The Year In Review
Reflections on the Forgotten Side of Medicine and frequently asked questions.
I (and others) believe the principal things which characterize the era we are in now is rapid change; things that typically would have taken years if not decades to occur are instead happening in the span of months. Similarly, it has been remarkable to see how much things have progressed on the vaccine issue. When I wrote my first article, authorities were doing their best to suppress mass protests that were breaking out against the COVID-19 vaccines they were mandating—now just a year later, they are beginning to distance themselves from that policy.
When you consider that, despite widespread opposition and public protest, it took decades for a similar shift to occur against the smallpox vaccines, this timeline is quite remarkable.
Where Did This Substack Come From?
I fully ascribe to the belief history repeats itself. More and more as my life moves forward, the past, present, and future seem to merge; over and over I see the same historical processes re-enacting themselves and then arriving at their expected conclusions. With COVID-19, I had a vision at the end of December 2019 it was going to turn into a global debacle that would ultimately be predicated upon there being no way to treat it, and the last few years have been the surreal experience of watching that nightmare become reality.
One of the things I hated the most about what I saw unfolding was knowing how powerless I was to stop it (I felt like a grain of sand on the shoreline that knew exactly what the ocean's waves would do to each of us and the absolute futility of trying to oppose it). I eventually decided that I wanted to put a lot of work into a few projects I felt had a tiny chance of averting the tide we were all facing, not because I expected them to succeed but rather because I knew I would never be able to live with myself if I felt I’d done nothing and the events I foresaw came to pass.
Although those efforts, as expected didn’t do anything to change the course we were on (barring one exception I am still not sure if I was responsible for), they were nonetheless invaluable within my own life. They allowed me to prevent quite a few people I was very close to (along with a few patients) from dying of COVID-19, they provided some critical tools for convincing people to avoid vaccinating and treating the COVID-19 vaccine injuries, and they provided the knowledge base that has helped me write many the articles I’ve presented here.
When I watched the mandates play out around the world, I began to have déjà vu of what had happened with the smallpox vaccination mandates over a century ago. That un-proven experimental vaccine not only failed to prevent smallpox but often triggered outbreaks, and simultaneously had a very high injury rate. This resulted in a downward spiral of increasingly stricter mandates (as the medical authorities were unwilling to recognize vaccination rather than insufficient vaccination was the root problem) and widespread protest from the working class as they became more and more opposed to taking them. Eventually, the working class was able to end the mandates (largely through one of the largest protests of the century) and successfully ended smallpox with a much more sensible model the medical profession initially opposed but eventually copied.
Initially, I saw these parallels in Australia, where large public protests against the vaccination mandates were aggressively suppressed by the authorities, and started trying to get the message of what happened previously to the smallpox vaccination protest movement (e.g., through friends who were publicly known for speaking out against the harms of vaccination). I wasn’t successful, and a bit later, I saw a new massive protest break out in Canada which was remarkably similar to the one which turned the tide against the Smallpox vaccines. I tried reaching out to a few contacts again to spread the message, but that also didn’t go anywhere.
Eventually, one day in the middle of the Trucker protests, I woke up and realized this just didn’t sit well with me, and I decided to try publishing it myself (which I had avoided since I thought no one would see it). One person who saw my initial attempt suggested putting an easily sharable version on Substack. Immediately after I did that (one year ago on February 12th, 2022), I asked Steve Kirsch in his comments to promote it, for some reason he graciously agreed, and simultaneously encouraged his readers to subscribe to me.
In the year preceding that publication, I had undertaken an extensive project to verify and document each case of a severe vaccine injury that was reported to me. Although this was a lot of work to catalog, I felt compelled to do it because I hated how powerless I was to stop what I saw happening in front of me, and I wanted to at least do something and have some way to prove to my colleagues these injuries were real. I wasn’t completely sure what to do with that list (e.g., no scientific journal would ever publish it), so I decided to post it on the newly created Substack. It ended up going viral (it is the second spike on the graph below) and made me realize I needed to write here.
Since that time, I’ve realized my writing taps into an unmet need and the positive responses it’s received have encouraged me to keep on push on forward (currently the articles average a bit over 50,000 views, although quite a few have received between 100,000 to 260,000 views). In addition to Steve Kirsch, many other prominent figures in this movement have come across my writings and also stepped forward to help promote it (as have many many more readers), and to each of you I am profoundly grateful. Similarly, a few websites such as citizenfreepress.com have also been immensely helpful.
My Writing Philosophy
I love to write, but I have for the most part avoided writing publicly (e.g., authoring books). The biggest reason for this is that I constantly find that something I previously believed to be true I later realize is false as my understanding of the topic broadened, and I always hate the notion of committing to something in writing I later don’t agree with.
Our entire media ecosystem is filled with erroneous information, and we seldom realize how many things we each assume to be true are actually the product of misinformation. I put a lot of thought into fact-checking each statement I put forward and if I do not feel confident in a claim, I make a point to either state it is my belief (rather than a fact) or avoid covering the subject entirely. Despite this, I still have publicly stated false things, which I feel very bad about but I have simultaneously accepted is impossible to avoid doing this.
Publishing on Substack as an anonymous author provides an excellent solution to these dilemmas because a large number of intelligent readers are available to peer-review anything I write, in this format I can easily correct mistakes (which can’t be done in printed books), and provided I am transparent with my errors, no one holds those mistakes against me.
Before becoming a doctor, I trained and worked in the holistic medical field and was immensely bothered by how much marketing and self-promotion were necessary to succeed in that industry (even if you got great results for your patients). One of the reasons I ultimately went to medical school was so that I would not need to market for the rest of my life (any decent doctor who breaks from the medical orthodoxy will always have a patient base). So, throughout my career, I’ve followed the philosophy that if you focus on the quality of your work, everything else will work itself out (I’ve also been fortunate to train under some remarkably talented and highly successful physicians, each of whom also refused to market or promote their practice).
On Substack, I’ve tried to follow a similar philosophy: focus on quality over quantity in my writing and trust everything else will work itself out. I know we are continuously bombarded with things trying to capture our attention, and I want to be respectful of the time you are allocating to reading my writings. Additionally, a large part of what motivates me to write is the artistic process of creating a final product I feel good about, and if I was instead writing clickbait for views, I would lose interest in what I am doing here very quickly.
Most of the things I write about here are things I’ve thought over and discussed for decades and I feel at this point I’ve covered around 5-10% of what I feel compelled to share with the general public. Doing just that has required writing about 500,000 words in the last year here, so one of the biggest challenges I face is choosing which thing to cover as many more things will inevitably be cut out.
As best as I can, I’ve tried to focus on sharing largely forgotten topics I believe are important to bring into the current discussion that simultaneously will draw your interest. At the same time, my biggest goal has been to make them relatable and understandable, so I’ve tried to order them such that the premises each article relies upon was covered in a previous article and I’ve tried to write in a style that most readers, regardless of their background can understand (e.g., an M.D. or a high school graduate). Similarly, in each article, I try to cover the necessary level of detail to illustrate the point I am trying to show without excessively going into tangents or nuances on specific concepts I reference (as once the articles become too long and unfocused many won’t read them).
Doing each of these is a balancing act and there is no perfect way to do all of them, but I enjoy the challenge and it seems like it’s been done well enough here.
I also believe that it is typically counterproductive to become heavily polarized on a controversial issue or to be drawn into your primal emotions. Unfortunately, the current system of media revolves around doing this to us on a daily basis (as does the internet marketing economy), so it ends up being a fact of life that we are often upset and attacking each other. I believe that it is critical to write in a heart-centered manner to avoid doing this to my audience, and since many of the subjects I have to cover are quite frankly horrendous, it is always a challenge to avoid doing that.
Future Article Topics
At this point, my goal with this Substack is to have it evolve through six stages:
1) Doing everything I can to help end the COVID-19 vaccine mandates (which includes the erroneous premise COVID-19 cannot be treated except by preventing it with vaccination).
2) Illustrating the forgotten side of medicine that gave birth to these mandates (e.g., all the propaganda, erroneous arguments, and scientific misinformation those mandates were founded upon) so that we will be better able to resist it the next time it is attempted.
3) Showing how the same issues we observed with COVID-19 can be seen in many other forgotten medical tragedies I feel a personal obligation to speak out about.
4) Explore many remarkable medical innovations that have been largely forgotten because they were not compatible with the current monopolistic practice of medicine.
5) Illustrate how some of those innovations can be applied to treating spike protein vaccine injuries.
6) Dive into the forgotten spiritual framework that underlies much of medicine.
Some of the topics I would like to get to cover in the next year(s) include:
Note—this list is periodically updated as the articles are completed and others topics I want to cover emerge. Many of the articles written here have been cataloged here.
•Early pioneers for vaccine safety and how the field has changed over the years.
•Long-forgotten vaccine debacles.
•Alternative medical approaches I believe are dangerous and should be avoided (there are also many ineffective ones but there is no possible way I can cover all of those).
•The Ebola response in Africa.
•Medical innovations from the 1918 influenza (which helped me design my initial COVID-19 protocols).
•The origins of SARS-CoV-2.
•The importance of fevers.
•How the heart creates spiraling vortexes of blood to sort and transport blood throughout the body.
•How emotions and personality are stored with the organs, particularly the heart.
•One of Luc Montagier’s final papers and digital biology.
•Biophotons and mitogenic radiation.
•Dermatology’s misguided crusade against the sun.
•Common complications of surgery and ways to avoid them.
•How various vaccines cause autoimmunity.
•The major issues with commonly prescribed pharmaceuticals (e.g., NSAIDs like ibuprofen, proton pump inhibitors, anti-depressants, steroids, antipsychotics, fluoroquinolones, Lupron, gadolinium contrast, and Accutane).
•The adverse health effects of EMFs and ways they can be mitigated.
•Lots of things relating to cancer.
•The importance of a few specific trace minerals, my favorite supplement companies, and various effective utilizations of supplements for a wide range of conditions.
•The various applications of EDTA (e.g., for calcifications throughout the body).
•The ion effect.
•The various applications of DMSO.
•Exosomes and stem cells.
•Major misunderstandings around blood pressure
•The various oxidative therapies (e.g., ultraviolet blood irradiation).
•Neural Therapy.
•Some of the various (relatively unknown) pharmaceuticals I’ve come across that are remarkably helpful for certain conditions.
•A few of the remarkable energy medicine devices that have faded into obscurity.
•Helpful things that can be done for someone at the end of life (I view mishandling this to be one of the greatest shortcomings of the existing medical system).
•Nutritional approaches and techniques I’ve become a fan of over the years.
•Self-care methods for common sources of musculoskeletal pain (e.g., carpal tunnel or back pain).
•Helpful approaches for a variety of other common medical conditions.
•Conditions where conventional medical excels for treating the problem and it is essential to receive that care.
•Traditional American methods of healing that largely disappeared when the medical system was forced to follow the Allopathic model.
•Willhelm Reich and Orgone energy.
•The many benefits of healing waters (e.g., hot springs).
•Medical epistemology and its spiritual correlates (e.g., the effective utilization of intuition in medical practice).
•Reforms that I believe could improve the practice of medicine in the United States.
Note: The crossed out topics are ones I’ve since partly but not fully covered. The ones I have covered have been removed from the list.
The issue with each of these topics is that there is a lot to unpack within them so that each can be presented properly (I am not willing to broach the subject if I don’t feel I can do it correctly), so, at best I can write a few of these per month. One of the biggest concerns I have is presenting a therapy without providing the necessary context to understand how to utilize it because if that results in mistakes being made by those who utilize the therapy, regardless of the disclaimers provided, I feel personally responsible for them.
Finally, at the time I started this, I cannot even begin to describe how frustrating it was that I could not find a platform to bring awareness to the smallpox issue. If you ever find yourself in a similar situation to me (especially if you are in the healthcare field and I think the story is both true and compelling), I am happy to make this platform available to you.
Other Frequently Asked Questions
How do I personally feel about the medical profession?
Although I am frequently highly critical of medicine, there is also a great deal I love about it (I also owe my life to it) and I am very happy I chose to become a doctor. I believe every human institution inevitably becomes flawed over time, and since so much power and money is allocated to the medical profession, those flaws are much more impactful on our daily lives (similarly, I believe the training process and demands placed on physicians inevitably cause good people to do bad things to their patients.
Despite having many profound shortcomings, allopathic medicine also has produced many incredible discoveries that have transformed our lives and since we take those benefits for granted now, it is often difficult to appreciate what life was like without them or how hard it was to develop them.
What is my moderation policy?
I feel very strongly about not censoring anyone. The readers here are fairly good about not putting me in the position I need to (e.g., by saying things that are illegal or extremely distasteful), and I’ve tried to address most dissenting viewpoints here (e.g., I believe viruses exist, some people don’t) through an open dialog which has prevented the topics from becoming disruptive. At this point, despite my best efforts, I’ve had to ban one person (which I felt bad about doing) and my hope is that the number of times I have to do that will remain relatively small.
What are my credentials?
I am a physician from the Midwest who is board-certified in a specialty that presently requires three years of post-graduate (residency) training. Physician readers tend to assume I trained in internal medicine, and I will neither affirm nor deny this assessment.
How did I choose my pen name?
At the time I put this Substack together, I did not expect anything would come of it. The name “A Midwestern Doctor” was something I came up with off the top of my head since I had to choose a screen name to publish here. The goal of the name was to:
•Not identify the author.
•Accurately describe the author.
•Not offend or alienate anyone.
Although I have since discovered some people really dislike the Midwest, the name seems to have done its job.
Where did “The Forgotten Side of Medicine” come from?
Initially, I didn’t have a name for this (it was “A’s newsletter” at the time Kirsch encouraged his followers to subscribe to me). I eventually decided on this title because I wanted something that would give me the flexibility to cover all the topics I wanted to discuss (e.g., the critically important forgotten medical discoveries, previous medical atrocities that have been swept under the rug, and many of the problematic aspects of medicine that have escaped the public’s awareness).
After I settled on that title, I looked at a variety of ancient symbols of healing, decided I liked the healing hand the most and then chose the best picture I could find of it:
Why am I anonymous?
I believe the time each of us spends on this Earth is a blessing we should make the most of before our soul passes onto the next phase of its journey. To make the best use of that blessing, I hold the belief we should focus on maximizing the positive impact we can make upon the world around us, do the best we can to cultivate our own development, and do what we can to experience being fully alive. Conversely, I view one of the great tragedies of the modern era that despite technology having already solved most of our survival needs, people (regardless of their wealth) nonetheless are frequently pulled into a lifestyle that prevents them from doing any of those three.
With this Substack, the ideal situation for me is to make the positive impact I want to make, and then once the ideas I put forward enter the public consciousness, fade into the background, and be forgotten. Publicly, I have a variety of responsibilities and projects I am working on aimed at improving the medical field I would seriously undermine by associating it with this work.
My primary goal is to maximize the positive benefit I can provide to the world around me. So on one hand, this Substack is immensely appealing because the ratio between the amount of work I put into it compared to the benefit it provides to the world is incredible, but at the same time, I also feel ethically I need to remain anonymous so my other endeavors and those who rely upon me are not adversely affected.
Conversely, I don’t feel there is much of a benefit to my publicly disclosing my identity. I have tried to structure my writing transparently so that my entire thought process is explained (and the references for it are provided) so you don’t have to take my word on most of what I am saying. One of the most common ways controversial ideas are eliminated from the public discourse is by fixating on attacking the speaker rather than their message, and I want to avoid that happening here.
Because of this, I’ve avoided disclosing aspects about myself I don’t feel are helpful to the message I provide and let people assume whatever they want to about me. For example, people often ask what state I am in or for referrals and, although I wish I could, I don’t answer the question. Similarly, I am often asked about my gender and I have completely avoided answering that question for the same reason (disclaimer: multiple authors of both genders contribute to this Substack—so I am always stuck on when to say “I” vs. “we”).
What Are My Tricks For Writing?
I believe the most important thing I do here is that I write from the heart. I also view writing as a meditation practice, and my goal each time is to allow my mind to be aware of all the different concepts I am trying to tie together so that they feel like they are in harmony with each other and I am not shutting my mind down to one part of the picture I have a difficulty or aversion to examining.
One of the major things that help me be able to write here is being fluent in a different keyboard layout that is much easier to write quickly with (and does not strain your wrists as much to write with). I also sometimes utilize a dictation system, and I’ve recently had a wonderful volunteer editor start helping me with these articles.
Why Do I Frequently Include Tweets In These Articles?
Substack allows a very limited number of video sites to be directly embedded within articles (so you do not have to click through to an external website to view them). Early on I noticed that Youtube videos (which embed) kept on getting deleted from Youtube after I posted them here. I switched to Vimeo because they also embed and censor much less than Youtube. In November, an article I wrote went viral, and after a few days, Vimeo deleted both that video and the channel I had spent almost a year putting together and locked my access to at least download those videos.
One of the only other sites that Substack allows direct embedding is Twitter. I had avoided making a Twitter account for years because I felt it was inevitable it would be deleted (I thus did not want to put any work into it), but since Elon Musk took over Twitter, I have become hopeful that would not be the case. For this reason, I now upload videos both to a rumble channel (which does not embed) and to Twitter and then post the videos with the tweets in them here. Occasionally, when I have a video I believe may red-pill a lot of people, I instead send them to Pierre Kory to share as he has approximately 100 times as many followers as me (and sometimes he kindly agrees to share them). Of those, this was the most successful one which was seen by millions of people!
I think that video’s success was also my all time favorite Christmas present.
What is my policy on re-using the work here?
A few months ago, I discovered that someone made a licensing that perfectly describes how I feel about the content here. Anything publicly available here is covered under CC BY-SA 4.0. You can read the technicalities, but essentially you can do whatever you want with the content here (and I appreciate you sharing anything that can help others) and all I care about is if you alter it, you need to make it clear you altered it so I am not held responsible if the alteration deviates from my intended meaning.
Do you reply to emails?
At the start I did, but I ran into the issue that the people I replied to would add me to mailing lists or have their emails get hacked and start spamming me. I eventually had to change emails since the original one I used here became unusable. For this reason, I do read the emails you send me, but in almost all cases I don’t reply—if you would like to receive a reply please leave it as a comment on the most recent post.
Paid vs. Not Paid
One of the most common questions I have received here from readers is how to become a paid subscriber. This is because I deliberately avoided setting up a paid option for this Substack as I did not feel comfortable receiving payments from anyone. A few months ago, Substack directly contacted me to propose a compromise (this newsletter is in a relatively unique situation of having a large number of subscribers without any paid ones)—having me beta test the pledge system made for accounts like mine (hence why I have the pledge buttons now).
The primary reason I did not want to have paid subscribers was that I didn’t want anything I wrote to be biased by the need to commercialize this Substack (e.g., if you cover certain topics people won’t want to support the newsletter, while other topics I don’t think are as important to discuss need to focused upon if you become sales focused). A rather unlikely chain of events led to me having this platform, and I feel compelled to honor the will of whatever brought those events to pass. Similarly, since the work here is being seen by a large number of people, I see it as critically important to convey what I am trying to say in the purest way possible.
In addition to that, I also felt that given the magnitude of the problem we were facing with the vaccine mandates, it was not right for me to profit off that situation or withhold any of what might help stop it from the public. So, even though Substack (and quite a few of my colleagues who value the work here) strongly encouraged me to have paid subscribers, I avoided doing so.
Instead, I decided to reevaluate the question in a year. Now that that year has passed, it seems that my wish (that I’ve put more time than I want to think about over the last few years) has come true and the general public opinion has started to turn against the vaccine mandates. Because of that, I feel comfortable sharing the reasons I thought of to financially support this Substack:
•To support Substack’s business model:
One of the lessons I’ve come to accept in life is that nothing is ever free, and whenever something appears to be, there is a much bigger cost you are not aware of behind it being “free.” For example, in the previous article on medical gaslighting, I shared that one of the best investments you can make in your health is to find a physician who does not take insurance you pay directly for the medical services you receive (as they are then economically incentivized to serve you rather than the insurance companies), and many readers echoed this sentiment.
Within the media industry, virtually everything that gets published is done to appease the interests of a sponsor or government agency. Because of this, important investigative journalism is always not allowed to air and reporters are forced to spend their careers producing content that does not really benefit the public. I first came to Substack after Glenn Greenwald endorsed it and said it was critical to have the money you put into journalism go directly to the journalists rather than the media companies so the journalists were incentivized to produce quality journalism.
Since most social media companies are funded by advertising, their users will be data mined for profit and censored the second that user threatens a sponsor. Because of Substack’s radically different business model (remember there are no ads here), Substack cannot afford to censor (most) controversial views on the platform.
In my opinion, one of the most pivotal things that have brought the public to reject the COVID-19 vaccine mandates has been Substack. Beyond providing a large uncensored platform that directs readers to the best fitting newsletters for them, Substack also has directly incentivized a lot of people to work full time publicizing this issue (since those content authors can then bring people who see their promotion of the vaccine issue back to Substack and in effect be paid for all the public promotion they are doing on the vaccine issue). Similarly, Substack incentivizes people to make the best quality content they can (e.g., that which will be the most persuasive on the vaccine issue), which lies in stark contrast to the legacy media which simply pays journalists for anything that parrots the narrative.
I believe that if Substack can prove to the journalist community it offers better employment prospects than the mainstream media, that will be one of the most powerful forces available for breaking the stranglehold on Democracy the current media empire has. Similarly, I know many parties are looking to buy out Substack so it will stop hosting material that opposes the narrative, and if Substack can continue to maintain a steady revenue stream by publishing controversial content, that is much less likely to happen. If you believe in the importance of what is being put forward here, you should strongly consider supporting their model.
Note: Since Substack makes it possible for each author on the platform to download their email list (which I think is very kind of them) they’ve created a natural barrier against deleting a publication, as the author can just take their email list and migrate to another platform.
•To support the projects I am working on:
I follow a fairly frugal lifestyle; most of what I earn goes towards supporting charitable projects I believe are important for the world (e.g., helping the vaccine injured). If you would like to support those endeavors, I would greatly appreciate it and your support will go a long way toward helping them become a reality.
•To allow me to spend more time writing here:
To support the projects I care about, I presently work a few different jobs (a full-time one, a part-time one, and another part-time one I am starting). Because of this, I write here whenever gaps appear in my schedule. I am presently trying to figure out how much time I want to allocate to each of these jobs and if I can replace one with writing on here more (so I can chip away at the list of articles I want to write), I would like to do that.
•To allow me to cover more controversial topics:
There are quite a few things I want to cover but can’t due to their controversial nature (e.g., my mentors strongly advised against publicly discussing them). If I can occasionally write private subscriber-only posts, that gives me a lot more freedom to go into these more ambiguous and controversial topics as I don’t need to worry as much about who sees them.
Conclusion
I am frequently asked to share more about myself and my personal story, and for the most part, I avoid doing that because I want the focus here to be on bringing the messages I feel are important. I never dreamed it would be possible for me to reach so many people and feel like I was making a real difference with the COVID-19 insanity, and I am profoundly grateful to each of you who has helped make that possible.
Similarly, if any of you would like to consider pledging to become a supporter, I would very much appreciate you doing so. The number of people who do so will help me a great deal in figuring out the direction this Substack goes in and the projects I am working on. I was not sure where to set the price points for it (I looked at what everyone else was doing and chose a number that was in the middle), and if any of you feel they need to be changed please let me know.
Lastly, if you have any other thoughts or suggestions for improving this Substack (I am very open to ideas; I just don’t have time to do all of them), please do so in the comments. Similarly, if you just want to have a general open discussion with the lovely community of readers that has found this Substack, this would be an excellent thread for doing so. Thank you again for all that you have helped make possible over the last year.
Thank you for letting us know more about you, Doctor. And, thank you, for your brave stand for medical truth and quality care.
I look forward to reading about the many future topics you mentioned.
Of all the substacks I read, I enjoy yours the most. You only post when you have something cogent to share and You do an excellent job of bridging the knowledge gap between lay people and professionals.