Ten Reasons ID Physicians Should Quit
I quit ID in 2022, and it wasn’t covid that made the decision. I didn’t want to tie myself to the mast of a sinking ship.
Once financially independent, you work because you want to, not because you have to or are chained to a mast.
Here are ten reasons ID physicians should quit now.
RFK, Jr Might Have a Point
It’s not about vaccines. Let’s not start there. After all, the USA is the most obese and chronically ill country in the world. Congratulations! Let’s start blaming vaccines when there are problems with our food and pharmaceuticals.
Most obese and chronically ill country in the world. Let that sink in. Maybe it is time to admit that change is necessary regarding our diet recommendations, and the FDA is in bed with big pharma.
Regret Minimization
ID Docs know all about regret minimization. We coined Safer Sex. We treat HIV, babesiosis, listeria, bacteria, and Mpox, and yet we know our profession will be taken over by AI before 2030.
Thinking Fast and Slow
The value of an ID consult is to slow the thinking—records review. I’ll get that fax or culture result from OSH. When the ID pharmacist can’t get the fax anymore because AI has outsourced him– when it does antimicrobial stewardship intuitively within the workflow of the inpatient team– when medical records are accessible, and AI responds with more empathy and compassion than humans can, will we still need ID consults?
AI can think fast. ID doctors can think slow, and AI will eat our lunch.
Have Some Compassion
What would you do if you cared about children, public health, and the American people? You wouldn’t call RFK, Jr a monster or a vaccine denier. It is as accurate as saying that COVID came from a lab leak or a wet market. Wet market. Seriously? Gain of function? Have some compassion. Can we get data transparency and let people look at it and decide what it says in an open forum? Compassion means letting the data come to light. Data transparency is compassion.
What If What You Know is Wrong?
In med school, we were taught that 50% of our knowledge would be proven wrong. What happened? Do you think cardiology and oncology are evidence-based or money-based? Incentives matter.
Stop Pharmaceutical Ads
The US and New Zealand allow pharmaceutical companies to advertise to consumers directly. Once this travesty ends, traditional news media will lose about half its funding—a win-win. Another question: why does the pharmaceutical industry provide financial support for the FDA?
We Are a Sick Country
We have the worst chronic disease epidemic in the world. Stop discussing the source of the epidemic; acknowledge it. Transparency. Data. Perversive incentives to the food and pharmaceutical industries. Let’s get clear that our kids are suffering, and we are a sick country. Address the chronic disease epidemic in the United States.
Acknowledge People Don’t Trust Public Health
People don’t trust public health, the scientific establishment, or physicians. After the last decade, no one has been surprised by this other than academics. Mistakes have been made. Our children have been harmed, and it is a fact that 50% of academic studies cannot be reproduced. Wait—50/50 can’t be reproduced? Academic medicine has let us down, and academic journals are frequently just plain wrong. Weird. In med school, I learned that half of my learning would eventually be proven wrong. Half of what is written is wrong because of publish or perish and perverse incentives.
Something I Could Have Written
I could have written this:
Here’s another interesting anecdote that this entire vaccine debate reminded me of. When I was a resident many years ago, a physician colleague of mine, a non-infectious disease person, told me that he and his spouse had just had a baby. He said the following to me: “My spouse and I are both doctors. Neither of us has hepatitis B. I am sure we didn’t get it while she was pregnant. I’m not anti-vax, but why did they give my kid a hep B vaccine right after birth? What are they trying to prevent on the second day of life?” This physician colleague was not being “anti-vax.” He was simply asking a rational question that people are entitled to ask. We had a good conversation about the topic, and I forgot about it after that. But the recent firestorm reminded me that even medical professionals sometimes have reasonable questions about what we are doing and recommending.
Or this:
In summary, as infectious disease practitioners, we must be willing to acknowledge uncertainty where it exists. We must acknowledge prior mistakes that were made. We must equally continue to emphasize and advocate for the most critical elements of public health as it relates to infectious diseases. This is the only recipe for regaining the public’s trust and trying to improve public health in totality as much as possible.
Why You Don’t Want To Be an ID Physician
ID doctors are poorly paid. Often, you can make more as a hospitalist.
And masks in kids, COVID shots in healthy college-aged kids, and deceit and mismanagement of the pandemic. It hurt our kids. They hurt our kids. ID doctors are complicit and should be humble. We are inextricably linked to the poor decisions made around the pandemic. Before this fiasco, we had sanitation, vaccination, antibiotics, and germ theory. But since 2020, we have had political expediency, perverse incentives, and worse—just inaccurate, misaimed policy and shame if you don’t agree.
ID doctors have been on the wrong side of history during this pandemic. I would blame the politicians. I would blame the system. I would blame myself. When 90% of parents refuse CDC recommendations, I just have to blame myself. I quit being an ID doctor, but the pandemic confirmed why I left.
ID physicians need to reject public health and depend on transparency and data.
Everyone Needs ID, But No One Wants to Be US
Antimicrobial Stewardship and Infection Prevention have been winners in the hospital. ID doctors have helped these professions progress.
Unfortunately, these winners are easy for AI to replicate and save everyone money. Many pharmacists specializing in antimicrobial stewardship and nurses focusing on infection prevention will learn how AI will take over their jobs.
ID Doctors are Virtue Signaling
Since more than 90% of infectious disease physicians are Democrats, I can’t say this. It feels like collective PTSD because of how bad the ID community was about COVID. Not only were most ID doctors wrong about the whole COVID thing, but they practiced virtue signaling and should probably be discounted in general.
Conclusion: Ten Reasons ID Physicians Should Quit
ID doctors, I don’t forgive you. I quit in 2022, and more docs will quit you unless you figure out that your feelings matter less than the data.
Plain and simple changes are expected soon. Pause and engage in some self-reflection; ID doctors have done a poor job shepherding the people and failed in data-driven rational thinking and instead espoused political and personal thinking.
Instead of rules, give people options. Remember, we live in the most obese and sickest civilization in the history of the world. What is wrong with considering other views and not tying yourself to the mast of a sinking ship?
We are not the smart ones. How long did it take to accept hand hygiene? Sadly, we are not there yet. Yet this is the best of all possible worlds because the biggest problems we have to face are not infant mortality and infectious epidemics but childhood obesity and other problems of overabundance.