“Doctors are not scientists”, I heard quite often from my PhD mentor, Bruno Breyer, PhD ( Bonn), MD (Padua) [1], when he returned to his university office after visiting the medical clinic where he also consulted..
I was reminded of that recently by an article written by a medical doctor of long standing [2].
The essential point is that medical education prepares doctors to apply the best available knowledge; whereas the education of scientists for research teaches them to look for what is inadequate or misleading or plain wrong and seek ways of improving contemporary understanding.
Those represent almost opposite, somewhat incompatible casts of mind.
Of course there are many medically trained individuals who are and remain critically minded, who are inclined to skepticism, who are careful observers who learn from experience; so major discoveries have sometimes been made by medically trained individuals. Some advances in medical treatment are inarguably made by MDs: I have personally benefitted from the invention of angioplasty by the medically trained Andreas Grüntzig and its application to me, in 1981, in a clinical trial carried on by doctor Kenneth Kent at NIH [3].
On the other hand, many people trained for scientific research are not very good at it and never display originality.
Nevertheless, the distinction between applying accepted knowledge and questioning it describes a real difference, and one might expect that there would sometimes be consequences stemming, at least in part, from such different casts of mind.
(Somewhat similar contrasts apply to the differences between scientists and engineers; and in a way, also, between architects and engineers. Australians became aware, when the competition-winning design for the Sydney Opera House was in process of being made into an actual building, that architects are not necessarily engineering-minded. As the cost of building grew exponentially beyond the original estimate, from about 7 to 102 millions of Australian pounds, it became known that there had never previously been built anything with the shape of the now famous “sails” or semi-domes, and it took brilliant innovation to find a practical way to mass-produce the needed components [4]).
The distinction between doctors and scientists is pertinent to the inadequacies of modern medicine pointed to in my previous blog-post [5].
In particular, I think that the continuing blunder of taking HIV as an infectious virus that causes AIDS is owing in some very specific part to the fact that the physicians who first saw cases of AIDS suspected an association with homosexuality; which seems to have determined the faulty manner in which the CDC categorized AIDS cases, reinforcing that speculated association instead of recognizing that the crucial association was with over-abuse of recreational drugs ([6], p. 146ff. in [7]) and a generally unhealthy lifestyle that included frequent exposure to such venereal diseases as syphilis and gonorrhea and liberal consumption of antibiotics as prophylactic [8, 9].
The origin of the “HIV causes AIDS” blunder is owing in large part to Robert Gallo, MD; and its persistence is owing in considerable part to the influence of Anthony Fauci, MD. Subsidiary statistical incompetence was displayed by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) and by such MDs as Robert Redfield in the Army HIV Research Office [10].
Redfield was Director of CDC when COVID-19 arrived, and the CDC flunked test-preparation; and Fauci, advising federal policy, was largely responsible for non-evidence-based and widely damaging masking and distancing mandates during the COVID “pandemic”.
More in a later post about the inadequacies as to science of Gallo and Fauci (and perhaps others).
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[1] Henry H. Bauer, “Bruno Breyer 1900-1967”, Journal of Electroanalytical Chemistry, 21 (1969) 1-3
[2] Cathy Wield, “Doctors Are Not Trained to Think Critically”, 13 June 13 2024;
https://www.madinamerica.com/2024/06/doctors-are-not-trained-to-think-critically/
[3] Kenneth Kent;
https://www.pumphreyfuneralhome.com/obituaries/Kenneth-Mitchell-Kent-MD-PhD?obId=13389778
[4] https://www.sydneyoperahouse.com/our-story/the-spherical-solution
[5] Science is the contemporary tyrant of secular knowledge; https://henryhbauer.substack.com/p/science-is-the-contemporary-tyrant
[6] John Lauritsen, “CDC’s tables obscure AIDS-drug connection”, Philadelphia Gay News, 14 February 1985 (and five other papers); reprinted as Chapter I in The AIDS war: propaganda, profiteering and genocide from the medical-industrial complex, ASKLEPIOS, 1993
[7] Peter Duesberg, Inventing the AIDS Virus, Regnery, 1995
[8] The “fast-lane” lifestyle practiced by some groups, following the Stonewall Riot and “gay liberation” is described, for instance, in the 2006 film by Crayton Robey, When ocean meets sky. It was shown on LOGO television, June 2006; https://web.archive.org/web/20090228082749/http://whenoceanmeetssky.com; https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0410890
[9] Michael Callen, Surviving AIDS, HarperCollins, 1990
[10] Henry H. Bauer, The Origin, Persistence and Failings of HIV/AIDS Theory, McFarland, 2007
Physicians are oriented to the "pill for every ill" paradigm of medicine. Stopping bad habits does not fit into that mode of thinking. Hence, you get the "AIDS is a viral disease and here's the medicine that will cure it" policy. That goes for just about every other medical problem. Now Americans are the most heavily medicated (and chronically ill) people on earth.
How to change??