Smear merchants lie through their teeth about people like me who want
to help others so their bosses can stay in power to help themselves.
Partisan bickering will not solve our problems. We need outside-the-box
ideas that help liberals, conservatives, and everyone else get more of what
they want. Requires pixie dust? Impossible? No. Read an example of how
we could make government affordable without penalizing anyone.

Kevin Pezzi, MD

The Singing Surgeon™
I'm part Native American and revere natural health,
so should I also call myself a Medicine Man, too? :-)

Iconoclastic views on economics, politics, technology, science, and life

I'm a PBS mind in an MTV World

Disagree with something I wrote? So do I! Read more

“To avoid criticism, do nothing, say nothing, and be nothing.”

— Elbert Hubbard, American editor, publisher, and writer (1856–1915)

Trivia: He and his wife, Alice Moore Hubbard, the noted feminist and writer, died aboard the RMS Lusitania, which was torpedoed and sunk by a German submarine on May 7, 1915, when they were heading to Europe to cover the war and interview Kaiser Wilhelm II of Germany.

If you disagree with something I wrote, feel free to challenge it. Some of my viewpoints are the antithesis (exact opposite) of what they once were. That isn't flip-flopping; that is changing opinions with scant evidence to support them into convictions with a firmer foundation of facts.

My political philosophy is an amalgamation of libertarian, conservative, and liberal principles. My opinions have changed so significantly that my conservative friends might be horrified by how I strongly believe that liberals are correct on certain issues. I've previously written about some of them, but to make this more fun, I will present others as challenges in which I offer $100,000 to the first person who can refute the logic I used in forming that opinion. Please note that due to my limited time and difficulty using my hands after I broke my neck, I cannot quickly update my previously published opinions. However, now that I am balancing the promptings of head and heart, I strongly disagree with many opinions I expressed in my writings.

I like finding people who make me think, not necessarily those who agree with me. Genius Robert Heinlein said, “I never learned from a man who agreed with me.” If you can educate me, I'm all ears.

“Few people are capable of expressing with equanimity opinions which differ from the prejudices of their social environment. Most people are even incapable of forming such opinions.”
— Albert Einstein

“Great spirits have always encountered violent opposition from mediocre minds.”
— Albert Einstein

“The ultimate ignorance is the rejection of something you know nothing about and refuse to investigate.”
— Dr. Wayne Dyer

“If everyone is thinking alike, then somebody isn't thinking.”
— General George Patton

“Man's mind, once stretched by a new idea, never regains its original dimensions.”
— Oliver Wendell Holmes

“A lot of people risk their lives in a brief act of heroism, which is kind of cool, but Jill has what I call slow heroism. She is risking her professional life on something that her own calculations show may not work for a thousand years—may not ever. So I like to support people that are risking their lives.”
— ex-Microsoft billionaire brainiac Nathan Myhrvold speaking about Jill Tarter, who inspired the character played by Jodie Foster in the movie Contact. It takes a brilliant person to see that others who go against the grain of conventional wisdom may be sages although lesser minds often ridicule their ideas.

“I am not young enough to know everything.”
— Oscar Wilde

“You have enemies? Good. That means you've stood up for something, sometime in your life.”
— Winston Churchill

“Talk sense to a fool and he calls you foolish.”
— Euripides, Greek tragic dramatist (484 BC - 406 BC)

“It is socially unacceptable to be right too early.”
— Robert Heinlein

“I'd rather stand alone on the truth than with millions on a lie.”

“The most distinctive mark of a cultured mind is the ability to take another's point of view; to put one's self in another's place, and see life and its problems from a point of view different from one's own. To be willing to test a new idea; to be able to live on the edge of difference in all matters intellectually; to examine without heat the burning question of the day; to have imaginative sympathy, openness and flexibility of mind, steadiness and poise of feeling, cool calmness of judgment, is to have culture.”
— Arthur H. R. Fairchild

“It is not the critic who counts: not the man who points out how the strong man stumbles or where the doer of deeds could have done better. The credit belongs to the man who is actually in the arena, whose face is marred by dust and sweat and blood, who strives valiantly, who errs and comes up short again and again, because there is no effort without error or shortcoming, but who knows the great enthusiasms, the great devotions, who spends himself for a worthy cause; who, at the best, knows, in the end, the triumph of high achievement, and who, at the worst, if he fails, at least he fails while daring greatly, so that his place shall never be with those cold and timid souls who knew neither victory nor defeat.”
— Theodore Roosevelt

“It has been my experience that folks who have no vices have very few virtues.”
— Abraham Lincoln

This reminds me of something stressed by one of my psychology professors, who said that society imposes rigid boundaries for what behavior is acceptable, and applies tremendous pressure trying to force people to conform to the behavioral expectations. Some of the most brilliant and productive outside-the-box thinkers led unconventional lives. One of the side effects of forcing people to think inside the box is that by lopping off outside-the-box behavior, potentially great outside-the-box ideas are lost, too.

“We must not confuse dissent with disloyalty. When the loyal opposition dies, I think the soul of America dies with it.”
— Edward R. Murrow, American journalist (1908-1965)

“You will not do incredible things without an incredible dream.”
— John Eliot

NOTE: Several family members were brutally slaughtered recently, so I will take a break from writing. Their deaths erased my affinity for writing about politics or the economy, thus I'll later limit myself to health and brainpower in addition to completing my book on rapidly overcoming racism and bigotry. BTW, the two men who murdered my father are still on the lam; I am offering up to $100,000 for information leading to their arrest and conviction.

The secret pact of silence in medicine

Imagine that you are a doctor and saw a physician make an error in an online video. Would you speak up or keep quiet? Despite the lip service the medical establishment gives to not sweeping mistakes under the rug—or six feet under, in many cases—doctors are pressured to look the other way. I've witnessed doctors doing and saying things that would make your blood boil, and I've previously written about how some healthcare workers intentionally murder patients they don't like because they might, for example, have darker skin. The healthcare industry wants people to believe that they are trying hard to improve, but that is as believable as Rush Limbaugh claiming to be serious about weight loss.

The mistakes discussed below are far from the worst I know of, but they are especially notable because the fact they were posted online indicates the doctor and major medical website seem oblivious to what they did wrong. If Bill Clinton were similarly clueless, he would post a Weekend with Monica video and then wonder why people raised their eyebrows. This raised my MD eyebrows:

While doing CME on Medscape, I viewed video courses which revealed that some of the supposed sages giving those presentations don't know basic information about how to optimally sterilize skin before a surgical procedure. Courses in that section mentioned some of the horrendous infections that can result, but one video showed a physician toss a bloody gauze pad onto an obviously nonsterile area of the patient (the chest exposed by her V-neck blouse) and then reuse it, or some other pad that appeared to be bloody! The video shows what appears to be blood on his white coat sleeve (meaning his nonsterile coat likely touched her face) in addition to showing his hands touching her hair (almost certainly not sterile) and later her skin and gauze pads before and after injecting her, with several open wounds on her face. This doctor, mind you, is supposed to be someone with such expertise that he is qualified to teach other doctors.

Doctors don't have crystal balls that tell them which patients will and will not become infected as a surgical complication, so we should do everything possible to minimize the infection risk. In this video, the doctor appears to be making several mistakes, plus teaching other doctors that cavalier technique is acceptable.

I won't link to the video or show screenshots of it, which would allow the patient and physician to be identified. The latter would undoubtedly be furious that I criticized his technique, which strikes me as third-rate and evidence that he either doesn't care enough about patients or he flunked Germs 101 in med school. With the video serving as proof that I have valid reasons to question his technique, he couldn't defend his performance without seeming as if he were trying to stick up for something that falls far short of perfection. So what might he do in retaliation? If he were like others I've criticized for legitimate reasons, he would smear me, blasting me out of spite even though I am just trying to protect patients and others.

One of the central messages conveyed in my writing is that many of the supposed experts need more expertise; in fact, some appear not to know what the hell they are doing. In medicine, a lack of expertise is a big problem. Society in general has repeatedly told doctors to speak up when they spot problems, but most doctors are too spineless to ever criticize colleagues publicly or privately even when the mistake is unquestionable. I think this cowardice stems from how doctors know they all make mistakes, so if they don't criticize others, others are less likely to criticize them. There's a tacit agreement in medicine that we'll all just zip our lips, overlook misconduct and mistakes, keep pulling the wool over the eyes of patients, then do something more important: play golf, perhaps.

Not me.

Kevin Pezzi, MD

The secret pact of silence in medicine

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