Update about my situation in medical school, and about my writing on this platform

I have had a challenging life, the details of which I will not discuss here; perhaps someday. But to get to the point where I am today, I believe that I had to work harder than most other people to get to the same point. In my 20s, I learned to stop feeling sorry for that fact and embrace my uniqueness. I also learned to stop seeing myself as a victim, relying on my own efforts and hard work to get me where I wanted to go. I have chosen to transform my struggles into an inward resilience and depth; in that respect, my struggles have been a blessing.

I have also been enormously blessed by what we might call nature. I can think clearly, and I can write. People who take the time to converse with me in depth understand that I am a deep and intensely thoughtful person. This has won me champions who have helped me along my path, without whom I would not have made it here.

This is one of my biggest complaints about wokeness: its biggest proponents are my colleagues, who, like myself, are often incredibly privileged people. And yet, especially among people at elite institutions, they are also somehow the same people who complain about “life difficulties” and their “intersectional oppression”. These very same people have advantages that leave me reeling.

Quite apart from elites, how can any of us who are among the top 0.00000001% of wealthiest humans in history (virtually every single American alive, including the “poor”), who have amenities that would put kings to shame just a century ago, complain? I am reminded of a writer, whose name I cannot summon to my memory at just this moment, who commented that those who embraced revolutionary Marxism were usually not those from the hard-scrabble working classes (who often took pride in their lives), but bourgeois, privileged individuals who found in Marxism a solution to their privileged alienation.

I have never made excuses for myself. I have taken responsibility for my life. With that responsibility, I became a far happier person than I was when I blamed anything I struggled with on anyone else. I am responsible for my fate.

I never took any day or anything I had for granted, since I knew that life is precarious, and that accolades from peers could be deceptive and lead us to error. History is rife with examples of people who, widely lauded by their contemporaries, have done great harm to others. I have made my own way, trying to ignore what other people have said about me, or what other people have said is good or bad, and instead do what my conscience and careful reflection have told me is right. I work hard everyday to improve myself and try to live a thoughtful, meaningful life. As a hobby, I am relatively well-read, because I have always believed that only with knowledge and the understanding of those who came before me, can I make the choices that lead toward what we call the well-lived life.

Despite the challenges that I have faced in the past, the past eight months since my dismissal from medical school have been the most challenging of my life. It has been next to impossible for me to reconcile my old view of myself and the world with what took place. What has made this past eight months so difficult is that I, now in my thirties, see the world with such clarity, have faced such a setback.

I thought I had life “figured out”, but this was not the case. Perhaps this is because what “life” is and what “life in medicine” is are two different things. And perhaps I paid a heavy, irrevocable price for that naivete.

To say that I was treated unfairly is an understatement. I have faced misunderstandings between myself and others in the past, but these could ordinarily be worked through. With patience, I could progress in my own way, according to my own values, my own standards, which I know are very high ones; my individuality would be respected, because others knew I was authentic, that I had integrity, that I worked hard, that I believed in doing good for others with all my heart, and that I would be flexible to follow any rules that I needed to follow to progress. I’m not rigid. I listen closely. I understand that hierarchies exist. And I can make myself compatible with them, despite having my own ideas. I never, for instance, ever contradicted an attending when it came to patient care. Nor did I loudly air my own views. I was in medical school to learn from people who knew what they were doing.

But I have never been targeted by a malicious campaign of slander, as I have been recently. And to the degree that others might not have liked me at times in the past, I have always had people who have been able to go to bat for me and tell others the kind of person that I really am, to speak for my strengths and my integrity. But no matter my efforts to convey myself clearly, it feels as if everything about me was intentionally misinterpreted. Nobody who might have wanted to advocate for me could successfully do so. Did they try? What happened?

For the first time, I know being at the end of a witch hunt feels like. I can imagine what people who, in less civilized times (and perhaps we are in such times), must have felt when they were persecuted and maligned. I have never experienced such mistreatment in my life at the hands of people I trusted. It has broken my heart.

To say that medicine was a “dream” was not quite right. Medicine was my life, my identity, my being. Unless something changes, everything that I am has been taken away. And for what reason? No matter how I might mull over that question in my mind, I cannot find a valid one. No interpretation that I might posit can justify the decision that was made. I can see all the potential perspectives. But the ones that say I am unfit to be a physician are simply wrong. There must either be a misunderstanding, or there must be dark forces at play. I believe it is a bit of both: such dark forces have led to a misunderstanding. Dark forces lock that misunderstanding into people’s minds. It is a terrifying thought that such dark forces are alive and well in such an apparently otherwise civilized time.

Nothing I have said has been radical. I never embraced fringe science. I was open to the problems with the evidence base for the Covid vaccines—while also advocating for them as the beneficial treatment that they were in many populations. I have simply acted as a scientist in the same way I always have. I was once followed, championed by the biggest accounts on #MedTwitter for debunking nutrition and health quacks. But once I turned the same critical perspective to Covid policy, those same accounts would daily contact my school in an effort to get me expelled. Within a year, I lost my career.

I haven’t changed. But it feels that perhaps I never understood the game I was playing in the first place.

We must make meaning of our lives as they present themselves to us. That is especially true since I have children. Right now, I feel that my life is over, but I have children who I love and who rely on me. So I must extract some meaning from this darkness, for their sake, if not for mine. But in order to extract that meaning, I must also make that meaning mine. I must find a meaning of life that I can live with, so that I can continue on this journey with and for them.

I wanted to be a physician because I wanted to help the downtrodden, the vulnerable, the hurt, those who needed help the most. I wanted to be a doctor because healing wounds and fixing the world, one person at a time, was a kind of justice that I could do with my own hands and be proud of. The sick truly are those who have the least in our society—kings though we may all be by historical standards, illness and death humbles us all. It is the ultimate form of helplessness and vulnerability, next to which every category of vulnerability, especially in these privileged times, pales in comparison. Medicine was my escape from politics, for exactly this reason. The sick, we can be certain, indisputably need our help the most.

A thought that gives me some hope is that, out of these ashes, I can still do that same thing. If I’m not going to be a doctor, I can fight for those who are weak, who have nothing, who are vulnerable. I can turn my own setback into a source of a new battle for justice. One of my acquaintances has said to me that I sound “woke”. In a way, I am woke now. Quite the irony. But my wokeness won’t be on behalf of artificial categories that I am told I must obey unquestioningly as if by some orthodoxy. They won’t be immovable categories that have ossified into giant, unthinking bureaucratic structures that are unanswerable to anyone.

I won’t fight for justice as a way for me to advance a career. I will fight for it, as I have always fought for justice, as a way to find meaning in a world that can never be completely healed, but on which we can still make an impact, one person, one day at a time. And in that way, I can find a way to live in this world.

Right now I am exploring legal options. God willing, I will be able to resolve some of this informally. But if that fails, well, yes, legal options. I pray that I am able to get the legal help that I need, and that the courts are amenable.

But if I am not, there will have to emerge a new ‘me’. One who has lost everything, but who will fight on behalf of truth and justice to defend others from a similar loss. I don’t have the resources to side by the sidelines to do otherwise. One way or another, I must enter the fight.

We must be able to discuss things in our society that are important to our society’s future—and to the future of our patients. I will still fight for my patients, but in a different way. Not as a physician who advocates for and serves them. But as a scientist who advocates for truth—without which our patients and the public cannot best be healed. If we cannot speak, if we are silenced by the dark forces that swirl in our society, then truth will be stifled and destroyed—and we won’t even know it, our minds so clouded by that darkness.

So right now, I’m taking a short break to work on ideas related to free speech, cancelation, harassment, censorship, science, and so forth. And to plot my next moves. Please be patient. In the best way I can see it, my fight for myself is a fight for the world. We won’t always agree, but we will find the truth—which is what the world needs—in that disagreement.