Medical groupthink & gagging of doctors

Like many other Australians, I was shocked at the recent footage of a highly respected Victorian doctor, whose private practice of some 30 years, was raided by ‘public health agents/police’, who boxed up and took away all his ‘private and confidential’ files.

According to some doctors I have spoken to recently, these sorts of ‘public health raids’ on doctors in private practice are not nearly as rare as you might think. It’s just that those other times, there may not have been someone there with an Iphone to film it happening or post it online.

Even pre-covid, doctors, especially those sole or family doctors still operating in private practice, are being slammed with more and more regulatory hurdles to jump over by government and its bloated bureaucracy.To enforce all these new regulations, rules, laws and reporting obligations, the government is using all the same sector-destroying tactics it is using on farmers – including ridiculous levels of reporting requirements, official oversight, surveillance and monitoring technologies, all backed up by regulatory ‘audits’ and ‘unannounced compliance inspections’.

Because of all the secrecy that government and the health bodies are now imposing on doctors, most people don’t realise just how far the government has intruded itself into the intimacy of a doctor-patient relationship.

Today, Australia’s health sector is more tightly controlled, regulated and ‘muzzled’, than almost any other industry in the country. The ‘guidelines’ sent out to doctors by the regulatory tsar, Australian Health Practitioner Regulation Agency, uses manipulative, sly and coercive language, which is just flat out threatening in my book.

The guidelines warn doctors that if they give “health advice” or make statements which “contradict the best available scientific evidence” or seek to “undermine the national immunisation program”, they will be investigated and could face regulatory action. Doctors and nurses, are also being given verbal warnings from management and elsewhere, that they are NOT to talk to anyone about what they are seeing or hearing from patients in hospitals.

One nurse told me she was reprimanded when she asked a young man presenting at Emergency with heart palpitations and chest pain, whether or not he had received a vaccine-shot recently. Hauled upstairs, she was told in no uncertain terms that hospital policy is NOT to ask patients this, as it – get this – infringes patients right to privacy!!!

The upshot is that all our doctors and nurses now actively self-censoring everything they say to people, including friends. And none of this is being properly disclosed to patients – or the public. Right now, people are making decisions based on advice from their doctors, which they mistakenly believe has been given to them free all other ‘considerations’ or ‘conflict’, apart from a concern for their well-being. People need to know that, at least on some topics, this may not be the case.