Patients’ trust in doctors and hospitals declined sharply from 71.5% in April 2020 to 40.1% in January 2024, according to a 50-state survey study surveying nearly 450,000 U.S. adults.
Published July 31 in JAMA Network, the study suggests “the COVID-19 pandemic has been associated with a continuing decrease in trust in physicians and hospitals, which may necessitate strategies to rebuild that trust to achieve public health priorities.”
Authors Roy H. Perlis, M.D., M.Sc. et al. expressed their true concern, however, that “lower levels of trust were associated with lesser likelihood of pursuing vaccination,” an outcome that they argued creates “a public health imperative” of restoring public trust.
“Whether interventions to restore trust could increase compliance with vaccination and other positive health behaviors merits further investigation,” the authors wrote.
But nephrologist and internist Richard Amerling, M.D., tells CatholicVote that while the researchers’ conclusion about the COVID timeline is “hardly surprising,” the trust in doctors and hospitals has actually been deteriorating for decades:
“I think it’s been a steady decline over many years, because of so-called payment reforms that eventually led to doctors becoming employed, as opposed to being private business owners and running their own practice,” Amerling observed:
And, once you introduce outside players into this relationship, you always are compromising care in one way or another, or at least, you have the potential for real conflicts. If your employer says this patient must be discharged by a certain date and you don’t do it, well, you might be out of a job, right? So, things like that have been going on for a long time. The experience of patients in the hospital changed about 20 years ago. Before, they used to be followed by their private physician who saw them in their office and then would come in and see them in the hospital. At least 20 years ago, that started to go away in favor of having patients seen and followed by a hospitalist who doesn’t have a prior relationship with the patient and who’s a direct hospital employee. And I think people started to see that the alliances and allegiances were altered, once you introduce a third party – and this applies to payment as well. So, when insurance companies took over paying doctors directly, they became de facto employees of the insurance company.
Amerling is a former president of the Association of American Physicians and Surgeons (AAPS) who now serves as an advisory board member and co-chair of the education committee for The Body Healthcare. He notes that trust between doctors and patients suffered further with the introduction of “requirement of preauthorization” by health insurers.
Obamacare (the Affordable Care Act) served as the catalyst for the next step in the decline in trust between doctors and patients, Amerling said, adding that “computerization and the use of the electronic health record fundamentally destroyed the patient-physician relationship.”
“When you go to see a doctor, they’re tapping on a computer. They’re looking at the screen,” he explained:
The real function of the electronic health record was to permit doctors to bill at a higher level. If you documented various elements in the electronic record of physical exam problems, medication lists, various things, then you would be able to bill at a higher level. The electronic health record automated all that. So, instead of handwriting a unique note for each visit, which is what doctors used to do, you would set up your electronic health record, copy and paste from our previous visit, use the template, which was mostly boiler plate, a lot of stuff in the routine exams that doctors never really do.
Moving along to when COVID hit, Amerling said doctors were told by the World Health Organization and the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) that there was no treatment to be offered for those who had the virus.
“It was just palliative care: stay home, take Tylenol for fever, and call 911 if you can’t breathe,” he said. “This, to me, was the death knell for medicine. If you would go along with that, you’re not really a doctor”:
Doctors see their patients and help them – no matter what. And the fact that they were willing to give that up, I think, was wholesale abandonment of patients, which is profoundly unethical. But this was being recommended by the authorities, and, because doctors had been conditioned to just follow the authorities and go in lockstep through years of brainwashing with evidence-based medicine guidelines, they went along with it. And I think that was a huge betrayal, and patients don’t really get over that.
Hospitals, Amerling told CatholicVote, then “became killing fields, where you were not allowed to be seen by your family, separated physically from contact with your loved ones, which is arguably the most important aspect of healing. People were denied access to their family on their deathbeds.”
“This was the worst thing I’ve ever seen as an official practice, and I think this destroyed faith in hospitals,” he said. “Then, the administration of Remdesivir, the following of rigid protocols that were financially incentivized because of bonus payments – that literally killed patients.”
Amerling is now part of a group that is working to be a model for reforming medical education and practice, one that is separated from the pharmaceutical industry and aligned instead with “Hippocratic and religious efforts.”
He recommends doctors who treat patients in a naturopathic way, i.e., “give your body the nutrients that it needs, avoid the toxins that are everywhere in the processed food environment that we all live in, and allow your body to regain its natural health, because that’s what it does,” he told CatholicVote:
The body is constantly rebuilding billions of cells all the time, and so you literally are what you eat. So, give your body the right nutrients you’re going to need to rebuild a healthy body. Gradually, then, you replace all the diseased cells in your body through a process known as autophagy, where cells clean up their act. There are ways you could trigger that and get off the many prescription drugs that people have been prescribed based on pharma-based medicine, guideline-driven medicine.
As a Christian, Amerling said faith and spirituality should be an integral part of the healing process:
We have to recognize that we are divine creations. We are not the product of any kind of a random process. I mean, one of the original sins of pseudoscience that was injected into the discussion was this whole notion that we are descendants of some lower organism. This is such a ludicrous idea, when you actually look at it, that it’s incredible that it ever gained acceptance. And now it is dogma that is being shoved down the throat of every kid in public school with literally nothing behind it. So, that is the first step: to recognize that we are all divinely created and created perfectly. There is simply no way that any of this could have happened by a random process.
Once we accept our “divine and perfect” creation, Amerling continued, then many drugs and vaccines are no longer necessarily part of the equation.
“We have an amazing immune system that is capable of repelling any kind of foreign invasion by any kind of micro-organism,” he asserted. “So, you do things that bolster that immune system. You eat healthy food, you get plenty of sleep, you expose yourself to the sun, you move, you get exercise, and you achieve good, if not excellent, metabolic health without medication, and that should be the basis of care.”
Making the connection again to spiritual health, Amerling shared that, to him, the most compelling part of the New Testament was “how Jesus Christ healed the sick.”
“So, that’s where it comes from, and that’s the concept of the body, the body of Christ,” Amerling said. “That’s where all healing ultimately comes from, and we just have to let it happen and not interfere with that process.”
