A Tough Pill to Swallow about Chronic Illness

Life is complicated, but RFK Junior is still a quack.

Here’s something you may not know: you can simultaneously hold two thoughts that are both true but which seem to contradict each other.

You can realize the truth that chronically ill people have been abused, neglected and gaslit by doctors, and that some doctors can be worse than useless when faced with a tricky chronic illness. In fact, many of us are suffering from iatrogenesis, an illness or injury CAUSED by mistaken medical care, in addition to whatever was wrong with us in the first place. We are, at minimum, traumatized. That’s real.

And, at the same time you realize that fact, you can also realize that RFK Junior and the iatrophobic “wellness medicine” community are dangerous quacks.

Those are both true statements.

Chronically ill people already know that both of those things are true. We live in this paradox every day. We know we need medical help. We go to the doctor, the real doctor with “MD” after their name. And as we do it, we’re terrified, because we realize that we’re taking our lives in our hands. We remember all the times the doctor was wrong, and we got sicker than ever, and then he blamed us for being sick. That is our everyday state. We never quite get used to it, but that’s our normal.

We are also terrified of “wellness medicine” fanatics, because such people are dangerous. We’ve all felt our hearts race as we were told “Americans are overmedicated. You need to get off all of those pills and just go on a special diet.” We’ve all been conned or bullied or abused by well-meaning people who didn’t understand how this or that herbal tincture would interfere with our meds, or who didn’t see the reason that this or that exercise regimen would make things worse. More than a few chronically ill people, particularly children or those so disabled they have a caregiver making choices for them, have been murdered by “wellness medicine.” Wellness medicine is dangerous. We know this.

No, the two aren’t equal and we shouldn’t talk about them as if they are. Doctors actually go to school to learn real science, while wellness medicine is mostly vibes. There’s a lot of legal oversight governing what doctors do, while wellness practitioners can do what they please. But most chronically ill people use a little of both, and realize that both could kill us.

We look into remedies that may or may not work. We read the ingredients. We figure out which supplements and herbal tonics have some research behind them that looks promising. We spend way too much money and we swallow the nasty tincture to see what happens. Sometimes it helps. I’ve been made severely ill by some herbal concoctions and I’ve been helped quite a bit by others.

We research every bite that goes into our mouths and find food plans that work. Personally, I have to stay in ketosis about 360 days a year or I’ll be much sicker. I’ve had vegans pooh-pooh me and act like I was being ridiculous when I told them that pea protein and tofu made me dizzy. And, on the other hand, I know other chronically ill people who have to go scrupulously vegan to keep from being sick all the time, and they cringe when someone lectures them about the benefits of the Jordan Peterson carnivore diet. Everybody has our own eccentric diet because every chronic illness is different. And yes, while we’re doing this, we worry that maybe we just have an eating disorder. In fact, some of us do develop eating disorders because the food we were eating and told was healthy made us sick, and that’s traumatic.

We go to the hospital for our testing and cringe as the antiseptic smell gives us flashbacks. We smile politely and crack jokes so the nurses will think we’re the “easy” kind of patient, because we know they’ll be annoyed at us if we show how afraid we are. We flinch as the phlebotomist takes another vial of our blood. We read the whole blood test result ourselves in the patient portal, and Google things that don’t make sense, and confront the doctor armed with a list of concerns he probably hasn’t thought of, and then we listen to him and get the prescription and worry all night about whether we should swallow that pill. And then we take it anyway.

Here’s something you need to know: doctors are awful, the whole system needs drastic reform, and chronically ill people suffer horribly because the world is the way that it is.

Here’s something else you need to know: modern medicine is necessary, vaccines save lives, pasteurization is good, germs are bad. You cannot cure chronic illness by bullying people about seed oils or refined sugars.

Here’s another fact: we cannot improve a bad situation by ignoring one facet of a complicated problem.

There is a reason that so many people think RFK Junior and his nutty ideas sound great. They’re reacting to a real situation, and they’re doing it in a dangerous and foolish way. Listening to chronically ill people who have been through this will make you deeply uncomfortable, but you’ll be more likely to understand what’s happening and not believe the next quack who comes along if you do.

That’s a tough pill to swallow, but it’s true anyway.