As a veterinarian, I am a strong believer in the practice of medicine and its ability to improve peoples’ lives. You won’t catch me writing conspiratorial rants about how modern medicine and pharma is a scam or GOOP-style articles about how all we need to be healthy is just to take herbs or essential oils or focus our chakras or whatever nonsense. The vast majority of doctors, dentists, veterinarians, and other health professionals work extremely hard and want the best for their patients, and I believe most are not primarily motivated by money (clearly it plays some role, your plumber doesn’t work for free because he loves sewage!)
That said, it is unfortunately true that some people and animals have bad outcomes that could have been prevented. Sometimes this is an issue of knowledge gaps or incompetence. Rarely, it is from bad actors with malicious intent (see the end of this article). But more commonly, it is because our healthcare systems are com…
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