One of the things that came out in the Larry Nassar sex scandal is that many of his victims thought that they were receiving legitimate medical treatment rather than highly inappropriate touching or non-medical procedures (e.g. Jacob Moore, a male gymnast).
Here’s why it matters: many of Nassar’s peers in the medical field helped him get away with it. Medicine often has institutional problems where problematic behaviour goes unchecked and medical professionals fail to report known problems.
Kovan [a doctor who worked with Nassar at Michigan State University] received a complaint that Nassar sexually abused a patient, although prosecutors in that case bought Nassar’s argument that massaging the vaginal area was appropriate treatment for a hip injury.
Those details are part of the 1,333 pages of MSU Police documents on the Nassar investigation released this week in response to requests filed under the Freedom of Information Act.
MSU colleagues initially defended Nassar, according to police investigation - mlive.com
William Strampel, the dean of MSU’s college of osteopathic medicine, was supposed to make sure that there was proper oversight on Nassar following a 2014 complaint that led to a Title IX investigation. No monitoring was instituted. He was later convicted of 2 misdemeanor counts of willful neglect of duty related to his failure to adequately supervise Nassar.
Nassar’s malpractice dates back to the 1990s when people were first accusing him of sexual assault. It had been going on for a long time and perhaps he would’ve gotten away with it if he wasn’t caught trying to delete child porn from his computer.
The Herx reaction and ‘detox’
As far as chronic illness goes, it is common for practitioners to gaslight patients into thinking that they should ignore treatment gone wrong.
A Herx reaction is a negative reaction that happens when spirochete bacterial infections are treated with antibiotics. While this is a legitimate medical phenomenon, it is often raised when the medical professional does not want to know whether or not the patient is actually infected by spirochete bacteria. They simply throw it out there so that the patient ignores unpleasant reactions to treatment. This is dangerous and inappropriate medicine.
I know of at least 3 different doctors loosely affiliated with the medical freedom movement who publicly talk about their patients “having” Herx reactions, chronic Lyme, or detox reactions.
The takeaway
It’s not just the doctors who fail to recognize chronic illness that are a problem. The entire field has serious institutional problems that are unlikely to be fixed quickly. Nobody has the courage to speak out about problems in the chronic illness field.
- Researchers and the research-adjacent clinicians are too concerned with getting research funding, which they need to do to keep their job.
- There is obvious grift with AFLDS (e.g. Simone Gold) and their enablers such as Robert Malone and Stella Immanuel. See this 2-min video which talks about how the charity inappropriately bought a luxury residence for Gold to live in. Independent media is silent on the obvious problems with AFLDS.
- Scientific fraud
- Doctors who’ve had legitimate issues with their licenses in the past such as Sabine Hazan and Margaret Aranda.
- Researchers with a history of retracted papers (e.g. Judy Mikovits)
Patients need to take responsibility for their health. Medicine has institutional problems. The media has largely ignored these issues. So-called ‘advocacy’ organizations often advocate against their demographic.
If you want good health outcomes and you want to get your life back, you need to get educated and know what’s happening.