I recently heard an interview on OnPoint Radio with Jane Clayson. The interview
subject was an internist named Stuart B. Mushlin. He had practiced in the Boston area
for 40 years and had recently written a book describing 20 difficult to diagnose patients
that he had encountered during his career. The book was titled “Playing the Ponies and
Other Medical Mysteries Solved”.

In the interview, Dr Mushlin expressed many of the same concerns that I have had with
the Big Business of medicine, and so I wrote the following letter to him:

Dear Dr Mushlin: Thank you for writing the book and also for taking the time to reveal
some unwelcome truths about the sad status of America’s healthcare system.

I am also a retired physician with 40 years of experience who always tried to make the
time-consuming effort to deal comprehensively with patients who had complex, often
iatrogenic illnesses in America’s medical system that rewards rapid, one-complaint-only
clinic visits. I practiced for 30 years in rural Minnesota, often with no hospital within 30
miles and few specialists readily available. Patients were reluctant to be referred to far
away specialists, so we both tried hard to figure out the health problems locally.

During the last decade of my career I practiced holistic mental health in my independent
clinic that didn’t have an MBA-trained administrator. My practice evolved into mainly
helping take patients off of their psych meds (each patient had become sickened but
also addicted to/dependent upon psychiatric medications whose adverse effects had
been unrecognized by their prescribing psychiatrists (who only spent 10 minutes with
them during their regular monthly or bi-monthly “med check” visits [!]).

My experience during that decade was the richest, most satisfying period of my career,
but it was also the least financially remunerative experience as well. (I could only see 6
– 7 patients per day because the practice of getting patients off their addictive
prescription drugs included 1) counseling them about their previous erroneous
diagnoses, 2) teaching them about how their drugs messed up their brains, 3)
discussing alternatives to drugs “therapy”, and 4) teaching them about the complexities
of good brain nutrition in a situation where many of their psych drugs were actually
depleting their brains of essential nutrients (especially the amino acid precursors of
certain brain neurotransmitters.)

Being innately altruistic (as I sense you are as well), I always disobeyed my clinic
administrator’s admonition to speed up my office visits. But being thorough and willing
to spend the large amount of time necessary to get the essential history from the
patient, I often was able to make the elusive diagnoses that previous doctors had
missed.

Therefore, as I am sure you also experienced, I was blessed (cursed?) with an often
burdensome patient load because of my reputation for being comprehensive and not
simply a prescription drug pusher. ALL patients need and deserve a healthcare-giver
who spends adequate amounts of time listening to them, despite what the Big Business,
Big Medicine, corporate-influenced/corporate controlled, for-profit medical establishment
demands today. Tragically, the concept of “time is money” has taken over ALL capitalist
institutions in America which also applies to the medical industry.)

I too was taught to listen to the patient, especially the parents of sick children, for, as
you so wisely stated “they will often tell you the diagnosis”.

However, the present reality of American medicine is that there is a virtual epidemic of
iatrogenic disorders because no physician has the time to give out full information about
the drugs that are often given out like candy. And, therefore, the medicolegal concept of
informed consent has gone out of common practice. By not informing patients about all
the important adverse effects of drugs and vaccines, we are doing a great disservice to
our patients and, most importantly, are putting their health at risk. And because we in
the medical community are frequently ignorant of many of the adverse effects of those
drugs or vaccines that we prescribe, we often cavalierly over-prescribe them and even

administer them in potentially lethal cocktails that have never been tested for long-term
safety or efficacy.

By not listening to the care-givers that are closest to the patient (and therefore not
understanding the true nature of the problem) is most tragically illustrated in the current
epidemic of vaccine-induced neurological injuries and deaths that all-too-often gets
families fired by irate/threatened pediatricians. Parents are selectively ignored when it
comes to iatrogenic disorders, and they get fired because they know, without a shadow
of a doubt, that the cluster of up to 8 different vaccine antigens that were injected into
the muscles of their tiny babies (at the 2, 4 and 6 month “well baby” visits) were what
caused the near-SIDS episode, the new seizure, the headache, the high fever, the
sudden onset of their kid’s (soon-to-be) permanent autism spectrum disorder or their
new autoimmune disorder.

These parents of vaccine-injured children know what the diagnosis is because soon
after the cocktail of vaccines that contained neurotoxins (like the deadly heavy metals
mercury or aluminum or live viruses), their normally developing, happy baby suddenly
lost its developmental milestones (quite possibly representing a vaccine-induced, viral
encephalitis which would only be diagnosed with a spinal tap.) Even if the dreaded
diagnosis of an iatrogenic illness may not be foremost on the list of possibilities, not
placing it on the differential diagnosis list should never happen. I’m sure that you would
agree with me that such an omission is bad medicine.

A partial list of categories of iatrogenic disorders that I commonly dealt with in my own
practice (daily in the case of the patients who were suffering from psych drug-induced
disorders) is below:

1) “Drug-induced Dementia” (read psychiatrist Grace Jackson’s book by that name –
subtitled “A Perfect Crime”),
2) vaccine-adjuvant-induced (mainly caused by the neurotoxin aluminum adjuvant)
autoimmune disorders (please study the research on the ASIA syndrome
(Autoimmune/inflammatory Syndromes Induced by Adjuvants) by Yehuda Shoenfeld –
google his work),
3) vaccine-induced macrophagic myofasciitis (MMF) –google Gherardi, et al,
4) SSRI or psychostimulant drug-induced so-called “bipolar disorder”,

5) SSRI/tranquilizer drug-induced depression,
6) psychostimulant/SSRI drug-induced psychotic disorders,
7) psychiatric drug-induced withdrawal syndromes – hundreds or thousands of very
common sets of symptoms that are routinely mis-diagnosed as “of unknown etiology”
and treated with another drug(!),
8) vaccine-induced Gulf War Syndrome,
9) Statin drug-induced dementia,
10) electroconvulsive “therapy”-induced (ECT) brain damage, depression, personality
change, permanent memory loss and progressive dementia,
11) etc, etc.

My career path is quite similar to yours in that it began when – back 30 or 40 years ago
- we were correctly being taught by my relatively altruistic med school professors (who
weren’t yet being paid honoraria or having their research funded by Big Pharma and
thus being co-opted to do their bidding) to “first do no harm”. I was also being correctly
taught to always suspect prescription drugs as being prime suspects in whatever was
causing a patient’s symptoms. No longer is this being done, thanks partly to the
powerful influence that cunning Big Pharma propaganda has on medical education and
the demand by patients to demand being prescribed the drug they have seen over and
over again on TV.

Sadly, this massive problem of iatrogenesis will not be easily solved in today’s junk
culture, partly because of the risk of malpractice lawsuits if patients started recognizing
that iatrogenesis is a common root cause of many of their chronic diseases, and partly
because what patients really need – and which they are being deprived of - takes too
much time to ever institute as long as medicine is a for-profit industry.

And what would one expect in our current culture of the over-prescribing by healthcare
providers and the willingness of Big Pharma-propagandized patients to demand their
“quick-fix” prescription drugs? (I always told my over-dosed and polypharmacy-afflicted
psychiatric-survivor patients that one of the problems in today’s medical system is that it
only takes 2 minutes for a doctor to write a prescription, whereas it takes 20 minutes to
NOT write a prescription. In today’s system, the 2 minute option is vastly more
profitable.

But when our desperate, propagandized, and often gullible patients (who are
bombarded by seductive TV and magazine commercials for costly drugs many times
per day) come in asking about whatever drug, too many doctors (60% or more
according to studies) welcome the 2 minute visit just to catch up on their double-booked
schedules - and write the script.

Thanks for listening. I welcome your comments.

Gary G. Kohls, MD, Duluth, MN

PS: Immediately below is a link to some of many columns that I have written in recent
years concerning America’s unrecognized Epidemic of Iatrogenic Disorders. Many of
the articles have been archived at:
http://duluthreader.com/search?search_term=Duty+to+Warn&p=2.