My direct personal experience is that the gaslighting often ropes in the patient in a kind of Stockholm Syndrome:
Me: You got much sicker right after [name of medical intervention].
Response: Oh, right, where did YOU go to medical school?
That white coat means wisdom, and the way your body is screaming at you must be a lie. I've seen this several times, now, up close and personal, in ways that seemed shockingly obvious. I'm always particularly fascinated by the maneuver of "we don't know what's causing it, but here's the list of medications we're adding to treat it." Sounds good, doctor.
There's just a portion of the population that won't get off the ride, no matter where it takes them. "These are the experts, Chris."
I gave up my academic career and trained to be a medical herbalist mostly because i didn't want anyone i loved to have to be treated by the NHS.
Medical herbalists are trained to take a full case history and perform a physical examination (a first appointment takes 60-90 minutes). We are taught to listen and to get a proper picture of the patient's lifestyle and diet. We build a timeline of when the problems started. We draw up differential and then a working diagnosis. We actually try and figure out the root cause.
Then we give herbal medicines that have been used successfully for millennia and which support the body in healing.
I just finished reading Lewis Thomas’ Lives of a Cell. There are several passages where he admits how dangerous vaccines are to the immune system. And this was taking place in the 40s and 50s
This is an amazing post. But… this is where my mind immediately goes on this subject. Diet and lifestyle is, in my mind, the root of the majority of anxiety and depression. The body and mind literally cannot function (especially the adrenals) without proper nutrients going in and while being flooded with environmental/diet toxins.
Also, when there is dysbiosis, the body produces massive amounts of toxins right inside itself that interfere with all sorts of essential bodily functions, including mood regulation.
I was having physical health issues in my 30s and finally realized that I was poisoning myself with a poor diet. I made this discovery after years of doctors visits and finding no real solutions. I finally had an epiphany, against my will because I wanted the doctors to have an easy answer. Begrudgingly at first, I made the necessary improvements (which was very inconvenient and difficult), and everything improved over time. Honestly, I went through several mourning periods when I had to give up junk food.
Before I changed my diet, I never thought of myself as anxious or depressed but after healing my body, the anxiety and depression that I was experiencing lifted. I was so used to feeling crappy that I thought it was normal.
Medication may mask symptoms (or make them worse in some cases) but it will never provide the body with what it actually needs, which is whole, unprocessed foods, good sleep, stress management, loving relationships, low levels of toxicity, etc.
I’m sure it’s possible that a person could have a very good diet and lifestyle (Although in my experience, many people believe their diet and lifestyle is better than it actually is) but until someone struggling with mental illness actually makes these changes for about a year, and they have to be meaningful changes, they would never have a baseline to see how they feel on a proper diet in order to adequately find a solution if something is still wrong moving forward.
My sister has been on SSRIs for decades. I worked with her for a long time and slowly she started eating well a little at a time. Eventually, she had made significant progress and was eating well consistently. And not surprisingly, she didn’t need the medication anymore. She was doing amazing. Then, summertime hit and she put all her kids in soccer and just sort of let go of all the good habits she had formed because she was busy. She eventually lost all the progress she had made and ended up going back on medication. She decided it was just too hard to eat well and make other good choices and has given up even trying. And her doctor assured her the medication has no negative affects and isn’t addictive. (Gasp!)
I have so much sympathy and empathy for her and anyone trying to make significant changes because our entire culture is stacked against us being healthy. Advertisements, the medical industrial complex, addictive convenience food, family traditions, learned helplessness, busy lives, stressful relationships, expensive food (not that all healthy food is expensive but some is)… it’s so much to overcome. But, if it is the answer, it simply is, difficult or not.
Now she has four children. Three of them for sure are on medication, maybe four. It breaks my heart.
Somehow we have to turn this ship around or we will have nearly 100% of the population chronically ill. We literally cannot have a functional society the way we are headed. We are reaching critical mass for the whole system to implode, which is what is happening with The Great Reset. Something has to change because it’s not financially possible to have a solvent system when more than half the population becomes so ill that they are unable to contribute. The Great Reset, in my mind, is a sort of controlled demolition so that we will all be under a bio-fascist state and we will eventually no longer have the ability to choose even the most simple of things for our own life, including what we eat. That’s my theory anyway.
But before the Great Reset is complete, we have a chance to make changes. It’s against all odds because this diet and lifestyle trap is happening to children before they even have a chance to decide what diet and lifestyle they want to follow because they are subject to whatever they are born into. Then they become adults who are in the system and already addicted and enslaved.
I find it so interesting that if you were to offer a child a cigarette, a glass of alcohol or illegal drugs, you would have your children taken away. But if you feed your children pizza, soda, ice cream, chips, chicken nuggets, mac-n-cheese, donuts, and breakfast cereal, you are known as the “cool parent”. And then as a society, we are surprised that our children have the highest rates of anxiety and depression ever even imagined. And we give them medication for it.
I guess why I’m rambling on is that we first make ourselves and our children ill by eating a diet that would probably be illegal to feed a pet because it’s so awful, then we go to the doctor to find a fix. What is the medical community supposed to do to fix that? Of course corruption and gaslighting is the general course of action because they don’t actually have any way to address what is really wrong. They have nothing else to offer because it’s not a case of a ‘lack of medicine’ that ails us.
Sorry for the meandering rant but I don’t think it’s just a broken medical system. We have to participate in our own health. It’s a two way street. The more we rely on big pharma and white coats that write prescriptions, rather than doing what we need to do, the worse off our health is going to be. Maybe doctors can start writing prescriptions for Blue Zones. I would support that. But we can write our own prescription for healthy lives and help to build healthy communities around us. I hope it’s not too late.
Depression drugs are a huge money-maker for Big Pharma. I wonder if this category of drugs is a bigger money-making than Statins (the drugs which supposedly lower cholesterol)?
I just read that 35 percent of adults have been on those drugs ... and take those pills every single day. I'm starting to think these drugs do absolutely no good for 99.99 percent of people who pay for them. And the negative side effects must be immense as well.
I now believe Legal Pharma is the biggest criminal cartel in the history of the world.
Since I came in contact with P. Breggin 35 years ago and a 10 years ago P. Götzsche I don’t use the term anti-depressants any more but depressants and.....anti-suicidal or anti-homicidal pills are in my vocabulary now fully understood as suicidal and homicidal pills.
20 years ago I underwent surgery that left me with chronic neuropathic pain. The memory of the number of doctors that gaslighted me and treated me like a drug seeker is still very much with me. I was a physician caught up in this nightmare, and was afraid to confront these doctors because I needed their help. In the end, I was the only person that I could count on to get me through that. I had to do my own research to discover the best things to help me. I still feel betrayed by my own profession
"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."
My take on this is likely to rile some folks up, so here we go...no sugar-coating.
This is a common human problem-egos and hubris exceeding the size of Manhattan. The root cause is a deep-seated insecurity. It's not my task to figure out why these folks are so insecure.
The typical medical doctor's attitude. "I am the expert here, not you. Please play your designated role as a patient, you rube! I am a trained medical doctor and you are a mere mortal."
The message is as follows; DO NOT under any circumstances question my expertise or authority. I am seriously not at all interested in your thoughts, opinions or feelings. Let me get through this damn check list and move on. I have oodles of money to churn through the system today.
This has always been my experience with every doctor I have ever had the unfortunate happenstance to employ. Maybe I have been unlucky, but I seriously doubt it. Perhaps if medical doctors (this includes dentists-on steroids!) tried acting like normal human beings we might have a fighting chance of establishing a collaborative patient/doctor relationship.
How about you doctors/dentists get off your unearned high horse!
Let me be very clear. This experience has only been with doctor's and dentists that I have employed. This in no way pertains to doctors (never met a dentist worth an intelligent conversation) I have met, in general. In the last year, I have met many prominent docs in the medical freedom movement (of which I am very involved in as an independent writer) that are professional, kind, intelligent, open to having a debate/conversation, etc. I suspect they are just like you doc-AMD.
Just my 60 cents for today.
Thank you, as always for your excellent analysis Doc!
Thank you for acknowledging this widespread but overlooked aspect of medical practice. As an ophthalmologist who truly believed in my medical training to listen to the patient and try to understand root causes, I am appalled by the protocol-driven approach of most physicians today. If you just listen with an open mind, you can help people so much more effectively. I vividly recall a patient who presented with bilateral sloughing of the corneal epithelium, an intensely painful and rare condition. On taking the history, I discovered that she had started on a fluoroquinolone for sinus infection 2 days before. The same interference with collagen that results in tendon rupture resulted in her ocular condition. When I searched the literature there were case reports of this in a couple of obscure journals, but nothing in the online entries on the drugs themselves. I reported it to the drug reaction database, but no one will ever know about it. The patient took weeks to heal and months to recover normal vision. But the party line will continue to be that this was unrelated to the drug.
Who here is old enough to remember the gaslighting of the Vietnam vets returning from the war?
Tons of vets returning from the jungles of Vietnam were seriously illwith organ damage, strange body rashes, and so on. Many died in the ensuing years. The government position was that for almost all cases, the cause was psychosomatic illness". IOW, the patient was typically told that his/her symptoms were due to the stress and the trauma of the war experience.
Many patients pushed back, saying that their injuries were due to deployment of toxic exfoliant "agent Orange" while in Vietnam. (Think of the herbicide "Round-Up" on steroids.) Agent orange was deployed in large amounts and inevitably landed on, and was inhaled by, naive but trusting veterans.
But the government position, upheld by physicians, was staunchly that those strange and devastating war injuries had nothing to do with Agent Orange. Strictly "all in the head".
Fast forward to about the year 2000 (maybe even earlier), by which time many vets had already died of those "psychosomatic" injuries. In the news, there was a discreet announcement allowing as how "probably agent orange was the reason for all of those war injuries". I don't remember any mainstream news source announcing this, although some might have (but I doubt it). In fact, it wasn't until the suppression of all the C-19 vax injury stories that I thought about revisiting the Agent Orange story, to see whatever became of it.
Merry Christmas to you and all the FLCCC doctors, you are all godsends and counter weights to the utterly immersive insane engulfment of the earth by pharma.
Too many people I know personally have recently been gaslighted and fobbed off with a non-diagnosis. Functional Neurological Disorder seems to be the current favourite and cardiac damage in the proven absence of coronary artery narrowing is merely attributed to stress. Arrhythmias are treated with ablation therapy or a pacemaker with no suggestion as to what could have triggered the problem. Too few doctors are prepared to entertain the possibility that the vaccine has quite probably caused the problem. Worse still some have recommended further boosters which have or will almost certainly in the future compound the problems. As a retired doctor I find it extremely difficult to see friends and family treated in this way and yet most of them still believe their doctors implicitly and fail to consider the possibility of vaccine damage.
My direct personal experience is that the gaslighting often ropes in the patient in a kind of Stockholm Syndrome:
Me: You got much sicker right after [name of medical intervention].
Response: Oh, right, where did YOU go to medical school?
That white coat means wisdom, and the way your body is screaming at you must be a lie. I've seen this several times, now, up close and personal, in ways that seemed shockingly obvious. I'm always particularly fascinated by the maneuver of "we don't know what's causing it, but here's the list of medications we're adding to treat it." Sounds good, doctor.
There's just a portion of the population that won't get off the ride, no matter where it takes them. "These are the experts, Chris."
I gave up my academic career and trained to be a medical herbalist mostly because i didn't want anyone i loved to have to be treated by the NHS.
Medical herbalists are trained to take a full case history and perform a physical examination (a first appointment takes 60-90 minutes). We are taught to listen and to get a proper picture of the patient's lifestyle and diet. We build a timeline of when the problems started. We draw up differential and then a working diagnosis. We actually try and figure out the root cause.
Then we give herbal medicines that have been used successfully for millennia and which support the body in healing.
It's a much better model.
I just finished reading Lewis Thomas’ Lives of a Cell. There are several passages where he admits how dangerous vaccines are to the immune system. And this was taking place in the 40s and 50s
This is an amazing post. But… this is where my mind immediately goes on this subject. Diet and lifestyle is, in my mind, the root of the majority of anxiety and depression. The body and mind literally cannot function (especially the adrenals) without proper nutrients going in and while being flooded with environmental/diet toxins.
Also, when there is dysbiosis, the body produces massive amounts of toxins right inside itself that interfere with all sorts of essential bodily functions, including mood regulation.
I was having physical health issues in my 30s and finally realized that I was poisoning myself with a poor diet. I made this discovery after years of doctors visits and finding no real solutions. I finally had an epiphany, against my will because I wanted the doctors to have an easy answer. Begrudgingly at first, I made the necessary improvements (which was very inconvenient and difficult), and everything improved over time. Honestly, I went through several mourning periods when I had to give up junk food.
Before I changed my diet, I never thought of myself as anxious or depressed but after healing my body, the anxiety and depression that I was experiencing lifted. I was so used to feeling crappy that I thought it was normal.
Medication may mask symptoms (or make them worse in some cases) but it will never provide the body with what it actually needs, which is whole, unprocessed foods, good sleep, stress management, loving relationships, low levels of toxicity, etc.
I’m sure it’s possible that a person could have a very good diet and lifestyle (Although in my experience, many people believe their diet and lifestyle is better than it actually is) but until someone struggling with mental illness actually makes these changes for about a year, and they have to be meaningful changes, they would never have a baseline to see how they feel on a proper diet in order to adequately find a solution if something is still wrong moving forward.
My sister has been on SSRIs for decades. I worked with her for a long time and slowly she started eating well a little at a time. Eventually, she had made significant progress and was eating well consistently. And not surprisingly, she didn’t need the medication anymore. She was doing amazing. Then, summertime hit and she put all her kids in soccer and just sort of let go of all the good habits she had formed because she was busy. She eventually lost all the progress she had made and ended up going back on medication. She decided it was just too hard to eat well and make other good choices and has given up even trying. And her doctor assured her the medication has no negative affects and isn’t addictive. (Gasp!)
I have so much sympathy and empathy for her and anyone trying to make significant changes because our entire culture is stacked against us being healthy. Advertisements, the medical industrial complex, addictive convenience food, family traditions, learned helplessness, busy lives, stressful relationships, expensive food (not that all healthy food is expensive but some is)… it’s so much to overcome. But, if it is the answer, it simply is, difficult or not.
Now she has four children. Three of them for sure are on medication, maybe four. It breaks my heart.
Somehow we have to turn this ship around or we will have nearly 100% of the population chronically ill. We literally cannot have a functional society the way we are headed. We are reaching critical mass for the whole system to implode, which is what is happening with The Great Reset. Something has to change because it’s not financially possible to have a solvent system when more than half the population becomes so ill that they are unable to contribute. The Great Reset, in my mind, is a sort of controlled demolition so that we will all be under a bio-fascist state and we will eventually no longer have the ability to choose even the most simple of things for our own life, including what we eat. That’s my theory anyway.
But before the Great Reset is complete, we have a chance to make changes. It’s against all odds because this diet and lifestyle trap is happening to children before they even have a chance to decide what diet and lifestyle they want to follow because they are subject to whatever they are born into. Then they become adults who are in the system and already addicted and enslaved.
I find it so interesting that if you were to offer a child a cigarette, a glass of alcohol or illegal drugs, you would have your children taken away. But if you feed your children pizza, soda, ice cream, chips, chicken nuggets, mac-n-cheese, donuts, and breakfast cereal, you are known as the “cool parent”. And then as a society, we are surprised that our children have the highest rates of anxiety and depression ever even imagined. And we give them medication for it.
I guess why I’m rambling on is that we first make ourselves and our children ill by eating a diet that would probably be illegal to feed a pet because it’s so awful, then we go to the doctor to find a fix. What is the medical community supposed to do to fix that? Of course corruption and gaslighting is the general course of action because they don’t actually have any way to address what is really wrong. They have nothing else to offer because it’s not a case of a ‘lack of medicine’ that ails us.
Sorry for the meandering rant but I don’t think it’s just a broken medical system. We have to participate in our own health. It’s a two way street. The more we rely on big pharma and white coats that write prescriptions, rather than doing what we need to do, the worse off our health is going to be. Maybe doctors can start writing prescriptions for Blue Zones. I would support that. But we can write our own prescription for healthy lives and help to build healthy communities around us. I hope it’s not too late.
Depression drugs are a huge money-maker for Big Pharma. I wonder if this category of drugs is a bigger money-making than Statins (the drugs which supposedly lower cholesterol)?
I just read that 35 percent of adults have been on those drugs ... and take those pills every single day. I'm starting to think these drugs do absolutely no good for 99.99 percent of people who pay for them. And the negative side effects must be immense as well.
I now believe Legal Pharma is the biggest criminal cartel in the history of the world.
"Vaccines" just add to this.
Since I came in contact with P. Breggin 35 years ago and a 10 years ago P. Götzsche I don’t use the term anti-depressants any more but depressants and.....anti-suicidal or anti-homicidal pills are in my vocabulary now fully understood as suicidal and homicidal pills.
Incredible analysis. What % of doctors in America can we trust to follow the Hippocratic oath? Does naming and shaming help expose the bad apples?
Here’s a short list of the worst doctors in America: https://yuribezmenov.substack.com/p/how-to-do-no-harm-part-2
20 years ago I underwent surgery that left me with chronic neuropathic pain. The memory of the number of doctors that gaslighted me and treated me like a drug seeker is still very much with me. I was a physician caught up in this nightmare, and was afraid to confront these doctors because I needed their help. In the end, I was the only person that I could count on to get me through that. I had to do my own research to discover the best things to help me. I still feel betrayed by my own profession
"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."
My take on this is likely to rile some folks up, so here we go...no sugar-coating.
This is a common human problem-egos and hubris exceeding the size of Manhattan. The root cause is a deep-seated insecurity. It's not my task to figure out why these folks are so insecure.
The typical medical doctor's attitude. "I am the expert here, not you. Please play your designated role as a patient, you rube! I am a trained medical doctor and you are a mere mortal."
The message is as follows; DO NOT under any circumstances question my expertise or authority. I am seriously not at all interested in your thoughts, opinions or feelings. Let me get through this damn check list and move on. I have oodles of money to churn through the system today.
This has always been my experience with every doctor I have ever had the unfortunate happenstance to employ. Maybe I have been unlucky, but I seriously doubt it. Perhaps if medical doctors (this includes dentists-on steroids!) tried acting like normal human beings we might have a fighting chance of establishing a collaborative patient/doctor relationship.
How about you doctors/dentists get off your unearned high horse!
Let me be very clear. This experience has only been with doctor's and dentists that I have employed. This in no way pertains to doctors (never met a dentist worth an intelligent conversation) I have met, in general. In the last year, I have met many prominent docs in the medical freedom movement (of which I am very involved in as an independent writer) that are professional, kind, intelligent, open to having a debate/conversation, etc. I suspect they are just like you doc-AMD.
Just my 60 cents for today.
Thank you, as always for your excellent analysis Doc!
Thank you for acknowledging this widespread but overlooked aspect of medical practice. As an ophthalmologist who truly believed in my medical training to listen to the patient and try to understand root causes, I am appalled by the protocol-driven approach of most physicians today. If you just listen with an open mind, you can help people so much more effectively. I vividly recall a patient who presented with bilateral sloughing of the corneal epithelium, an intensely painful and rare condition. On taking the history, I discovered that she had started on a fluoroquinolone for sinus infection 2 days before. The same interference with collagen that results in tendon rupture resulted in her ocular condition. When I searched the literature there were case reports of this in a couple of obscure journals, but nothing in the online entries on the drugs themselves. I reported it to the drug reaction database, but no one will ever know about it. The patient took weeks to heal and months to recover normal vision. But the party line will continue to be that this was unrelated to the drug.
Who here is old enough to remember the gaslighting of the Vietnam vets returning from the war?
Tons of vets returning from the jungles of Vietnam were seriously illwith organ damage, strange body rashes, and so on. Many died in the ensuing years. The government position was that for almost all cases, the cause was psychosomatic illness". IOW, the patient was typically told that his/her symptoms were due to the stress and the trauma of the war experience.
Many patients pushed back, saying that their injuries were due to deployment of toxic exfoliant "agent Orange" while in Vietnam. (Think of the herbicide "Round-Up" on steroids.) Agent orange was deployed in large amounts and inevitably landed on, and was inhaled by, naive but trusting veterans.
But the government position, upheld by physicians, was staunchly that those strange and devastating war injuries had nothing to do with Agent Orange. Strictly "all in the head".
Fast forward to about the year 2000 (maybe even earlier), by which time many vets had already died of those "psychosomatic" injuries. In the news, there was a discreet announcement allowing as how "probably agent orange was the reason for all of those war injuries". I don't remember any mainstream news source announcing this, although some might have (but I doubt it). In fact, it wasn't until the suppression of all the C-19 vax injury stories that I thought about revisiting the Agent Orange story, to see whatever became of it.
Anyway, stellar example of gaslighting.
Merry Christmas to you and all the FLCCC doctors, you are all godsends and counter weights to the utterly immersive insane engulfment of the earth by pharma.
Too many people I know personally have recently been gaslighted and fobbed off with a non-diagnosis. Functional Neurological Disorder seems to be the current favourite and cardiac damage in the proven absence of coronary artery narrowing is merely attributed to stress. Arrhythmias are treated with ablation therapy or a pacemaker with no suggestion as to what could have triggered the problem. Too few doctors are prepared to entertain the possibility that the vaccine has quite probably caused the problem. Worse still some have recommended further boosters which have or will almost certainly in the future compound the problems. As a retired doctor I find it extremely difficult to see friends and family treated in this way and yet most of them still believe their doctors implicitly and fail to consider the possibility of vaccine damage.
Here’s good advice: read any medicine’s package insert and take it seriously. Whatever it discloses, you can safely assume it’s worse.
Psychiatry is contemporary witch doctory.
Thank you for sharing your knowledge with us.