It is no small thing to realize that one’s trust in doctors has been shaken. In addition to putting one’s health at risk, at least in the long term, such a recognition has the potential to shatter one’s self-conception as an Enlightenment-oriented rationalist. Granola-munchers and witches may glance with suspicion at the contemporary medical establishment, but white-collar professionals do so at their acute psychological peril. While my own journey to skepticism and mistrust has been reluctant, it is, I think, representative of that taken by a great number of conservatives. We would like to believe in an ordered world of disinterested therapeutic recommendations, but the behavior of physicians as a class has rendered that conviction well-nigh impossible.
Perhaps I ought to begin by stating that I and others of like mind obviously do continue to trust doctors when the question at hand is discrete, fundamental, and unideological — a category that used to include much more than it does today. If a medical professional tells me that I have cancer, I am likely to believe him. The same is true if a surgeon wishes to set my child’s broken bone or repair a loved one’s artery. What I cannot trust is that any particular physician will speak honestly if the issue of the moment resides at the ever-expanding meeting place of medicine and culture. There, a doctor who is also a friend might whisper the truth sotto voce, but an M.D. chosen at random from the local practice’s website is almost certain to project an institutional viewpoint that is monolithic, totalizing, and false.
Like many of my fellows, I can chart my odyssey away from easy credulity on maps both public and private. Observing the medical community’s naked hypocrisy has spurred my retreat, but so, too, have smaller conversations I’ve had with others. Watching public health officials contort themselves to defend un-“distanced” Black Lives Matter rioters two summers ago, I noted the effortless victory of identity politics over what was, at that time, our best prophylactic thinking. Yet I also recognized, some months later, the potential ramifications of wokeism in my children’s pediatrician’s office. More on the latter in a moment.
As so often happens, these agitations burst into full-fledged upheavals only when I attempted to marshal them in argument. Having decided, like most other American parents, to wait a while before giving our children a COVID shot, my wife and I had left ourselves open to aggressive remonstration from vaccine absolutists. How, our concerned loved ones wondered, could we abide any risk to the 8- and 10-year-old in our care? What, furthermore, did our qualms about the Pharma-Fauci establishment matter when we could simply ask our doctor what she thought, thus settling the matter in an instant?
Faced with this categorical pronouncement, I experienced at once the familiar mental jangling that accompanies logical fallacies. Here, in a form so tidy it might serve as a classroom illustration, was an overreliance on authority that practically shimmered with counterfeit sophistication. Given the unutterable complexity of modern medicine, didn’t it make sense to outsource our judgment to experts specially trained for the purpose? To answer in the negative required not only the deployment of my various misgivings but their sharpening into actual grievance and accusation.
To begin with, it is obviously the case that even solo medical practitioners reside within a larger health community and are bound by its edicts and norms. Just as Joe Biden would make a poor arbiter between congressional Democrats and Republicans, so my doctor is unfit to adjudge a quarrel between my family and public health leaders. To suggest that a physician can serve as an evenhanded advice-giver in such circumstances is necessarily to invoke an image that is archaic if not mythological. The kindly village doctor, telling it to me straight no matter the consequences, may once have existed in this country. If so, however, he has long been replaced by bullied functionaries under explicit threat should they deviate from the health-bureaucratic line.
Coming into my moment of crisis, I had, after all, been reading the same reports as other worried conservatives about the pressure on doctors to hew to approved positions. In July of 2021, the Federation of State Medical Boards had released a statement promising to meet vaccine misinformation on the part of physicians with “the suspension or revocation of their medical licenses.” That “misinformation” was left undefined was itself chilling, as towing a hazy line requires harsher self-censorship than holding to a clear one. More recent days had seen the high-profile firings of doctors, such as UC-Irvine’s Aaron Kheriaty, who dared to promote natural immunity as an alternative to vaccination. Clearly, a concerted effort had arisen to supplant 1 million medical voices with a single, irresistible cry. And since the trustworthiness of individual physicians was exactly the issue on which my debates now hinged, their muzzling represented a decisive rebuke to those who would badger me into compliance.
Several other incidents were equally disturbing. In the fall of 2020, as newly released emails now confirm, Anthony Fauci and National Institutes of Health Director Francis Collins colluded to deliver a media-abetted “takedown” to the authors of the Great Barrington Declaration, in which prominent scientists questioned the wisdom of lockdowns and other COVID ameliorations. That same year saw the attempted deplatforming of Stanford radiologist and White House adviser Scott Atlas, whose obvious brilliance ceased to matter the instant he crossed the emerging medical-cultural consensus. There are more examples of this kind, but these few are sufficient to illustrate the point. Like Russian oligarchs free to pursue their fortunes as long as they stay out of politics, individual physicians may fill prescription pads to their hearts’ content. What they mustn’t do, at least where the most sensitive issues are concerned, is oppose the dictates of the established order.
This is not, to be clear, a COVID-dependent phenomenon. Indeed, the attempt to bring the medical field under political discipline is arguably one of the preeminent scientific facts of our time, a catastrophe that touches everything from STEM instruction to medical publishing to grant-making. Writing in the Atlantic in 2019, Williams College biochemistry chairwoman Luana Maroja spoke for many academics when she bemoaned the presence of “campus norms [that] proscribe any discourse that might offend women [or] minorities.” (Maroja’s own students had begun, “without any evidence,” to reject the very existence of trait heritability.) In peer-reviewed venues such as the Lancet and the New England Journal of Medicine, a tony leftism increasingly obtains, with both publications giving recent space to such “health” concerns as critical race theory and gun control. As reported by the Center for the Study of Partisanship and Ideology, 30.4% of all grants given by the National Science Foundation in 2020 contained the terms “equity,” “inclusion,” “gender,” “diversity,” “underrepresented,” “marginalize,” or “disparity.” (The figure in 1990 was 2.9%.) What is at stake in these developments is not mere political advantage but the very soul of science.
Take, for instance, the American Academy of Pediatrics’s 2018 statement on “transgender and gender-diverse children,” a declaration notable primarily for its ideological radicalism. Though individual doctors may well oppose the AAP’s call for “gender-affirmative” care, to say so publicly requires a brand of courage infrequently found in these craven times. In the absence of open dissent, the conservative parent can only assume that a given pediatrician will be his enemy should a son or daughter fall victim to the transgender craze. More than that, it is not unreasonable to worry that a pediatrician might introduce the notion of transgenderism to a child who is, at present, blissfully oblivious.
My own children’s doctor — soon to be their former doctor — serves as a useful illustration of this premise. Having linked, on her practice’s website, to such woke-militant organizations as the AAP and the Center for Young Women’s Health, my children’s pediatrician has shown herself to be, in all likelihood, staunchly opposed to our own values. When, on a recent visit, she made clear that future checkups would include one-on-one chats with my 10-year-old daughter, I knew at once that our time in her care would be limited. That may sound like an extreme reaction, but it proceeds from what my wife and I believe to be an ineluctable logic. Unless a physician explicitly shares our values, she cannot be trusted to hold a private, intimate conversation with our preadolescent girl.
Here, then, is the fruit of the Left’s co-opting of yet another American institution. Asked to “trust my doctor,” I find that I no longer can. Denied disinterested truth-telling, I see ideological bogeys at every turn. That this wariness could easily spread from doctrinaire conservatives to the two-thirds of people who are basically sane is a prospect that ought to give pause to our increasingly mendacious medical establishment. How many trusted the media, the schools, the clergy, and the professoriate 60 years ago? How many trust them now? Do doctors imagine that they are somehow immune from the same fate?
Writing in National Review in December, Ari Schulman characterized vaccine hesitancy as “a chance to belong with people who do not detest [you].” Without changing a word, one could apply that definition to populism itself, the inevitable byproduct of “elite” duplicity and condescension. That the two phenomena are related is the story not only of the COVID era but of the last decade and a half of Western politics, as well. That’s the thing about us rubes. We will put up with quite a lot. But we will not be lied to forever.
Graham Hillard teaches English and creative writing at Trevecca Nazarene University.
