HOME / BLOG /

MDs Gone Rogue

Lifelong honors student-former surgeon-currently a yoga teacher/doctor's health advocate Dr. Yumiko Kadota, MD knows first-hand doctors have plenty reason to be unhappy with the medical industry (Instagram: @mindbodymiko):

50840171_609700562803292_8249903187655256194_n

POSTECH's and Google's glucose-monitoring and drug-delivering smart contacts aren't state-licensed, and that's because the doctors and engineers aren't sitting satisfied with the status-quo (IEEE here and here):

mjc1otu0oa

This opinion piece is not meant to disparage in any way physicians who seek to improve people's lives and inquire outside of convention. I understand their frustration with the system. In my early 20s, I saw first-hand the glacially progressive bureaucracy of medical science while working in a bioinformatics startup within Singularity University-Nasa Ames. My professor at the time and I had this amazing product with the potential to change millions of chronic illness patients' lives for the better -- from epilepsy patients to veterans, senior citizens, inter alia. The enormous amount of required money (mostly for legal), the pushback from big hospitals, the ubiquity of doctors' acceptance of decades-outdated inefficient tools/their lack of eagerness to adopt newer tech . . . everything was bang-your-head-against-the-wall frustrating. So I get why compassionate doctors go rogue. Sometimes they personally experience illness and (bio)hack their way back to health. Sometimes they just are sick-and-tired of the inefficiency of state-licensed conventional and experimental treatments that are slowly failing their patients, their friends.

Brilliant But Flawed

Just like we witnessed the rapid, unfettered development of AI within Microsoft/Twitter go Nazi and a long-worshipped Nobel Prize-winner Dr. Watson (of Watson and Crick/the real hero of the story, Rosalind Franklin) appropriate science to fuel and advocate his racist dogma, we see doctors gone rogue use their MDs to proliferate downright unfounded notions. Some are interesting/promising, some are harmless/silly, others are potential threats to public health/people's livelihoods.

Reason for Temperance to Ballast Enthusiasm for Innovation

As a young person and as a young-at-heart person, it's easy to wish things would move faster. It's easy to just wish clinical trials and promising new treatments would just be green-lighted. Yet there's another piece of the picture. As I grew older, and as I personally experienced chronic illness, I came to see the benefit of why doctors spend their whole lives training to take care of a specific type of patient. While researching California legislative law, I found out psychiatrists too have an unlimited licensure. Yet as someone with UCTD I sure wouldn't want one giving me a kidney transplant, much less speculating why I'm experiencing photosensitivity (difficulty with UVA-1 treatments) as a localized scleroderma patient! (Technically, your MD PCP can give you a boob job.)

In the US today, patients aren't an all-you-can-eat buffet for well-meaning Frankenstein-inspired researchers and clinicians. Outside hospitals and state-licensed private practices, however, in the dark web analogue we know as complementary and alternative medicine (CAM) -- it's the Wild West. It's where a lot of progress is happening. In fact, it's because of all of this non-regulated medicine that the human health is expected to progress more in the next 10 years than it has in the last 100.

Note on CAM Endeavors

While many doctors gone rogue are well-meaning and only want to help patients, many complimentary and alternative (CAM) healing arts practitioners may appropriate science to make their human experiments more enticing to prospective patients/clients/customers (Imgflip):

qqitf

One scientific study is not enough to draw a conclusion but may provide a basis for further study (what dose is positively effective, what specific compounds are beneficial, etc., how stable, how consistently replicable). Yet many entities simply use the hot keywords such as science, cellular, adaptogen, age, life, detox to further their own agenda (La Prairie): 

laprairie

Read More:

Laypeople as Health Practitioners, for Better or Worse

A growing trend is for laypeople to take it upon themselves, regardless of scientific literacy or interest to further their own education level, to take the helm of their own health. Self-accountability is good, but so is teamwork. As a species we are a multi-personed entity -- social creatures, if you will. I do not simply affect myself but also stand to influence others. The birth/life/death of one person affects a whole community. We recently see the resurgence of measles, parents of young children with rare diseases who choose to start them on probiotic and Facebook-informed diet protocols instead of state-licensed medical treatments and patients who have been treated by naturopaths for conventionally benign autoimmune conditions who are now immensely/dangerously suffering from a myriad of supplement-triggered conditions.

Multiple people of various backgrounds have suggested I mega-dose on baking-soda. As you know, NaHCO^3 + HCl --> H_2O + NaCl (Facebook):

bakingsodacure

People have directly responded to my personal (publicly visible) Instagram with suggestions of all kinds (Instagram):

img_0953

Californian naturopathic doctors like Kristine Reese, ND, and Hadas Hilewitz, ND, are able to legally prescribe under the DEA controlled substances as well as adminster intravenous unproven therapies (turmeric in this case), such as the one that killed millennial eczema patient Jade Erick (Forbes):

https_specials-images.forbesimg.com_imageserve_587327978_960x0.jpg_fitscale

Ultimately, MDs are humans (illogical, creative, etc.) too and when they clock-out of their role as a state-licensed physician and venture out into the Tor equivalent realm of CAM, it's ill-advised for patients to view them as a white-coat healer. Healer they may be. But just like there are white-hat hackers, black-black hat hackers and gray-hat hackers -- their coat just went in the colorful civvie laundry when they stepped into the ring with the rest of us citizen scientists.

Know Your Scope of Practice/Rights: