Who Are "They"?
Staring too long in the Mirror of Erised is bad for your health.
Every year I re-read the entire Harry Potter series. I love to get lost in the halls of Hogwarts School of Witchcraft and Wizardry. I am delighted to rediscover the painting of the ticklish pear. And Dobby’s death brings a tear to my eye every dang time.
One storyline that never fails to captivate me is Harry’s discovery of the Mirror of Erised. Resting in an abandoned Hogwarts classroom, this is no ordinary piece of furniture. In the mirror, Harry sees not just his reflection, but his dead parents standing beside him. Harry becomes enamored with mirror, spending hours staring into the version of reality that he desperately wants to be true.
Dumbledore confronts Harry one evening. The wise old wizard explains that the Mirror of Erised “shows us nothing more or less than the deepest, most desperate desires of our hearts…This mirror will give us neither knowledge nor truth. Men have wasted away before it, entranced by what they have seen, or been driven mad, not knowing if what it shows is real or even possible.”
I thought about the mirror when I read a Note posted by a cancer survivor on Substack. The Note preceded a video of a woman explaining “They’ll prescribe you pills before asking about your lifestyle. Cut you open before suggesting breathwork, sleep or sunlight.” And so on. The survivor commented: “Why is this (unfortunately most often!) the case in todays world with all of the knowledge that we have at our fingertips.”
Another Note, which garnered over 11,000 likes, stated “They buried hormone therapy for 20 years over flawed studies…How many women suffered in silence because medicine was scared of our hormones?”
A rising voice in the Substack “Health Politics” category with 8K followers wrote in a recent post “Do you remember how we tiptoed right into being (essentially) dependent on our cell phones? I’m pretty sure they knew most people would decline an actual chip.”
To quote an excellent song by Tim McGraw, who are they?
In this chaotic world where people who do everything right still get sick and science progresses at a frustratingly slow pace, storytellers offer comfort to our desperate minds: The answers are out there. “They” are just hiding them.
“They” is a lazy pronoun used by people who want you, when standing in front of the Mirror of Erised, to see clear answers. They, on the other hand, see themselves surrounded by bags of your hard-earned money and hope.
I’ve been in medicine for over 20 years. I have worked at or had friends who have worked/trained/led every major medical system in the US and quite a few across the world. I have never been invited to, heard about, even sensed a whisper regarding a large-scale coordinated campaign by doctors to keep information from our patients. Case in point, our friends and family members die of the same diseases everyone else does.
I also know these claims are false because they crumble with minimal interrogation. Take the three Substack examples that I mentioned above.
Claim #1: “Doctors don’t want you to know about healthy living.”
I don’t know a single professional medical society that does not recommend a balanced diet, adequate sleep and exercise as part of a healthy lifestyle. For example, at this year’s largest meeting of oncologists in North America, one of the prestigious plenary sessions was reserved for a study on the benefit of a structured exercise program in colorectal cancer survivors.
Literally, the biggest stage in oncology was given to exercise. Not exactly hiding it under a bushel basket.
And this is just one example.
highlighted multiple studies that show the benefits of health behaviors. He wrote:Unlike other things that have been touted for long life such as resveratrol, high dose antioxidants, human growth hormone, and plasma from young people’s blood, these lifestyle interventions are cheap, mostly proven to help, and can’t be stuffed into a crappy pill for Huberman or Oz to sell us.
Claim #2: The medical community is conspiring to hide knowledge from you.
I assume Note #2 writer was referring to the Women’s Health Initiative (WHI). Started in 1991, the WHI was THE FIRST EVER series of trials to focus on major health issues in women. Diseases like cardiovascular disease, menopause, and osteoporosis had never been studied before. Let me repeat, these issues that impacted women’s health had NEVER BEEN STUDIED BEFORE IN WOMEN.
The WHI enrolled over 160,000 women, making it the largest prevention study of its kind in the United States. Over 2,400 papers have been published analyzing the data gained from the WHI.
An early WHI publication found that, unlike investigators hoped, hormone replacement therapy (HRT) did not prevent heart disease and in fact, increased the overall risk of breast cancer. Because HRT did not help heart disease and seemed to cause cancer, many women were taken off HRT and it was not recommended for many years. The costs, physicians reasoned, were not worth the benefits.
As one of the primary authors explains, the press release and original publication overstated the risk of breast cancer. By the time the authors realized this, however, the journals were printed and ready to be mailed. And thus, the cul-de-sac we were left in for 20 years.
With time and advancements in our understanding of HRT, this view has changed. The science evolved and our medical recommendations along with it. Did doctors overreact out of an abundance of caution over concerns about cancer? Absolutely. Was HRT “hidden” from women? I don’t think so.
According to the U.S. Health Resources and Services Administration 2024 report, the health care industry employees over 17 million people. And this number doesn’t include researchers, people working in the pharmaceutical industry and various other services. Healthcare is the largest employment sector in the United States.
Is it possible to keep a secret even among a couple dozen people? Let alone 17 million people who would have to make the decision to let their loved ones suffer so whatever secret remained hidden?
Claim #3: They want to microchip you.
This might in fact be true. At a recent hearing, Secretary of Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy, Jr testified that his vision was for every American to wear a portable health monitoring device.
I assume the Secretary believes that knowledge is the barrier to healthy living. This is incorrect. In his privilege, he neglects the health barriers that normal people (including cancer survivors) face: illness, fatigue, lack of insurance coverage, finances, food deserts, redlined neighborhoods, public policy failures and the impact of the transportation lobbyists. Our society is not structured to support healthy living, a fact even the fanciest FitBit won’t change.
Eliott San of
wrote about the challenges faced by cancer survivors whose doctors tell them to exercise:If exercise is as good as a drug then let’s treat it like one and build it into those EOB’s. Let’s Rx the hell out of exercise with a year full of refills. Generic brand me 12 months of Gold’s Gym. Ship me a home IV pole and a Peloton. Let’s get all these TikTok trainers paired up with patients and reimbursed by Medicare. If it really is as good as a drug, let’s treat it like one. Let’s build the support systems and infrastructure so that cancer patients don’t look at that statistic as yet another burden of cost and time — both of which are at a premium for those who are sick.
*Insert massive applause sounds here*
As for microchips, our fellow citizens are already walking this earth with government approved metal devices in their bodies. Millions of people, for example, are alive today because of metal aneurysm clips in their brains which prevented them from dying or being seriously disabled by an intracerebral hemorrhage.
Millions more have pacemakers which are remotely monitored by their cardiologist and the device manufacturer. For awhile, I recommended men have literal GPS devices called Calypso Beacons inserted in their prostates to guide their radiation treatments.
Further, in a 2022 study, the NIH estimated that over a million people have undergone placement of cochlear implants. I dare anyone not to cry watching videos of babies hearing their mother’s voices for the first time with the help of this government approved “microchip.”
So, tell me again, which of these chips we are supposed to decline, and which are we supposed to accept? Which will save our lives, and which will lead to government control? It’s hard to keep track…
By using the pronoun “they,” writers and influencers create a nebulous enemy. A specific person or organization is not named so our mind wonders what this unknown (i.e. scary) group is up to. This is another sign that information is not on the up and up. Show me the specific person who hid this information or wanted it hidden from patients. How exactly was the “hiding” organized and conspiracy to conceal enacted?
Why do influencers omit these critical details? Because they are lying to you. They stand next to you in front of the Mirror of Erised (Erised is “desire” spelled backwards, btw) and show you what you really want to see - a definitive answer. The complexity of illness distilled to a simple explanation.
It is easy to become addicted to these mirages. To spend hours entranced by the comfort that conspiracy thinking provides But as Dumbledore said, this provides you with neither truth, nor wisdom. Like Harry, your only hope is to turn away.
On my mind…
I agree that the healthcare system is not conspiring against our cancer survivors but there is substantial harm being done through the lack of education for all individuals touched by cancer about the benefits of such lifestyle interventions such as exercise, nutrition (especially promoting diversity of gut microbiome), stress management, optimizing sleep and more. Why are health care practitioners not given the appropriate time to educate their patients and systems ignore the need to link "all" patients to navigators, integrative/lifestyle programs, exercise resources and more? Simply because there is no money to be made in these services. In the process individuals live the real consequences as they are "cared" for in our clinics. Systems will not change until we have a payment model (value based care) or policies that require this type of care. What can be done right now? We need to train patients how to advocate effectively for the type of care that they deserve. Stacy, thanks for always advocating for survivors (those living with and beyond cancer) and making their voices louder.
Thanks for the shoutout Stacy. Like so many things that produce the proverbial "They", illness is often a loss of control that sends people searching for answers. Everyone is welcome to return with whatever answers they find, but that does not necessarily mean that those answers are true. I for one would not be here if I did not trust the medical system.
As for the social media mavericks offering silly truisms, I can just imagine them counting their impending likes before really thinking through, "Cut you open before suggesting breathwork, sleep or sunlight." My truism for these people is something like: "They'll make you do seventeen coffee enemas before thinking about checking your bloodwork."