Gulliver’s Medical Doctors 2021
by Asa Boxer
Welcome to Barstool Bits, a weekly short column meant to supplement the long-form essays that appear only once or twice a month from analogy magazine proper. You can opt out of Barstool Bits by clicking on Unsubscribe at the bottom of your email and toggling off this series. If, on the other hand, you’d like to read past Bits, click here.
On June 6, 2024, a Substacker with the handle “A Midwestern Doctor” published an affidavit by one Dr. James Miller, calling out the medical community, and especially the administrators at a hospital in Washington State for criminal behaviour, including fraud, wilful negligence, petty persecutions, and gaslighting during the covid scam. As he puts it, he witnessed the following:
criminal collusion in part by hospital leadership, with federal authorities, to harm the well-being of Americans during the COVID crisis. I further attest that I also observed the established and long-standing groundwork of the wanton institutional corruption of the medical and healthcare communities, especially in hospitals. . .
These strong words barely capture the horror that abides in the specifics Miller shares in his 72-point affidavit. Among the sickest observations are his revelations concerning attitudes toward and purposeful neglect of the unjabbed, running from point 19 to 21 specifically, and then picked up again at point 31 through 33. I draw your attention to these passages, but really, one ought to study the whole document. It reads like a fictional account of the sort I wrote in 2021, which you can find here. It also reads, in parts, like a high school diary, replete with the sort of petty vindictiveness one expects of immature psyches, but which one finds incongruous with the dignity generally associated with MDs and medical staff.
So troubling and disconsonant is this situation that even the Midwestern Doctor relaying the tale and having suffered similar trials of his own at the hands of the medical community had trouble coming to terms with the sorry state of affairs, insisting in his conclusion that MDs are “the most talented members of society.” Followers of analogy magazine may recognise an echo here with Neil deGrasse Tyson’s assertion that members of the National Academy of Sciences are “the most brilliant minds in the nation.” What emerges from these assertions is an important insight into how these people think: these folk truly believe themselves superior to the rest of humanity, indeed so superior, that they deserve unquestioned authority. We’re talking power-tripping egomaniacs. At their sufferance, we live and die. In item 18, we learn:
According to the CDC recommendations and hospital policies, this patient was a perfect candidate to be given remdesivir. However, when I brought this case to the infectious disease physician, he indicated that my patient "seemed like a nice girl" and to therefore not give her remdesivir.
And in item 19, we learn:
George Diaz, the head of Infectious Disease at my hospital. [. . .] explained to me that he believed that any individual who is unvaccinated (to COVID) should not be permitted to engage in society or have a driver's license. He expressed support for the idea that unvaccinated people deserved less access to societal resources, including preventative medical care and transportation. [. . .] He told me that he was working with the Washington State Governor's Office to enact these ideas. He was frequently on local news television at this time and was responsible for informing the public about COVID, infectious disease, and recommended health policy.
The modern version of the Hippocratic Oath was formulated in 1964 by Louis Lasagna, then Academic Dean of the School of Medicine at Tufts University. According to Peter Paul Rubens, in an article tellingly titled, “The Oath: Meaningless Relic or Invaluable Moral Guide?”—the modern oath is still used by a number of medical schools today, but there are, in addition to Lasagna’s version, many varied oaths in use. So the Hippocratic Oath you thought doctors swore to uphold is one of the many myths you can add to the bag of bogus notions the public holds about science. “Do no harm!”? Nope. Not even in the standard new version. What the new version does say, however, is “Above all, I must not play at God.” But as Rubens points out, “some doctors see oath-taking as little more than a pro-forma ritual with little value beyond that of upholding tradition.” Moreover, “fewer than half of oaths taken today insist the taker be held accountable for keeping the pledge.”
As the title to this week’s Barstool Bit indicates, there was another aspect of this lunacy that caught my attention. Item 17, which I’ve copied out in full below, might have been penned by Jonathan Swift (1667-1745) or Franz Kafka (1883-1924). Despite the terrifying reality the sketch conveys, I can’t help but laugh aloud. The absurdity is so truly profound, it brings home my point made in a previous article that we are living in an age of satire. The satire is a story type that follows the hero into the wintry night region (or underworld) of senseless rules and an inverted society gone mad where he is impotent to bring about change. Without further ado:
17. On or about July 2020, I was working and in the hospital Intensive Care Unit (ICU). At this time, there were so few patients in the ICU that nurses were being sent home due to the low census. At one point during the shift, myself and multiple other providers and nursing staff were sitting and drinking coffee at the nurses station because we had completed al [sic] the work there was to do at that time and no patients needed assistance. Whilst we were sitting at the nurses station, a news article was seen that had been published in a local newspaper indicating that the hospital, specifically our ICU, was overrun with a flurry of COVID-19 patients which was causing difficulties for the hospital's function. This was obviously the opposite of the truth as we were currently sitting in the ICU and it was only approximately 30% full. However, another physician sitting with me at the nurses station, who was an ICU director, began to panic after reading the article that we had to respond to the crisis and immediately called leadership and began strategizing with hospital administrators to deal with the crises [sic] that existed only in the news. The hospital administrators then escalated the poor care and civil rights violations which were occurring to patients and members of society through their promotion and publication of statements to the community that provided and amplified false and misleading information of patient volumes and outcomes. I attest that this instance is reflective of the broad-sweeping inappropriate and unscientific responses to clearly false and misleading information that hospital administrators engaged in during the COVID-19 pandemic.
Wag the Dog anyone? For those unfamiliar, in the 1997 film Wag the Dog, we are told by a political strategist that if he didn’t see it on TV it didn’t happen, and if he did see it on TV, even if it didn’t happen. . . then it happened. (In this case, it wasn’t TV, but the analogy still holds.)
To bring this all back home to the main subject here at analogy, what’s going on here is a complete disconnect from the heart life. These folks are out of touch with their own interiority. They have no idea what motivates their behaviour. The inner world for them is so neglected, it is “a place of demons,” as poet Ted Hughes (1930-1998) pointed out. And the outer world, having no correspondence to the inner world, is “a place of meaningless objects and machines”—including the human lives around them. They feel—in an unconscious way—that these machines ought to obey the commands of their superior brains. Those that disobey may as well perish. If this sounds like the psychology of a psychopath. . . well, it is. Meanwhile, if the news says there’s a crisis in the ICU even when it’s apparent that the report is false, the ICU director will behave as though it’s true. Why? Because truth has no inner value. Ethics have no inner value. Oaths have no inner value. The world of flesh and blood has no inner value. As Hughes put it:
So here are two worlds, which we have to live in simultaneously. And because they are intricately interdependent at every moment, we can’t ignore one and concentrate on the other without accidents. Probably fatal accidents.
In the present case, the word “accidents” isn’t quite the right term. It’s closer to mistakes: as in mistaken sense of self, mistaken sense of responsibility, mistaken sense of medicine and science, mistaken sense of reality. Attending to what’s in print instead of what’s before one’s eyes is THE problem facing science and medicine today. This is precisely the problem of mistaking the relationship between models and phenomena. How many of us have sat in front of a doctor who doesn’t look at us, but instead looks at his computer? This is a very dangerous state of affairs. If these are “the most talented members of society,” the situation is truly hopeless. But I disagree with this assessment. I think the majority of MDs are simple-minded, often ambitious, shallow, profit-driven folk with a knack for rote learning who believe that only stupid people ask questions. Moreover, they are afflicted with an acute case of leftbrainitis that goes undiagnosed and leads to millions of tragic and fatal mistakes.
Asa Boxer’s poetry has garnered several prizes and is included in various anthologies around the world. His books are The Mechanical Bird (Signal, 2007), Skullduggery (Signal, 2011), Friar Biard’s Primer to the New World (Frog Hollow Press, 2013), Etymologies (Anstruther Press, 2016), Field Notes from the Undead (Interludes Press, 2018) and The Narrow Cabinet: A Zombie Chronicle (Guernica, 2022). Boxer is also the founder and editor of analogy magazine.
I thought I had read enough about the medical scams COVID brought on, but this excellent post taught me otherwise. Thanks for bringing the work of Dr. James Miller and “Midwestern Doctor” to wider attention—and, as always, for putting a significant issue in a perspective that speaks to your literary strengths. That “MD” himself felt that he had to assert the superiority of his tribe is a staggering irony that Swift would have enjoyed. I note that Christopher Rufo has recently exposed Medicaid fraud at Texas Children’s Hospital related to “gender-affirming care,” more doctors above the law. Medical associations aren’t the only ones that believe themselves to stand above the rest of us. We know that government and media also see themselves as brighter, smarter, righter, and that is one of several reasons why these folks find it so easy to get on the same page. Some of them should get on your page, that's what I think. A bracing read.
The grim portrait of modern medicine presented in the affidavit by Dr. Miller is corroborated by my father who has been a medical doctor in southern Ontario, Canada, for over 50 years. He started out as a family physician, long ago when there was still such a thing as primary care, before becoming a hospital resident. I'd expected him to be shocked by the revelations in Dr. Miller's affidavit, but instead he found it all too familiar. When he first immigrated to Canada in the early 70s and started practicing medicine, he was disturbed by the general lack of empathy toward patients among his colleagues, in comparison to doctors he'd worked with in eastern Europe, and that too many of them were egotistical though servile to the edicts of the medical colleges, and ambitious to the extent that they became doctors for the money and status it conferred. Then in the 80s when public medicine was sold off to the multinationals, the health care system got a lot worse, and quickly. So, the strong impression he gave me is that all the corruption, callousness, and ineptitude attested to in the article has been around for decades in Canada, even in the supposed heyday of the public system, but the de facto privatization that started under Mulroney in the 80s was the beginning of the end.