I am a physician who stood against the false narratives swirling around Covid and, for a time, it seemed like I lost.
Before Covid became a public reality, I was working as a successful trauma surgeon and surgical ICU physician in the hospital that had the first diagnosed Covid case in America. I was working as one of the more senior surgeons of a team of 12 surgeons. The hospital and medical community had already been struggling prior to Covid with various departures from reality with narratives including ‘racism everywhere’ and ‘diversity as long as it supports deviancy’, but it wasn’t appearing to dramatically affect patient care.
In 2018-2019, I stumbled onto a fraud scheme perpetrated by some of the administrative doctors in our hospital that did cause patient harm, so I reported our hospital administration for fraud. I similarly observed and discovered other connected issues that caused patient harm by various other providers that I tried to bring to light in our hospital. I was ‘rewarded’ with 12 complaints filed against me over a two week period, in retaliation. These complaints accused me of breaches of almost every aspect of professional behavior and ethics. They followed one of the administrators sending out an email asking her colleagues to “get rid of Dr. Miller”. None of these allegations stood (they were all false to begin with), and I continued to do my job to the best of my abilities in this hostile situation, but it became increasingly difficult. Eventually, every single complaint was dismissed as unsubstantiated.
Then, through February and March of 2020, our hospital had a large number of Covid patients including a real upsurge of many sick patients in early March. A couple of weeks later, it hit the news, but only after the virus had passed its inflection point in our hospital and after our healthcare system was not in any threat of having inadequate resources. Things then went completely mad with hype and fear – again, this was after the real infectious surge was passed.
Suddenly, our hospital outcomes and quality data became hidden and opaque to us. Prior to this, almost all data were openly shared and discussed in quality assurance meetings. The hospital forced upon us a narrative that was pure lunacy and contrary to all available observations and previously available data. A chilling example is the following.
I was working a shift in the ICU in late April 2020 and had basically nothing to do because greater than half our beds were empty. We were ‘low censusing’ any nurses willing to go home because there were so few sick patients. I was having a cup of coffee, chatting with the staff and another ICU physician, who was in leadership, when the daily newspaper was delivered. Prior to the paper being delivered, we were all relaxed, jocular and noting how little work we all had. The other ICU physician picked up the local paper where the main headline said, “Local ICU Overwhelmed”. The article was referencing our ICU, as we were the only hospital in the county. He looked at me, started sweating, panicked and said, “What are we going to do? We may not be able to handle this!” I replied with, “Pour another cup of coffee and laugh at the morons writing the paper.” He became visibly distressed and left to call the hospital administration about the situation, who confirmed they were complicit with the newspaper article. This colleague was one of the medical directors of our ICU. Our hospital and ICU were not overfull at the peak number of infections in March 2020. In fact, the ICU was never overfull, even after the horrible protocols that hurt so many patients were established. I knew we were in serious trouble as a medical community when clinical leaders started believing the words in a newspaper and hospital administrators more than their own eyes and experience.
Then, I watched as every policy, practice and quality metric that makes a trauma and surgical programme have good patient outcomes be undermined or abandoned by my colleagues and hospital administration. I filed countless complaints to our quality department for disgusting breaches of care that were now becoming commonplace. I could not turn my back on my oaths taken to advocate for patients. Between mid-2020 and 2021, following a leak of information from the opaque administration, I learned that our unanticipated morbidity and mortality numbers had more than doubled for indexed trauma patients. It was horribly demoralising to watch.
After the vaccine was rolled out in late 2020, it became a functional mandate in the broader community, and then definitively mandated by the late summer of 2021. The medical community in the county I was working in (Snohomish, Washington State) started refusing to care for unvaccinated patients except in the hospital setting. I couldn’t believe that patients were banned from accessing basic primary care at first, but then I spoke to a man at my church who was denied both refills of his diabetic medications and treatment for a sinus infection by his primary care provider, all because of his Covid vaccination status. This was so inconceivable that I still didn’t believe it. Even when patients did make it to the hospital, I learned that the physicians and staff in the emergency room were directed to provide a lower tier of medicine to this group of patients. It was less than acceptable, and worse, less dignified, than the care given to any other patients pre- and post- Covid. I had to verify with physician leaders that they approved of this inhumanity. I found out that all the major healthcare systems in the county had agreed to this action, and drove the creation of the policies that demanded physicians act in direct opposition to their oaths. After discovering this, I departed from the medical community in spirit.
Working with my pastor, we turned our church into a free clinic to care for those ostracised from society. I obtained independent malpractice insurance and we started seeing patients. People were desperate. We didn’t advertise, but there were so many people seeking basic healthcare that we struggled to see everyone. I did my best to see people in their time of need, but it was hard. I was still working in my full-time hospital position. I just didn’t have enough hours in the day. Most of the people I cared for were seen at the church – they were met with maskless smiles, prayer, support and free medical care. Sometimes, people would be waiting in my driveway for me when I arrived home in the early morning after a night shift or late at night after I finished a day shift. What became obvious as the most important thing about our clinic is that our patients needed to be treated as valuable people created in God’s image.
Prior to this experience, I was a seasoned (and hardened) subspecialist with the best reputation one could hope for in the hospitals I worked in. When other doctors, health executives, nurses and local politicians or their families had surgical problems, I was often the one asked to deliver their care even if I wasn’t scheduled to be working. After our health care system abandoned the oaths we took as physicians, I had an identity crisis and pivoted to putting more efforts into the free clinic, caring for the dispossessed patients.
Eventually, my work at the free clinic treating unvaccinated patients became known, and the hospital administration learned of it. Subsequently, the real pressure against me started. The hospital responded by opening an investigation of me on synthesised charges of ‘micro-aggression’. There ended up being two separate and independent investigations (one by the hospital, one by my physician group leadership who were working in tandem with the hospital) into my conduct. My colleagues, who months earlier asked for my help and guidance about both professional and personal matters, would no longer return my calls, text messages or emails, or speak to me in public, for fear of being labelled as affiliated with me while in my state of political disfavour. The investigations themselves and the repercussions to my reputation were the punishment. I was treated as guilty, even when proven innocent, by the hospital administration and my colleagues. The investigations eventually exonerated me, my behaviour and my healthcare delivery, but left open the possibility for immediate suspension or termination if I committed a ‘micro-aggression’ in the future. Obviously, this was a no-win scenario for me since micro-aggressions are subjective, undefinable, unprovable and therefore indefensible. I refused to continue working without an independent mediator, so the hospital gladly paid out my contract instead of mediation and restoration.
Separately during this time I was reported to the State Medical Board by an outpatient pharmacist for prescribing a two-week course of fluvoxamine (an anti-depressant) to help a patient recovering after Covid. This prescription had been banned by the Washington State Medical Association as a treatment for Covid or its repercussions. Incidentally, the patient had a positive response and near complete recovery from her illness, but the pharmacist and WSMA didn’t seem to care about that data point and were apparently just offended that I violated their protocol.
By March and April of 2022, multiple other clinics in the county began to accept care for most patients, regardless of vaccination status, and so we wound down the free clinic at my church, transitioning people’s care to physicians in established practices who would now agree to deliver appropriate care. As I had been reported to the state (although no formal charges were brought) and I was being pushed out of hospital medicine for practising ethical medicine, I knew it was time to leave Washington State. The message to me was clear: if I stayed, I would have formal investigations that would prohibit me from obtaining a medical licence in another state. My livelihood would be stripped away. So, we sold our homes and boats, liquidated our assets and moved to South Florida in May 2022. I was, and am, bitter at the medical establishment that committed these crimes, so I planned to retire at age 50 with the move and have nothing further to do with the establishment.
However, after the hurricane came through Florida in the fall of 2022, I started doing volunteer work for hurricane victims. This included some medical relief work. I realised there is still good that can be done in medicine, that people need healthcare providers, and that by nature, I am a healer.
So, in February of 2023, I returned to practising medicine and started working as a primary care physician at a holistic clinic where no patient is turned away. I discovered that I enjoy being a family physician, too. I lost my prestigious career and my social position, but I did not lose my ethics or integrity. I did not violate my oaths of practice. So, ultimately, I have won. And I’m happy.
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A hero. A real doctor in a world gone insane. For all the risks of hurricanes, I think I’d move to Florida in a heartbeat if I could.
Slightly off-thread, but I was reminded of the following issue from the distant past, which I conjecture is present today in the US and UK.
[TL;DR: modern healthcare is dominated by politics and activist agenda rather than medicine]
Covid apart, fraud schemes involving anti-depressants, other interventions and protocols are well-known in the UK mental health services too, though the well-meaning people involved in them might find a justification for them, and indeed the fraud is minor in itself but has repercussions. In one hospital I was associated with (through visiting patients as a carers’ representative) there were issues over “ring-fencing” of government funding and protocols for treating severe depression. In essence, the physicians or finance directors found out, or concluded, that as a result of funding conditions they could only authorise and fund certain medication (e.g.cheap anti-depressants) or certain therapy (expensive Cognitive or Dialectical Behavioural Therapy) if they also ticked a box saying that in their opinion the depression was attributable to certain politically-associated causative agents, most relevantly “domestic emotional abuse”, “discrimination”, “bullying” and suchlike. (Politicians at the time were keen to use terms like “tackling workplace bullying” and “addressing the epidemic of domestic emotional violence” in their rhetoric.) Thinking they were working in the best interests of the patient and merely bending the rules a little, the physicians and administrators would collude to tick these boxes to keep the financial department and politicians happy and, usually, achieve a short-term (and often long-term) medical benefit. Unfortunately, in some cases (notably Dramatic Personality Disorder) the patients, often with distorted perception of their world, would see the “tick boxes” and use them as evidence to seek reparation from their ex-spouses, ex-employers for causing the depression, trying to use the ticks as evidence that a clinician supports the hypothesis of what causes the depressive behaviour, whereas the clinicians was merely bending the rules to obtain funding. Arguably, tick-boxing didn’t help the patient in the long term either, as it merely gave them an incorrect identification of the cause of their depressive behaviour, which they would then cling on to rather than seeking more accurate interventions. At least the lawyers made some money out of the practice!
Personal and professional integrity were quickly cast aside by too many in the face of financial incentives.
Thank goodness there were / are some true professionals who advocate for their patients and fellow humans.
https://tessa.substack.com/p/anthem-covid-19-vaccine-provider
Rotten ba#tards.
A cynic might note that they accidentally gave ALL the “vaccinated” a lower standard, by promoting a drug that was granted “Emergency Authorization Use”, and circumventing the normal protocol for brand new drugs. A proper risk and benefit analysis would be nice, at the very least.
Medical Apartheid justified by those who claimed to hate Racial Apartheid
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Stand in the Park Make friends & keep sane
Sundays 10.30am to 11.30am
Elms Field
near play area
Wokingham RG40 2FE
The medical profession has not covered itself in glory, and on not one, but three occasions.
[1] The medical professions showed open support for BLM an avowedly Marxist organisation that created an atmosphere to imply that only black lives mattered, as evidenced by of the radio presenter in the Isle of Man that lost his job because he said all lives matter, to give just one example
[2] The medical profession promoted lockdowns, masks and the mandating of unproven ‘vaccine’ therapies, with their unions championing governments to pay people to stay at home and not work. Now those same unions complain that inflation has devalued their pay packets.
[3] The medical profession prioritised Covid patients above all else so that Cancer patient’s care was suspended. And of course the example given above.
During any war it is expected that medics treat injured soldiers and civilians based on need and not who they are. Just one example is the famous story below from WW2. How far have we drifted form the following and why?
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RrI1bB39PGs
Humanity in War: The Story of Two Medics on D-Day
The chilling thing about this is that so many perfectly lovely friends, relatives and family all went along with this. During the period when serious discussions were made about allowing unvaccinated to participate in society, I remember being a bit shocked at a perfectly reasonable friend thinking that it was not just OKay but actually justified to shut those of us who preferred not to take part in an experiment out of medical treatment/travel etc (or even restaurants in France).
It was, by far, the biggest outbreak of Mass Psychosis since the Medieval Witch Trials.
“Crimes the individual alone could never stand are freely committed by the group [smitten by madness].”
Carl Jung, The Symbolic Life
A “perfectly lovely” couple we know told us that all unvaccinated people should be imprisoned for endangering others …
i had the same thing happen to me, closest friends ,a sibling,cousins too.
i’m glad others like me here that i can read about so not feel so alone and wasn’t just me had this happen.chilling is good description .was like ww2 posters no parks no schools no restaurants no cinemas but they didn’t realize .still don’t.
These are bitter truths but it is always better to know and to remember. And the memories are going to be very poignant for many given their losses. This profession seems to think that it will always carry on unscathed. I have a feeling that this may not be the case given the awakening on a mass scale that has occurred in just the last two months. I would just ask them to repent of their actions it isn’t impossible. This has been a very fertile period in terms of cross-pollination of disciplines and the joining together of open minds. Before we lament our times we should imagine what it would be like if we didn’t have to go through them.
To read this article 3 years ago, one would assume one was reading a dystopian short story of the science fiction genre.
The sad reality is that I have witnessed very similar occurrences here in Australia.
And we don’t have a Florida to move to!
Good fiction is believable. This is unbelievable, sadly, but true. I was admitted to Royal Berks Hospital in 2021 and the lead physician in A&E was vitriolic, foaming at the mouth and shouting at me when I told him I was unvaccinated. He didn’t like that I had the temerity to tell him he had no right to advise me under his Hippocratic oath to take a clearly unsafe and ineffective treatment which he would know if he had read the trial data. He refused to treat me and passed me on to an underling. An unforgettable experience of the Covid era. Me and my family are happy and healthy. I wonder if he is?
He should have been up before the GMC and barred from practising. But he most likely got an award for following the narrative
Retaining your integrity and peace of mind is priceless.
Well done.
Dr James Miller should be seen as a beacon of truth, honesty and honour in a very faulty American medical system. I haven’t heard of any doctors with the same actions in the UK National Health system, but I suspect they may exist, although silenced by the system. After the extreme impact of Covid is over, I expect more situations like this will be discovered.