DOUBLE BLIND MEDICINE:
When the doctor and the patient are
Both in the dark
I got a dermatologist the other day that gave me goose bumps. He was in his mid-thirties, tall, slim, and serious, like many doctors these days. But what stood out the most was a dazzling, full-color, cool-looking tattoo on his right arm that snaked from his wrist, circled his forearm, and slid under his short-sleeved shirt into unfamiliar anatomical areas. I think he also had a tattoo on his left arm, but I was too stunned at the time to take notice.
Now, you might think, like me, that a tattooed dermatologist is an oxymoron. It doesn’t take a lot of imagination or internet research to figure out that tattoos are bad for the skin.
The most obvious problem is that the tattoo is done by pricking the skin, which causes trauma to the skin and risk of infection. Interestingly, there is research linking skin lesions caused by tattoos and vaccines as a cause of numerous skin reactions, including cancer.
The 2014 article, “Tattoo and Vaccination Sites: Possible Nest of Opportunistic Infections, Tumors, and Dysimmune Reactions,” in the journal Clinical dermatology, explains that, “Both dermal tattoos and vaccine injections can alter local immune responses, creating an immunocompromised district at or near the site of placement. This can lead to the development of opportunistic infections, benign and malignant tumors, and local dysimmune reactions. A variety of tumors including basal and squamous cell carcinomas, keratoacanthomas, and malignant melanoma have also been reported in association with tattoos … Vaccination sites provide a similar environment for benign and malignant tumors. “
The inks used are also a problem, causing allergies and exposure to heavy metals. It is quite common for people to have an allergic reaction to the dyes used in tattoos. Ink is actually packed with many unnatural chemicals and ingredients that can irritate a person’s skin.
There is also a link to skin cancer. When it comes to cancer, black ink can be especially dangerous because it contains a very high level of benzo (a) pyrene. Benzo (a) pyrene is currently listed as a carcinogen by the International Agency for Research on Cancer (IARC). Black ink is the most used color for tattooing.
You might think that this doctor got the tattoos before he became a doctor, so he didn’t know any better. But this was a new tattoo. And he was showing it off, not hiding it.
Tattoos are common these days and are all the rage in certain circles. Doctors want to look good, like everyone else. They grew up like everyone else, exposed and brainwashed by the same cultural messages. They simply choose to dedicate themselves to medicine.
I also put in a cardiologist who smoked cigarettes. He was also very overweight and ate a big, juicy hamburger with fries for lunch. Of course, being obese, smoking, and eating fried foods can increase heart disease.
An obese cardiologist and smoker eating fast food makes as much sense as a tattooed dermatologist.
Perhaps these doctors are attracted to their specialties because they know they will need specialty treatment due to their lifestyles? It’s like when neurotics with mental problems become psychologists or psychiatrists.
What about female doctors who constrict their breasts in tight bras for long hours every day? There are many expert women in breast health, including breast surgeons, who wear bras that damage the breasts. Her medical training never mentioned tight clothing as a cause of circulatory impairment and lymphatic stasis. These doctors voluntarily immobilize and alter the shape of their breasts, hide their nipples, and basically redesign the appearance of their breasts for cultural reasons, and they do so despite the documented damage caused by bras, including sore breasts, cysts and cancer. Wearing bras is something that all women, even doctors, are culturally expected to do.
Is this hypocrisy? Should we expect physicians to be role models for health and healthy lifestyles?
More basically, when we seek help, does it matter if the helper is in the same trouble as us? In other words, can you trust a lifeguard from someone who is in the same boat as you?
We seek help in many places.
Would you go to a priest who was a known pedophile?
Would you use a mechanic whose car is broken down?
Would you go to a hairdresser who is having a “bad hair day”?
Would you use a plastic surgeon who has a big nose, a bulging-eyed chin, and facial scars?
How about eating in a restaurant where the cook is not there due to food poisoning?
You can also go to a health food store and buy French fries, coffee, candy, wine, beer, and many other unhealthy things.
Then there are the addiction recovery programs that offer coffee for everyone, one of the most addictive substances we consume.
Clearly, there is a problem here. We live in a culture where there are many products and activities that can harm us. In fact, the greatest cause of illness and death is culture and everything bad that teaches us to think, do and feel. We absorb these cultural messages from the womb onward, as our nature is modified by our culture.
This applies to everyone. It also includes doctors. Just because someone has studied medicine does not mean that they personally eliminated all harmful cultural practices in their lives. The same cultural causes of illness that fill your waiting rooms also fill your personal lives. In fact, the medical culture is even worse for doctors.
For some reason that is not clear, the medical system exploits doctors with long hours of work and day and night shifts without sleep. Doctors are in a rush and pressured, snacking on unhealthy snacks on the go. They are tempted to abuse drugs to keep going, but they can settle for drinking 10-20 cups of strong coffee. They are also tempted to use drugs to relax, but they can settle for some alcoholic beverages. They have little recreation time, or time with their families. And depending on their specialty, they are exposed daily to infectious disease, death, radiation, the sights and smells that steal the soul of hospitals, and depression from treating endless lines of sick people, often using treatments that do no good, and for conditions that have no known cause.
Clearly, being a doctor can make you sick, mentally and physically. It is no wonder why there are so many physician suicides. Practicing medicine is slow suicide.
This also means that doctors are not the ones telling patients to clean up their lifestyle. The doctor’s lifestyle is at least as bad, and actually worse. They participate in the same unhealthy culture as everyone else, are addicted to many of the same things, and suffer from the same psychological and physical problems. But they are the ones who are meant to treat those problems.
This is a basic reason why medicine does not emphasize lifestyle or other cultural causes of disease. How can doctors tell patients not to do things that they do themselves?
This is also the reason why many discoveries of the cultural causes of disease go unnoticed by medicine. For example, when it was culturally accepted that smoking was safe and good for health, everyone smoked, including doctors. In the 1950s, there were advertisements for tobacco companies using doctors to promote smoking. Many members of the medical profession ignored, ridiculed, and vehemently opposed new research showing that smoking caused lung cancer.
Nobody likes to be told that what they are doing is wrong and can harm them, especially doctors who are considered health experts. Telling smoking doctors that their habit is really bad is a challenge to their authority. And how can you tell patients who smoke to quit?
Another example can be found in today’s debate on arm health dangers and their relationship to breast cancer. I know this topic personally, as a co-investigator, with my wife Soma Grismaijer, of the world’s first study focused on the bra-cancer link. We announce our results in the 1995 book, Dressed to kill: the link between breast cancer and bras, now updated for 2018.
There are now many international studies linking breast cancer to wearing tight bras.
Essentially, women who do not wear a bra have roughly the same risk of breast cancer as men, while the tighter and longer the bra is worn, the greater the risk, more than 100 times higher for a bra wearer 24 hours a day, 7 days a week compared to a non-bra. woman.
But this information still resists a culture that has become as addicted to bras as it had been to cigarettes. Women have been conditioned to believe that they need artificially shaped breasts to be acceptable in public. Even doctors have accepted that message. Under the spell of the lingerie industry, the thought of being braless in public sends chills to women who would feel naked and embarrassed if their breasts weren’t supported by a bra.
As a result, the issue of the bra is still relegated to marginalized and alternative health groups, although women are now wondering why they need to wear a bra in the post-# MeToo world. Should women’s breasts be constantly sexualized by pushing, squeezing, pinching, pinching, compressing, constricting, dividing and lifting the breasts with bras? Many women are now saying no.
Ironically, many female doctors who wear bras insist that under no circumstances can bras cause disease, especially cancer. The reason is that they cannot imagine themselves without a bra at work, which is a logical conclusion from this information. If they realized that bras were causing illness, then they would have to defend their bra habit.
This means that there is an additional problem caused by doctors who are just as ignorant as everyone else regarding unhealthy lifestyles. The doctor with bad lifestyles not only models bad lifestyles, but that doctor can also be personally and psychologically involved in defending those bad lifestyles. They don’t want to stop doing what everyone else is doing too. They want to belong, just like everyone else, even if it requires smoking, drinking, or other harmful behaviors.
But his denial carries weight among patients. Doctors implicitly model and teach by their own behaviors.
Should doctors be required to practice the latest lifestyle trend supposedly to improve health and prevent disease? Before something like this can be considered, the biggest obstacle for doctors is their own medical culture that abuses them and leads to depression and suicide. As long as the institutional and corporate powers that control medicine continue to abuse doctors with a harmful medical culture, don’t expect medicine to focus on culture.
Medical culture is a glass house that will not throw stones at pop culture.
And since the medical industry benefits from the detection and treatment of the resulting diseases, there is actually a financial incentive to maintain the cultural status quo, even if that culture is also killing doctors. There are many more pre-med students waiting to take your place.
This is a double blind medicine. Both the patient and the doctor are in the dark. It is the blind leading the blind, except that blind leaders deny their blindness and mock those who see the light.