This piece was originally published on my Substack on November 4, 2024. If you’d like to follow my writing there, you can find me at mineralshaman.substack.com.

There’s a curious trend running through mainstream media right now. Former medical doctors are having their awakening moments. They write bestselling books about metabolic health, they speak before Congress, they become the new authorities on alternative health. The masses eat it up. Brave physicians who finally saw the light, now out spreading the gospel of real health.

Forgive me if I’m not impressed.

I’m glad these conversations are reaching the mainstream. That part is good. But there’s something strange about calling these doctors revolutionary when they are only now discovering what a lot of us figured out decades ago.

Take me back to 1995. I was fifteen, reading about hunter gatherers and Neanderthals while my school was still handing out the USDA food pyramid. Even then it was clear to me that our entire understanding of diet rested on a misunderstanding. That wasn’t a revelation. It was obvious to anyone willing to look past the accepted story.

The skepticism stuck. I considered medical school at several points along the way. But the more I read actual curricula and talked with practicing physicians, the more the picture came into focus. Medical school wasn’t teaching health. It was teaching symptom management built on a flawed foundation.

That’s the part I keep coming back to with the newly awakened. These are people who looked at that education system and thought, yes, this is where I’ll learn about health. They spent years inside the paradigm, practicing within its limits, before finally noticing the limits.

Western medicine has its place. If I’m in a car accident, take me to a trauma center. If I need surgery, give me a skilled surgeon. But for chronic illness, for any real understanding of what health actually is, the system has nothing.

It doesn’t want to understand diet. It isn’t curious about environmental toxins. It has no framework for the emotional and psychological weight people carry into disease. It was never designed to investigate root causes. It was designed to manage symptoms and move product.

So when these doctors get celebrated as health revolutionaries, I have a question. Where was that discernment when they signed up? Why should I trust the judgment of someone who couldn’t see the flaws in the system they were about to spend a decade inside?

What they’re sharing isn’t wisdom from medical school. It’s insight they picked up in spite of medical school. They’re using the MD after their name to legitimize knowledge that lives entirely outside of it, and often in direct opposition to it.

And that’s the trap. Every time we look to a physician as the final word on health, we prop up the same structure that created the problem. We keep insisting that real knowledge has to arrive with credentials attached, even when those credentials certify an education in disease management rather than health.

None of this information is new. Processed food, metabolic dysfunction, inflammation as a driver of disease. These are things many of us have understood and lived by for a long time, back when the establishment was still pushing low fat diets and statins.

So I’ll take the growing awareness. I’m not going to pretend it isn’t progress. But I keep seeing these awakened doctors as a symptom of the same deference that got us here, and it makes me wonder how much has really changed.

Their degree isn’t the reason to listen. Whatever let them see past it is. And I’d still rather hear from the people who saw through it from the start.