Dear American Medical Association,

[MachineGhost]

I read with interest your organization's plan to create ethical guidelines for physicians in the media, which would include a report on how doctors may be disciplined for violating medical ethics through their press involvement, and a public statement denouncing the dissemination of dubious medical information through the radio, TV, newspapers, or websites.

One of people who helped craft your group's resolution to tighten control of doctors in the media is not, in fact, a physician himself, but only a medical student. He told Vox in an interview that "Dr. [Mehmet] Oz [and The Dr. Oz Show] has something like 4 million viewers [sic] a day. The average physician doesn't see a million patients in their [sic] lifetime. That's why organized medicine should be taking action." In point of fact, Dr. Oz reaches only half that number -- but let's not let a little thing like accuracy stand in the way of an agenda.

Dr. Oz is a high-profile example, but countless integrative doctors in states across the country routinely face harassment and the threat of having their licenses revoked by state medical boards for the most specious of reasons. Yet when conventional doctors engage in behavior that is similar to that of integrative physicians -- or when conventional docs flout the law in the most egregious ways -- state boards are far more lenient, if any action is taken at all.

The bias, then, is already overwhelmingly against integrative practitioners, and now the AMA is looking to take further steps to silence them. What will happen to doctors who don't unflinchingly support the CDC vaccine regime, or who inform their patients of any alternative treatment that clashes with conventional orthodoxy? In Europe, it is already illegal for doctors to use the terms "probiotic," "superfood," and "antioxidant" when used in relation to commercial food products or supplements -- and European doctors who even mention the benefits or health claims of any food, supplement, or non-drug product to patients face jail time. Will we allow free professional speech to be similarly suppressed here? Has the US come to this?

The only way that medical care advances and gradually becomes more scientific is by challenging orthodoxy. Doctors might have killed George Washington by repeatedly bleeding him. The doctor who first told physicians to wash their hands was scorned and harassed. The doctor who first found bacterial involvement in stomach ulcers was vilified until he was eventually exonerated and given prizes. Medical errors, taken as a whole, are today one of the largest single causes of death in the US. How can there be advances or improvements if critics, researchers, and innovators are all gagged?

By gagging doctors' free speech in the media, the American Medical Association may be attempting to "defend the profession" -- but only from competition and change, not from those you dismiss out of hand as "quacks."

Stop censoring free speech in the media! Disagreement and debate is healthy, but using your billy club to prohibit doctors from exercising their First Amendment rights is an outrage. Please do not go forward with these speech-suppressing ethical guidelines, which will unduly restrict our access to health information. The American public will not stand for it.

[MediumTex]

The bias, then, is already overwhelmingly against integrative practitioners, and now the AMA is looking to take further steps to silence them. What will happen to doctors who don't unflinchingly support the CDC vaccine regime, or who inform their patients of any alternative treatment that clashes with conventional orthodoxy? In Europe, it is already illegal for doctors to use the terms "probiotic," "superfood," and "antioxidant" when used in relation to commercial food products or supplements -- and European doctors who even mention the benefits or health claims of any food, supplement, or non-drug product to patients face jail time. Will we allow free professional speech to be similarly suppressed here? Has the US come to this?

Hippocrates said: "Let food be thy medicine, and medicine be thy food."

How would you like to be the cop who had to go arrest Hippocrates and throw him in jail for making the statement above?  What if he resisted?  Wouldn't it be a drag to be the nameless dolt in the history books who beat Hippocrates when he refused to go to jail peacefully for saying that people should let food be their medicine.