You have a Drug Dealer, Not a Doctor

A deliberately blunt line about prescribing

Eleven seconds, and the line is intentionally provocative: Chris Brandlin's shorthand for what he sees as a system that reaches for a prescription pad before it reaches for anything else.

Taken literally the phrase is unfair to physicians, and it is worth saying so directly. Doctors are not drug dealers. The substantive version of the argument — which he makes at length elsewhere — is structural: appointment lengths are short, reimbursement rewards billable interventions over dietary and lifestyle counselling, and prevention is difficult to code for. Those pressures shape prescribing patterns regardless of any individual clinician's judgement or intent.

Nothing here is a reason to stop or change a medication. If a prescription concerns you, that is a conversation to have with the prescriber, not a decision to make after an eleven-second video. Stopping some medications abruptly is genuinely dangerous.

The fuller and fairer version of this argument: prevention over prescription, how little nutrition training medical school requires, and the sick-care system.

More at healthcare reform and public health policy.

Nothing here is medical advice.