Dr. Curtis Kommer as he retires: "My Role in Health Care’s Existential Crisis"; American health care is experiencing an existential crisis, and I regret that it has happened “on my watch.”
Dr. Curtis Kommer as he retires: "My Role in Health Care’s Existential Crisis"; American health care is experiencing an existential crisis, and I regret that it has happened “on my watch.”
'By not speaking up as a physician, I enabled others to speak for me, others with far less knowledge, understanding, or commitment to patient care. I regret that most of all. In short, patients died!
troubled souls ... they know what they did was wrong. he justifies it under "i was busy taking care of patients", but the truth is he and many others were scared and did not had the strength to stand up for their patients.
This is all well and good but he's not quite over the target yet, IMHO. And the target is huge. It's an elephant and it's called pharma. The trust we place(d) in docs rested largely in their ability to heal. And they either healed by 'cutting ', ie, surgically removing the offending pathology- or by prescribing it away. Well now that 80% of us have deemed that we don't trust the recommendation of 99% of docs to 'get boosted', I'd say docs had best begin to accept that our blind faith in them is fading into the ether. We are no longer blind and no longer faithful, because it turns out that docs are blind and faithful- to pharma. I suspect I'm not the only one who assumed that when my doc prescribed something, that he had independently vetted it as being safe and effective after hours of due diligence scouring journals, ingredient lists and lists of side effects. That was my blind faith, clearly misplaced. Now I'm suspicious of everything I'm told by my doc because I can't 'unknow' what I now know. And I'm not alone. This is medicine's real crisis and it's why Colleges and governments are desperately imposing controls on what doctors are allowed to say, think and prescribe- because we now distrust them and with that distrust, their power, prestige and control, evaporates. As it should.
A very touching paper by a physician, most of us would love to have as their doctor. That doctor patient relationship, simply no longer exists here in the UK. It was never really that great, now it simply doesn’t exist. Advocacy for a patient, all but gone. I can understand this man’s despair.
Dr Kommer, Now that you are retired, I hope you will join others and take up the sword for protecting the Doctor/patient relationship and help build a better health care system. We need it. We all (providers and patients) have become a number, a cost point in the huge machinery of giant medical groups that are more concerned with the bottom line.
If your health allows it, now is the time to use your voice and experience. You have nothing to lose and we have everything to gain. We need to fill the ranks with Providers that truly care about patients and the honorable "practice of medicine". We needed more doctors to speak up the last 2 1/2 years, but they were too afraid to pull on the chain of corporate medicine that is around their necks.
We need a major overhaul of the system, or a new decentralized independent system where the power lies in the doctor/patient relationship. The few that have stood up the last 2 1/2 years have paid dearly for their advocacy. They have been maligned, fired and had their licenses threatened in order to achieve their compliance and the Powers That Were have failed. They have informed and saved millions of lives at great personal risk and they have the support and gratitude of millions.
If other Providers are reading this, NOW is the time to join together and stand up. The profession as you know it is dying and future doctors will be nothing more than "order followers" that will look at approved treatments and write an approved prescription. There will be no art or practice of medicine. We are at a turning point in history and what will you (providers collectively) say 5, 10 years from now? , "I stood up. I gave it all I could", or "....................nothing. I chose a safe, ever shrinking prison. Medicine was different back then"
While I appreciate and commend Dr. Kommer on his compassionate insight and reflection on the decline of patient care due to the major failures that have occurred with the evolving health care system in the US over the past 20 years. he did not mention the most egregious elephant in the room and that is the dangerous experimental mRNA injections that continue to be promoted by the FDA, CDC, NIH, AMA and other medical organizations with no informed consent of the potential for serious adverse health effects and fatal injuries.
The problem is centralization. It started a couple of decades ago and reached a new predictable height when the Obama administration and congress implemented the Affordable Care Act. Rapidly the large providers (typically the local hospital(s)) took over the delivery of health care. Hospitals and large providers are run by committee. If you can envision the couple of people who know how to steer a committee to their desired result then you can envision where essentially as few as only one person can implement policies. It’s as if one or a very few people have the ability to basically flip a switch and that’s the new operating procedure for everyone. It’s called centralization folks and when history is written the centralization of treatment during the covid fiasco is going to be shown to have resulted in most of the deaths from a severe flu like disease. Good luck future generation(s), your gonna need it.
All I see is a doctor that has regrets about not speaking up. Unfortunately, I can say the same thing for every damn doctor and nurse and hospital administrator out there. NOT one of them STOOD UP and practiced PATIENT ADVOCATE!! You all let the husband die alone without his loving wife alongside of him to say goodbye, to give some comfort. You all withheld this common decency from all of the people. You all killed these people as much as the vaccine has hurt and killed the people, by not saying ENOUGH stop this now!!!. We have to change the protocol, because this is not working, let's try something else. NO, you all followed the narrative and obeyed bad orders and hid your head in the sand. NOW HIDE YOUR HEADS IN SHAME for what YOU ALL DID TO ALL THOSE PEOPLE!!!! Your voice is TOO LITTLE, TOO LATE!
As Dr. Kommer states, “Better late than never”. I grew to dislike HMOs starting about 25 years ago, more so as those damned tablets came between me and my “doctor” (or is that more accurately “Big Pharma rep”?). Also, I would dearly love to see legislation upending medical boards to only dealing with actual physician qualifications and not dictating what is or is not an acceptable protocol. That is between the physician and patient, not to be overseen by some bureaucrat that has no knowledge of the patient. Focus only on qualifications of the physician.
It is always good for reflection, but we also need accountability.
I worked in health care my whole career. First working for a group of Dr’s offering seven primary services and had approximately 50 Dr’s in this practice. I started out as a file clerk/receptionist and then moved to a keyboard operator ( keying all the Dr’s services per patient, sent these cards to our Provincial Health Authority for payment. I remember back then as a young person, many of these Dr’s acted like they were ‘God’. If we couldn’t find a patient’s file ( which often it was in the Dr’s desk, or in their brief case, or at home), the patient would sit waiting as file clerks were yelled at, some crying because we couldn’t find the file. Sometimes it was misfiled ( not that often). I remember seeing lab reports where it showed a person had cancer, but the wrong person was told they had cancer. Example: there was two Adam Smith’s. No one was held accountable. I then moved on to work in Public Health, becoming a CPA then working for our Provincial Government. ( Now retired).
So during my 35 year career I was able to see the whole picture of our health care system.
Our Health Care Systems worldwide need to be taken down and built back.
Health Care has become political. Dr’s donate to the political party they like to get the health policies they wish, plus the funding they want.
The reason why we have health care is forgotten. It should be all about the patient.
In the airline business they have ‘Cockpit Resource Management’, we need to have that in Health Care.
Dr’s need to pay their staff better and respect them. They could hire Nurse Practitioners. Many of them don’t want to, as that takes away from their net income. They need to hire business people to manage their businesses. They need to have someone in their organization that reviews all new public health mandates and ‘red flags’ issues to Dr’s.
I also remember as a 5 year old child, loosing my baby brother as the Dr’s gave him the wrong blood transfusion.
As a society we need to become our own ‘Dr’s, doing lots of research and holding Dr’s and other Health Care Practitioners accountable. We need to demand that.
We all need to do that with our Government’s ( all parties), our education systems also.
I’m not stating that all Healthcare Professionals , Politicians, Educators are bad. I am saying that many of our ‘systems’ are.
I appreciate this post very much. Some doctors are suffering with the decisions they made because they were told to do so or lose their jobs. I’m a clinician. I see a young doc who cries in my office every session. He pulls himself together before he leaves and thanks me for sitting with him. It’s not right was was done. It’s just not right.
I worked in a hospital twice from September 2020 to present. I became friends with one of the hospitalists in our small rural facility. He had absolutely no power to effect any change except to his growing reputation as a troublemaker. He realized soon that he was there to be the licensed fall-guy if something tragic happens and nothing more. Did he get anything changed? Nope. Admin and his mRNA-loving colleagues removed him from committees, from discussion groups, and the message sent was enough that he removed himself from a facility that needs him very much. A doctor is in a tough spot. Do they speak up and become a target only to lose their license and unable to see any patients? Or do they keep quiet, see all the patients they possibly can, and work within the f'ed up system they had no hand in creating. Once a license is revoked, a doctor is truly worthless to the patients who need him/her. I, for one, will not judge. Will Dr Kommer succeed? I am pessimistic but I applaud that he is now trying to do something.
As I understand it Pharma now owns the data from their clinical trials of drugs and vaccines and hardly any of that data is released to doctors and the public so doctors are completely ignorant as to the safety and efficacy of pharma's products. Would appreciate any feedback from anyone having more knowledge about this.
You know, I really don’t care about his feelings or those who never spoke out against these injections. More so I feel very angry at the entire health industry.
When I was a child doctors came to your home. As an Italian American child in Brooklyn in the 1950’s 1960’s our brownstone,owned by my grandparents, we lived on the second floor and my aunt and her family on the third floor. Whenever our Doctor who spoke Sicilian dialect came to my house for measles mumps or chicken pox (no vaccines then) he was accompanied upstairs by my grandparents who would speak to him about various ailments and he would comfort them with kind words and maybe a prescription.
He would eventually get to see me or my brother. We got a prescription and would feel immediately better. We knew when we saw his little black leather doctors bag we would get excellent care and a lollipop ☺️No insurance forms because we had no insurance and the visit was cash $25 and my grandparents conversations was free.
The reason I brought up home visits is because the doctors at that time got to connect personally with an entire extended family. Now, we’ll I don’t have to tell you because you know,
doctors are mostly in it for the money and protection by corporate medicine firms whom in return expect doctors to follow their rules and all patient doctor relationships ended. The corporate rules:
always refer patients whenever possible. (That way we can keep the patient on a string and collect insurances) inferred Of course. if your smart you assess their “diagnosis “ and make up your own mind.....after all ITS YOUR LIFE.
So my advice is take care of your own health to avoid doctors and only go to one when absolutely necessary to avoid death or blindness.
Maimonides always said stay away from doctors. Eat well but not too much,keep your bowels moving, avoid dangerous activities or places and keep a good disposition and sleep well. He gave diets to keep one healthy too. He was one of the first physicians, in the 13th century!
So since the human body is the same as it was then I think his advice still stands.
So much for corporate medicine and their masking rules, coldness and generally since Covid ,....just raking in the money over YOUR DEAD BODY in many... too many cases
One wonders how many other MDs (and others in the HCW ranks) will be experiencing a massive wave of regret and 'mea culpa' self-recrimination if/when they too come to the inescapable realization that they were complicit in the take down & break down of not only the medical establishment but of society and humanity as a whole as well. They all made choices, whether consciously or not, even if under duress. That "better late than never" BS trope does not cut it, sorry doc. Too little too late is more like it, but if it helps you sleep at night, well then so be it... Sucks to be you though <smh>
Medicine has been infected with the disease of beaurocracy and has fallen beholden to the agencies that are under the control of big pharma. It’s been a slow steady train wreck.
But, in defense of those trying to practice medicine against the beast that’s been created, the average citizens have to take back their power by taking control of their health. Most chronic diseases are the result of decades of diet and lifestyle choices and doctors cannot fix this for us. It’s our power, our responsibility and our opportunity to be able to walk away from such a corrupted system. We need a medical system for emergencies and such but we really can leaves most of the rest of it behind if we choose to.
His mea culpa is a little late after the unconscionable damage to his fellow man has already been done. He can still try to redeem himself - he obviously still has his licence- not like so many doctors who have been censored
troubled souls ... they know what they did was wrong. he justifies it under "i was busy taking care of patients", but the truth is he and many others were scared and did not had the strength to stand up for their patients.
This is all well and good but he's not quite over the target yet, IMHO. And the target is huge. It's an elephant and it's called pharma. The trust we place(d) in docs rested largely in their ability to heal. And they either healed by 'cutting ', ie, surgically removing the offending pathology- or by prescribing it away. Well now that 80% of us have deemed that we don't trust the recommendation of 99% of docs to 'get boosted', I'd say docs had best begin to accept that our blind faith in them is fading into the ether. We are no longer blind and no longer faithful, because it turns out that docs are blind and faithful- to pharma. I suspect I'm not the only one who assumed that when my doc prescribed something, that he had independently vetted it as being safe and effective after hours of due diligence scouring journals, ingredient lists and lists of side effects. That was my blind faith, clearly misplaced. Now I'm suspicious of everything I'm told by my doc because I can't 'unknow' what I now know. And I'm not alone. This is medicine's real crisis and it's why Colleges and governments are desperately imposing controls on what doctors are allowed to say, think and prescribe- because we now distrust them and with that distrust, their power, prestige and control, evaporates. As it should.
A very touching paper by a physician, most of us would love to have as their doctor. That doctor patient relationship, simply no longer exists here in the UK. It was never really that great, now it simply doesn’t exist. Advocacy for a patient, all but gone. I can understand this man’s despair.
Dr Kommer, Now that you are retired, I hope you will join others and take up the sword for protecting the Doctor/patient relationship and help build a better health care system. We need it. We all (providers and patients) have become a number, a cost point in the huge machinery of giant medical groups that are more concerned with the bottom line.
If your health allows it, now is the time to use your voice and experience. You have nothing to lose and we have everything to gain. We need to fill the ranks with Providers that truly care about patients and the honorable "practice of medicine". We needed more doctors to speak up the last 2 1/2 years, but they were too afraid to pull on the chain of corporate medicine that is around their necks.
We need a major overhaul of the system, or a new decentralized independent system where the power lies in the doctor/patient relationship. The few that have stood up the last 2 1/2 years have paid dearly for their advocacy. They have been maligned, fired and had their licenses threatened in order to achieve their compliance and the Powers That Were have failed. They have informed and saved millions of lives at great personal risk and they have the support and gratitude of millions.
If other Providers are reading this, NOW is the time to join together and stand up. The profession as you know it is dying and future doctors will be nothing more than "order followers" that will look at approved treatments and write an approved prescription. There will be no art or practice of medicine. We are at a turning point in history and what will you (providers collectively) say 5, 10 years from now? , "I stood up. I gave it all I could", or "....................nothing. I chose a safe, ever shrinking prison. Medicine was different back then"
While I appreciate and commend Dr. Kommer on his compassionate insight and reflection on the decline of patient care due to the major failures that have occurred with the evolving health care system in the US over the past 20 years. he did not mention the most egregious elephant in the room and that is the dangerous experimental mRNA injections that continue to be promoted by the FDA, CDC, NIH, AMA and other medical organizations with no informed consent of the potential for serious adverse health effects and fatal injuries.
The problem is centralization. It started a couple of decades ago and reached a new predictable height when the Obama administration and congress implemented the Affordable Care Act. Rapidly the large providers (typically the local hospital(s)) took over the delivery of health care. Hospitals and large providers are run by committee. If you can envision the couple of people who know how to steer a committee to their desired result then you can envision where essentially as few as only one person can implement policies. It’s as if one or a very few people have the ability to basically flip a switch and that’s the new operating procedure for everyone. It’s called centralization folks and when history is written the centralization of treatment during the covid fiasco is going to be shown to have resulted in most of the deaths from a severe flu like disease. Good luck future generation(s), your gonna need it.
All I see is a doctor that has regrets about not speaking up. Unfortunately, I can say the same thing for every damn doctor and nurse and hospital administrator out there. NOT one of them STOOD UP and practiced PATIENT ADVOCATE!! You all let the husband die alone without his loving wife alongside of him to say goodbye, to give some comfort. You all withheld this common decency from all of the people. You all killed these people as much as the vaccine has hurt and killed the people, by not saying ENOUGH stop this now!!!. We have to change the protocol, because this is not working, let's try something else. NO, you all followed the narrative and obeyed bad orders and hid your head in the sand. NOW HIDE YOUR HEADS IN SHAME for what YOU ALL DID TO ALL THOSE PEOPLE!!!! Your voice is TOO LITTLE, TOO LATE!
As Dr. Kommer states, “Better late than never”. I grew to dislike HMOs starting about 25 years ago, more so as those damned tablets came between me and my “doctor” (or is that more accurately “Big Pharma rep”?). Also, I would dearly love to see legislation upending medical boards to only dealing with actual physician qualifications and not dictating what is or is not an acceptable protocol. That is between the physician and patient, not to be overseen by some bureaucrat that has no knowledge of the patient. Focus only on qualifications of the physician.
My personal thoughts.
It is always good for reflection, but we also need accountability.
I worked in health care my whole career. First working for a group of Dr’s offering seven primary services and had approximately 50 Dr’s in this practice. I started out as a file clerk/receptionist and then moved to a keyboard operator ( keying all the Dr’s services per patient, sent these cards to our Provincial Health Authority for payment. I remember back then as a young person, many of these Dr’s acted like they were ‘God’. If we couldn’t find a patient’s file ( which often it was in the Dr’s desk, or in their brief case, or at home), the patient would sit waiting as file clerks were yelled at, some crying because we couldn’t find the file. Sometimes it was misfiled ( not that often). I remember seeing lab reports where it showed a person had cancer, but the wrong person was told they had cancer. Example: there was two Adam Smith’s. No one was held accountable. I then moved on to work in Public Health, becoming a CPA then working for our Provincial Government. ( Now retired).
So during my 35 year career I was able to see the whole picture of our health care system.
Our Health Care Systems worldwide need to be taken down and built back.
Health Care has become political. Dr’s donate to the political party they like to get the health policies they wish, plus the funding they want.
The reason why we have health care is forgotten. It should be all about the patient.
In the airline business they have ‘Cockpit Resource Management’, we need to have that in Health Care.
Dr’s need to pay their staff better and respect them. They could hire Nurse Practitioners. Many of them don’t want to, as that takes away from their net income. They need to hire business people to manage their businesses. They need to have someone in their organization that reviews all new public health mandates and ‘red flags’ issues to Dr’s.
I also remember as a 5 year old child, loosing my baby brother as the Dr’s gave him the wrong blood transfusion.
As a society we need to become our own ‘Dr’s, doing lots of research and holding Dr’s and other Health Care Practitioners accountable. We need to demand that.
We all need to do that with our Government’s ( all parties), our education systems also.
I’m not stating that all Healthcare Professionals , Politicians, Educators are bad. I am saying that many of our ‘systems’ are.
I appreciate this post very much. Some doctors are suffering with the decisions they made because they were told to do so or lose their jobs. I’m a clinician. I see a young doc who cries in my office every session. He pulls himself together before he leaves and thanks me for sitting with him. It’s not right was was done. It’s just not right.
I worked in a hospital twice from September 2020 to present. I became friends with one of the hospitalists in our small rural facility. He had absolutely no power to effect any change except to his growing reputation as a troublemaker. He realized soon that he was there to be the licensed fall-guy if something tragic happens and nothing more. Did he get anything changed? Nope. Admin and his mRNA-loving colleagues removed him from committees, from discussion groups, and the message sent was enough that he removed himself from a facility that needs him very much. A doctor is in a tough spot. Do they speak up and become a target only to lose their license and unable to see any patients? Or do they keep quiet, see all the patients they possibly can, and work within the f'ed up system they had no hand in creating. Once a license is revoked, a doctor is truly worthless to the patients who need him/her. I, for one, will not judge. Will Dr Kommer succeed? I am pessimistic but I applaud that he is now trying to do something.
As I understand it Pharma now owns the data from their clinical trials of drugs and vaccines and hardly any of that data is released to doctors and the public so doctors are completely ignorant as to the safety and efficacy of pharma's products. Would appreciate any feedback from anyone having more knowledge about this.
You know, I really don’t care about his feelings or those who never spoke out against these injections. More so I feel very angry at the entire health industry.
When I was a child doctors came to your home. As an Italian American child in Brooklyn in the 1950’s 1960’s our brownstone,owned by my grandparents, we lived on the second floor and my aunt and her family on the third floor. Whenever our Doctor who spoke Sicilian dialect came to my house for measles mumps or chicken pox (no vaccines then) he was accompanied upstairs by my grandparents who would speak to him about various ailments and he would comfort them with kind words and maybe a prescription.
He would eventually get to see me or my brother. We got a prescription and would feel immediately better. We knew when we saw his little black leather doctors bag we would get excellent care and a lollipop ☺️No insurance forms because we had no insurance and the visit was cash $25 and my grandparents conversations was free.
The reason I brought up home visits is because the doctors at that time got to connect personally with an entire extended family. Now, we’ll I don’t have to tell you because you know,
doctors are mostly in it for the money and protection by corporate medicine firms whom in return expect doctors to follow their rules and all patient doctor relationships ended. The corporate rules:
always refer patients whenever possible. (That way we can keep the patient on a string and collect insurances) inferred Of course. if your smart you assess their “diagnosis “ and make up your own mind.....after all ITS YOUR LIFE.
So my advice is take care of your own health to avoid doctors and only go to one when absolutely necessary to avoid death or blindness.
Maimonides always said stay away from doctors. Eat well but not too much,keep your bowels moving, avoid dangerous activities or places and keep a good disposition and sleep well. He gave diets to keep one healthy too. He was one of the first physicians, in the 13th century!
So since the human body is the same as it was then I think his advice still stands.
So much for corporate medicine and their masking rules, coldness and generally since Covid ,....just raking in the money over YOUR DEAD BODY in many... too many cases
One wonders how many other MDs (and others in the HCW ranks) will be experiencing a massive wave of regret and 'mea culpa' self-recrimination if/when they too come to the inescapable realization that they were complicit in the take down & break down of not only the medical establishment but of society and humanity as a whole as well. They all made choices, whether consciously or not, even if under duress. That "better late than never" BS trope does not cut it, sorry doc. Too little too late is more like it, but if it helps you sleep at night, well then so be it... Sucks to be you though <smh>
Medicine has been infected with the disease of beaurocracy and has fallen beholden to the agencies that are under the control of big pharma. It’s been a slow steady train wreck.
But, in defense of those trying to practice medicine against the beast that’s been created, the average citizens have to take back their power by taking control of their health. Most chronic diseases are the result of decades of diet and lifestyle choices and doctors cannot fix this for us. It’s our power, our responsibility and our opportunity to be able to walk away from such a corrupted system. We need a medical system for emergencies and such but we really can leaves most of the rest of it behind if we choose to.
His mea culpa is a little late after the unconscionable damage to his fellow man has already been done. He can still try to redeem himself - he obviously still has his licence- not like so many doctors who have been censored
.