Severe pelvic pain. Family history that made my concern not just MRI-level, but exploratory-surgery-level. OB-GYN after OB-GYN: dismissed, dismissed, dismissed. Learn to deal with it.
I’m not just a patient. I’m a board-certified internist, an integrative medicine physician, and a DPC doctor who specializes in women’s health. Yet my MRI was refused. Not by AI. By an actual physician—I tracked down the name.
Finally, desperate, I broke my own rule of not seeing male OB-GYNs. He didn’t dismiss me. He saw my symptoms line up with real findings on imaging. And the bitter truth? If he hadn’t witnessed it himself, he might have dismissed me too.
This is where distrust grows—not out of paranoia, but from being told “you’re fine” when you’re not, or slammed against the walls built by insurance, corporations, and sometimes colleagues.
The System: Accelerant on a Dumpster Fire
The system isn’t just a dumpster fire. It’s a dumpster fire with accelerant poured on it by “Make America Healthy Again” influencers peddling powders and pseudoscience while physicians are quietly pushed out of jobs. Patients see that and wonder: who do I trust?
Insurance dictates what will be covered. We can order whatever we want, but coverage is another story. Meanwhile, patients sit in five-minute slots—seven if we’re lucky.
Doctors are not the system. But the translation has become: doctors are the system. Because when the bill arrives, patients don’t call their insurer—they call us. We pick up the phone. And they demand to know why “we” charged them. The truth? That bill is the negotiated price between insurer and hospital system. But to the patient, it’s our name at the top.
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Why We Gravitate to Groups
Being on call means triaging, improvising, keeping people alive, and then collapsing—if we even get to collapse. More often, we go home to families, errands, solitude, then turn around and do it again.
Maybe that’s why we gravitate toward Facebook groups. We gather for memes, for fur babies, for parenthood or not, for politics or not, for being single, partnered, religious, irreligious. And for DPC, where many of us went to strip away the absurdity of insurance.
I and many colleagues chose DPC to step off the hamster wheel. We said: no more. Let’s redirect what we save toward prevention and catastrophic care. Let’s remove the absurd layers of coding and reimbursement roulette.
Patients sometimes ask, “How do I know you’re not bought by Big Pharma?” The truth? We never were. Maybe we were romanced by free pens. Half the time, we just swiped a pen off a colleague’s desk because we didn’t have one. Pens didn’t buy us. Pharma didn’t buy us. Insurance and corporate systems have shackled us.
When Support Looks Like a Cult (Or Does It?)
Recently, an anonymous physician published “When Support Starts to Look Like a Cult”. She described her view of a women’s doctors’ group as an echo chamber where dissent wasn’t tolerated, especially around a post about the polarizing influencer Charlie Kirk and his commentary.
But anonymity itself begs questions. Why stay faceless? What’s the motive? Was it fear of backlash, or a way to lob grenades without accountability?
And let’s be clear: this was her experience. Her metabolized truth. That doesn’t make it universal. I’ve seen groups implode under groupthink. I’ve seen others splinter, feistier and more divisive by design. But the risk is the same: when we turn our words inward, we don’t just lose patient trust, we lose trust in each other.
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Standing Firm
In response, Dr. Dana Corriel, founder of SoMeDocs, wrote “Standing Alone, Standing Firm”. Her point was strong because it’s true: if we burn down the platforms that amplify us, our voices vanish.
Meanwhile, the irony is that some of the very groups being defended charge thousands of dollars to join. That’s autonomy. You can pay if you want. But I choose to put my money into SoMeDocs, which charges only a modest fee, yet delivers real value: SEO power, a platform for my authentic voice, opportunities to build and sell courses, and resources that actually support physicians rather than exploit them. It’s an expanding, physician-supportive tool.
This was never about religion or race, though those distractions were dragged in. It was about politics. About influencers. About how society shifts, and how fear fuels division.
And yet, patient care has always demanded that we set aside our differences when collaborating. Now, society demands the same: doctors must unite, because the stakes are bigger than any Facebook fight.
If We Collapse, We Get Replaced
If we let venom collapse platforms like SoMeDocs, we don’t just lose microphones. We get drowned out by louder, misinformed voices. Influencers with hashtags. Politicians with slogans. Algorithms with profit margins.
The system is already firing physicians, consolidating practices, shrinking coverage, ballooning medical debt. Patients already distrust us. If we keep tearing each other down, we accelerate our own extinction. And the system won’t mourn us. It will replace us.
Stand United
Distrust is real. I’ve lived it – dismissed as a patient by my own profession. Patients live it daily in denials, bills, five-minute visits. But distrust doesn’t have to define us.
Doctors are not the system. We never were. The system is failing us all. And the only way forward is together—firm, loud, and unwilling to turn our weapons inward.
Because if we don’t stand united, we won’t just lose trust. We’ll lose medicine itself.
This was never about religion or race, though those distractions were dragged in. It was about politics. About influencers. About how society shifts, and how fear fuels division.
