Insiders Admit What Your Doctor Never Will: Modern Medicine Is a Fraud

It’s worse than you think.

In a sane world, widespread fraud, rampant conflicts of interest, the corrupt peer review system, and the replication crisis would be enough to convince anyone that medical science is fundamentally untrustworthy.

But most people would rather let perceived experts dictate their beliefs—especially in medicine, where appeals to authority routinely crowd out independent judgment.

This article is for them.

The emperor admits he has no clothes

What follows is a compilation of damning admissions from some of the most authoritative figures in medical science—top editors of the world’s most influential medical journals: The Lancet, The New England Journal of Medicine, The BMJ, JAMA, and more.

Short of study authors confessing outright fraud in their own work, these are the most credible admissions you’ll ever hear.

Your doctor cannot be trusted

Nearly everything doctors do—what they learn in medical school, what guidelines they follow, what drugs they prescribe, what procedures they perform—is based on research published in medical journals. The entire medical system is downstream from that literature. And doctors don’t verify this research themselves. They simply trust it.

But here you have the editors-in-chief of the world’s most prestigious medical journals unequivocally admitting that the journals are corrupt and the research cannot be trusted.

Blind deference to the presumed expertise of doctors isn’t just willful ignorance—it’s profoundly self-destructive, if not outright suicidal.

The admissions

Marcia Angell is the former editor-in-chief of The New England Journal of Medicine, where she served on the editorial staff from 1979 to 2000. She’s also a physician and Senior Lecturer in Global Health and Social Medicine at Harvard Medical School.

The New York Review of Books, “Drug Companies & Doctors: A Story of Corruption” (15 January 2009)

Richard Horton has been editor-in-chief of The Lancet since 1995. He’s also a physician and honorary professor at the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine, University College London, and the University of Oslo.

The Lancet, “What is medicine’s 5 sigma?” (11 April 2015)

The Medical Journal of Australia, “Genetically modified food: Consternation, confusion, and crack-up” (1 February 2000)

The New York Review of Books, “The Dawn of McScience” (11 March 2004)

Arnold Relman was editor-in-chief of The New England Journal of Medicine from 1977 to 1991. He was also a physician and professor of medicine and social medicine at Harvard Medical School and served as president of the American Federation for Clinical Research, the American Society for Clinical Investigation, and the Association of American Physicians.

BMJ, “Who pays for the pizza? Redefining the relationships between doctors and drug companies. 1: Entanglement” (31 May 2003)

Jerome Kassirer was editor-in-chief of The New England Journal of Medicine from 1991 to 1999. He’s also a physician, Distinguished Professor at Tufts University School of Medicine, former Lecturer in Medicine at Harvard Medical School, and Master of the American College of Physicians.

Jerome Kassirer, On the Take: How Medicine’s Complicity with Big Business Can Endanger Your Health (18 October 2004)

Medscape General Medicine, “Physicians on the Take” (20 March 2006)