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March 10, 2025- by Steven E. Greer, MD
Last week was a tough one for me. From Monday through Wednesday, I was unable to get any quality REM sleep until about 4:00 AM. I was suffering from slight gastroparesis. I did not actually feel nauseated or the need to vomit, but it was enough to keep me awake.
I started to analyze the food that I had been eating. I could not spot anything obvious. I thought it might have been some nachos, but those were healthy all-natural ingredients. I have had no problem with them before.
I considered the various medical ailments that might cause these symptoms. There was nothing obvious. If someone has diabetes, for example, they can suffer gastroparesis. However, I have been in very good shape, increasing muscle mass. Cancer would not present this way. There was no indication that I had any sort of illness.
I saw no need to have bloodwork drawn. I was not vomiting or extremely ill. However, I knew something was off. I was peaked, or green around the gills, as they say. The onset was mid-day.
I eventually isolated the cause. When I am not squeezing my own orange juice, I will get freshly-squeezed, unpasteurized, orange juice from Trader Joe’s. However, that store is too far of a drive and I decided to buy something similar at my local big box grocery store. Their version is an item hidden away, and I do not think it sells very quickly. I suspected that I was drinking slightly tainted orange juice. Therefore, I skipped the orange juice and the symptoms resolved.
The point of the story is how I approached this diagnosis. Doctors are supposed to learn from medical school the complex art of diagnosing people based on the physical exam and logic. This is why the best students are selected for medical school. Memorizing guidelines and following protocols are not what doctors are supposed to do at the individual patient level. I went to medical school right about when this style of teaching ended.
Surgeons are supposed to be able to examine the patient and determine whether surgery is needed for an acute abdomen without needing a CT-scan. Now, every patient in the ER immediately receives a CT-scan. There are no financial incentives for the classic physical exams. Medical imaging is what makes the most money for a hospital. The same goes for cardiology. In the old days, a doctor could diagnose most ailments from a stethoscope auscultation, ECG, and eyeballing of the neck veins and leg swelling. Now, every cardiac patient gets an ultrasound and CT-scan (plus a stent in many cases).
More importantly, not only have doctors lost the art of the physical exam, they often are simply uneducated. They have little ability to use common sense and logic. They are utterly illiterate with statistics and medical journal data. A recent study showed that 80% of Harvard doctors cannot pass a basic biostatistics quiz. They do not know what a p-value means, etc. They certainly cannot spot the statistical games played by the corrupt medical journals to hide lack of efficacy of drugs, safety signals, etc.
In my own medical case of this suspected food-borne illness, I used common sense augmented by surgical training to rule out various etiologies. There were no zebras (i.e., rare diseases) that were probable. I focused on the most likely cause and used the process of elimination. I did not need to look at labs or medical imaging.
Today, the vast majority of doctors would have never come up with this diagnosis, in my opinion. If I would have gone to the emergency room next to me, which has the “Cleveland Clinic” name on it, but is really Martin Health, I doubt the ER doctor would have found the problem. For one thing, there are mostly physician assistants (“PA”) delivering the care. I helped a friend receive care there for a hand infection. There was not a single medical doctor seen. The PA did it all and committed malpractice (i.e., The PA drained a finger infection with a needle rather than make an incision. So, the abscess promptly returned.).
This leads to the more important point of this essay: There needs to be a radical overhaul of the medical teaching system. Even before DEI lowered standards, the perverse incentives of Medicare were causing doctors to use unnecessary tests and procedures. The pharmaceutical industry intentionally caused the medical curriculum to skip teaching about nutrition or vaccines. Now, the problem is 10-times worse. At UCLA, they are matriculating students who cannot even identify the aorta.
I was lucky to have gone to The Ohio State University College of Medicine when I did. We still had very good clinicians. They were trained decades before me. I remember a few of my professors being the best clinicians and I still rely on those skills today.
The new Secretary of the Health and Human Services, Robert Kennedy, needs to address this problem. The problems of unsafe vaccines or unhealthy foods are just symptoms. The disease is the corrupted medical school industry.