. Mendelsohn, MD

Spending money on your health is one of the most dangerous things you can do. If this surprises you, consider the following.

Did you know that 50% of stents used to open clogged arteries to the heart are unnecessary? Of those stents that are placed, a certain percentage will cause complications, such as stroke, heart attack, or even death. Cardiologists are too zealous about stenting, because they get paid to do it (though they do see life-saving benefits in emergency cases).

Still, that is small consolation for those who do not actually need a stent and suffer a stroke, heart attack, or even death as a complication of receiving one.

People tend to fall for all kinds of gimmicks, frauds, and simplistic thinking. I know this all too well—the world of medicine is largely hucksters selling drugs, supplements, surgeries, and gadgets to people indiscriminately. Why is this? First, if something can be a medicine, then it can be a poison. This leads many people to experience relief with various “therapies,” but others will feel and perform worse with the same therapy. Second, doctors and patients both want to be right and hate to be wrong. This creates what we call the placebo effect. Doctors have a long history of fooling themselves into believing what they are doing is of benefit to the patient, and fooling patients into agreeing with them. The word ‘doctor’ is derived from the word ‘docere’, meaning to teach. Unfortunately, this noble profession has morphed out of its original meaning towards something that closely resembles a dictator. Most people have a strong tendency to blindly believe their doctors because of the surrounding prestige. Instead, patients should be demanding that doctors first and foremost teach their patients how to get well and stay well. Now we are in a time where one cannot question the authoritative position of a doctor; this is unless that doctor is outside of the mainstream view that is carefully and deliberately choreographed by Big Pharma, Big Tech and Big Food. The moment they question their narrative, they become a quack.

Because living beings are complex systems, it is very difficult to isolate therapies that work reliably, or are worth the adverse effects and risks. Yet people believe that "experts" are more often right than wrong. This is absurd when you look at the actual track record of experts. What is perhaps more perverse than the arrogance of experts is the arrogance of those who continue to follow them, even after their advice has proven flawed.

Take bloodletting as one example. Bloodletting (more properly known as therapeutic phlebotomy) is the practice of cutting open a patient and allowing them to bleed. Technically, drawing blood for labs is bloodletting. So is blood donation. So is cutting your finger with a knife while cooking dinner. Not long ago, doctors widely agreed that bloodletting had therapeutic value. George Washington was famously bled of many pints of blood before he finally succumbed to pneumonia (although he may well have died of blood loss).

The practice has, in modern years, been vilified as hopelessly backward and foolish. After all, the notion that you could make a patient better by literally injuring them is counter-intuitive, to say the least. However, that is exactly what any elective and many emergency surgical procedures do. The question is, how do you know when to cut and when not to cut? The history of surgery is littered with examples of surgical procedures that sound good in theory, but fail to benefit the patients in practice (that is why we call it “practicing” medicine). Likewise, many surgeries began as grisly experiments, including surgeries we still perform today. The first five mitral valve commissurotomy patients all died post-operatively. The surgeon who innovated the procedure was nicknamed, “Bailey the Butcher.” His sixth patient, however, made a full recovery and lived a full life. He saved her life. If he had stopped at five, who knows where the world of open heart surgery would be today? What seems like butchery may be the antecedent to a life-saving surgery.

Bloodletting must have seemed wrong-headed from the start. Why then did doctors gravitate toward the practice of bloodletting? First, it is something that doctors can do. Doctors love to “do” things. “Don’t just stand there, do something!” This simple phrase illustrates one of the greatest fallacies that people tend to fall for—that doing something is better than doing nothing. Few patients have the wisdom to know when to pay their doctors to do nothing. Those who think that they are only getting better when they are paying the doctor to “do something” are bound to waste an extraordinary amount of time and money, and they may risk their lives in the futile effort to get a bargain.

“Sometimes to do nothing is a good remedy.”

- Hippocrates

The father of medicine, thousands of years ago, warned us against overly aggressive practitioners of medicine. They always have and always will be with us. Still, while it is easy to deride bloodletting as quackery, we must ask: “When is bloodletting of therapeutic value?” There are times when it is appropriate, so the question becomes who, when, where, and how much?

In my next post, we will discuss the benefits of blood-letting.

Until then, be well,

Dr. Stillman