Doctors With Diverse Voices Have Always Faced Attacks

There is nothing new under the sun. We think the attacks on doctors who rebuffed the conventional COVID-19 narrative were somehow unique. Names like McCullough, Kory, and Marik suffered threats of delicensure, removal from medical societies, and ridicule in the public square. They are just in a long line of doctors who have stepped outside of conventional thinking to bring about change but have faced many attacks in the process.

Ignaz Semmelweis

Semmelweis was a Viennese doctor who worked in obstetrics. In the mid-1800s, many women died after childbirth from puerperal infections, the scourge of maternity hospitals throughout Europe. He figured out that there was some pathogen at work. His clue was when medical students came from the morgue and then assisted in childbirth, that is when a high incidence of death occurred.

His cure was to use a mixture of chlorine and lime as a handwash. Lo and behold, infections plummeted. However, Semmelweis was ostracized by the Austrians for many years, and only the Hungarians allowed him to pursue his career freely in the city of Pest.

William Harvey

Harvey was an English physician of the 1600s. His claim to fame was his discovery of how blood circulated in the body. He showed that the heart pumps blood through the circulatory system, which returns the blood to the heart. For that discovery, there was scepticism and ridicule in many places.

The prevailing theory had been that the liver was the source of circulation. Harvey overturned centuries of this incorrect assumption.

Dr Dwight Lundell

Old dogmas die hard. The biggest-selling drug class in the world are statins. These are given to people to lower their cholesterol, the premise being that high cholesterol leads to heart disease.

Lundell, the Chief of Staff of surgery at an Arizona hospital, told people to stop taking statins in 2023.

"As a heart surgeon with 25 years experience, having performed over 5,000 open-heart surgeries, today is my day to right the wrong with medical and scientific fact."

The wrong he was talking about was lowering cholesterol when the problem was inflammation of the blood vessels. The cholesterol theory led to the consumption of no-fat or low foods, which caused inflammation. This is what allows cholesterol to accumulate in the blood vessels. The American Heart Association led the ridicule against him. Still, more and more doctors are coming to his point of view.

Dr Barry Marshall

For many years, we were told that stomach ulcers were caused by too much acidity in the stomach or by stress. Dr Marshall, a West Australian, discovered that a bacterium, Helicobacter pylori, was the culprit. Repeated attempts to convince his colleagues, including the submission of a research paper, were rejected.

Dr Marshall then did something rather unusual. He drank a concoction of the bacteria and, within a short period––a few days––developed the symptoms of an ulcer. The condition was successfully treated with antibiotics. Marshall's discovery won him a Nobel Prize.

Donald Hebb

When I attended college in the late '60s and early 1970s, the accepted dogma was that the brain and its neurons were fixed like a computer's hard driver. Once brain neurons died, they weren't replaced. Donald Hebb said that behaviour was related to the neurons and how they function. This was pretty radical 70 years ago when psychology was considered separate from physiology. Hebb showed that behaviour occurred in response to the neurophysiology of the body. It came to the concept of "Neurons that fire together wire together".

Today, we call this rewiring of the brain Neuroplasticity. What you do, including what you think, can rewire your brain. This is an established part of neurophysiology, which has been confirmed by brain scanning techniques.

Daniel David Palmer

He was not a doctor of any kind. He wasn't even highly educated, but he was self-taught. In the late 1800s, he dabbled in all manner of new modalities that flourished at the time. Using some logic, he deduced that if the spinal segments were disturbed in their alignment, it could affect human health. After curing a janitor of deafness in 1895 by adjusting the spine, he launched a new profession called Chiropractic.

Palmer and his son established the Palmer School of Chiropractic in Davenport, Iowa. Chiropractors were derided and even imprisoned for practising an art form that cleared nerve interference along the spine and allowed people to function better. The profession grew by leaps and bounds because of public demand, yet some chiropractors were imprisoned for the accusation of practising medicine without a license.

Slowly but surely, Chiropractic became accepted, and today, many thousands around the world see millions of patients who are reaping the health benefits.

There is an analogy between what happened with chiropractors, especially in the early days and the doctors who battled the pertaining COVID-19 narrative. In both cases, it was a collective assault by the establishment of medical organizations. With Chiropractic, however, it was mainly the American Medical Association that attacked the chiropractic profession. In the case of COVID-19, it was a complex of government, the media, and the entire medical establishment.