Robert Whitfield MD discusses why the medical community avoids certain conversations and labels topics taboo. He points to money and politics as drivers of resistance, and argues that curiosity-driven questioning from clinicians is being shut down by both cultural and structural barriers.
But if, you know, if we would rewind, you and I, 150 years ago, many of the things you're doing right now wouldn't even be possible. Right. The advances that, I mean, maybe they'd be possible, but not to nearly the success rate that you have, right? Yeah. And not even talking about managing pain anyways. This all leads me to say, why do you think someone like yourself, other physicians, when they start to kind of, when they discover something new or when they realize that something we thought to be true may not be true, or that maybe something we were doing is also maybe causing harm. Why is there so much pushback from the medical community to have these conversations? And I think we see this in so many other areas, but from a doctor's perspective, because Lauren and I, what we do for a living is we have conversations, we ask questions, we're curious, we want to know. And I can't tell you how many times on the show people say, oh, that's taboo, or you can't talk about this, or that's controversial. And to me, these are all just questions I don't really like. It doesn't compute to me why certain conversations are controversial. That's where the gray is, though. But my point is, and I know you've also faced this, why are so many conversations shut down so hard in the medical community? Money and politics?
