Sacrificing Patients in the Name of Healthcare

By Dale Bredesen, M.D., Chief Science Officer for Apollo Health

Have you seen the recent publication claiming that medical misinformation and disinformation seem to be on the rise? (The Effect of Misinformation and Disinformation on Physicians’ Ability to Provide Quality Care | The Physicians Foundation ) This comes from the Physicians Foundation, so what they are really saying is, “Trust your doctor, he/she knows what’s best for you.” Ah, if only that were so! We are all — every single one of us — either patients or potential patients, and I believe we all have the same goal: best outcomes. We all would like to avoid dementia, live healthy, fulfilling lives, and enjoy brainspans that are every bit as long as our lifespans.

The Physicians Foundation suggests that Internet searches are a common source of this misinformation, interfering with good doctor care. But interestingly, and quite revealingly, they don’t mention the complementary piece of their own point: the recommendations from doctors have become increasingly outdated and ineffective, to the point that the major misinformation and disinformation often emanates from the doctors themselves! We physicians have been browbeaten into being purveyors of “Macmedicine,” with drive-thru-like 7-minute patient visits and smoking prescription pads dashing off tickets to lucrative, ineffective drugs. And when a drug creates a side effect — such as tardive dyskinesia (a movement disorder that can be caused by some antidepressants and antipsychotics), there is another drug that treats the side effect caused by the first drug.

We are told that our cognitive complaints are “just normal aging,” when a simple check of biomarkers (which the physician rarely orders) shows that we are in the early stages of Alzheimer’s — a stage that is readily treatable. We are told that nothing can be done for those with cognitive decline, when multiple publications, clinical trials, and the experience of thousands, shows quite the opposite. And we are told that functional medicine is “quackery” (Making it up as you go along: So-called “functional medicine” is pure quackery ), when we are all seeing it work every day, and reading publications that prove its efficacy — often when outdated, standard of care medicine has failed — for everything from lupus to rheumatoid arthritis to POTS to PANDAS to autism to chronic fatigue to chronic Lyme to long COVID to heart failure to inflammatory bowel disease to Hashimoto’s to cognitive decline, and on and on. So, if you are going to label something as misinformation or disinformation, you had better check it out carefully — maybe talk to some of the patients who have had excellent outcomes, or some of the physicians who are seeing success repeatedly — before making such a claim.

The Physicians Foundation did not describe what “misinformation and disinformation” the patients used to interfere with the doctors’ outstanding care — did someone dare to ask about gut health, or the oral microbiome, or mycotoxins, or prebiotic fiber, or resolvins, or nattokinase, or low-dose naltrexone, or physiological approaches to hypertension?

Make no mistake about it, healthcare is a massive business (about 5 trillion dollars per year in the US), and in business, income is prioritized over outcome. This is why our health is suffering, and so we must be involved, we must be activists, we must take a keen interest in our own organismal health. We are in the midst of a far-reaching paradigm shift, from medical “secrets” known only by doctors to public information that we should all know and share; from treating late-stage disease like Alzheimer’s and renal failure to early detection and increased prevention; and from profit-directed pharmaceutical treatment to systems biology-directed enhanced health, healthspan, and brainspan. Wake up, doctors! We are in the Information Era — don’t call it misinformation just because you don’t practice it yet! Take a look at the many who are benefiting from the ongoing advances in health and medicine, and let’s all combine our information to achieve unprecedented healthy outcomes. How dare a patient try to interfere with healthcare by caring about health?