Jordan Peterson has returned to the public eye after a very long hiatus due to, as far as I
understand it, being in a detox clinic in
Russia in order to get off of benzodiazepine, the benzodiazepines that he became addicted to,
including being in a medically induced coma for some period of time, then Pieterson going
from Russia to Serbia for further treatment, eventually getting covid-19. But now he's back
and he's getting back to the interview circuit and he's already saying really dangerous things. Now,
I'm going to talk about one of the things he said during an interview with Bret Weinstein.
And I know I'm stepping into a minefield here. The tricky thing about talking about the things
Jordan Peterson says is that no matter what his most devoted followers will say, David,
you're misquoting him. You're misunderstanding him. So even if it appears as though Jordan
Peterson said something that was wrong or wacky or dangerous, you were the one who doesn't get it.
David, you are straw manning him. But what Jordan Peterson said is quite dangerous. And I think it's
important to talk about it. But I will admit that in
this clip we're going to look at Peterson uses sort of interchangeable and sometimes vague
terminology. So first, we have to figure out what it is that he is saying. But the general message
from Peterson here is medicine may be responsible for killing more people than the number of people
that medicine saves. Again, that's what I'm hearing. Let's listen to the clip then.
I suspect if you did the statistics properly, I suspect that the medicine independent of public
health kills more people than it saves. I suspect if you if you factor in phenomena
like the development of superbugs in hospitals, for example, that overall the net consequence
of hospitals is negative. Now, that's just a guess. But it's and and it could easily be wrong,
but it also could not be wrong. And that is a good example. Or that's where my thinking about
what we don't know has taken me with regards to the critique of what we do. The fact that
it's even plausible is a stunning low, you know, medical error is the third leading cause of death,
you know, and that doesn't take into account. The generation of superbugs, for example,
so there is a lot there, but a key quote here for what we're dealing with is Jordan Peterson saying,
I suspect that medicine, independent of public health, kills more people than it saves. That's
the main point. And this includes, as he says, the fact that in hospitals, sometimes people
get infections and medical error and that if you include all of that, he believes it's possible
that medicine actually kills more people than it saves. Now, unfortunately, this is not plausible.
This is a completely absurd idea. And in particular, when we have nearly half the country
doubting the seriousness of covid because of the nonsense spread by the right for a year
and a huge contingent of covid. And given that we have to contend with, this is a particularly
dangerous time to be making completely wild, implausible claims about medicine. Let's take it
piece by piece. First of all, medicine killing more people than it saves is ridiculous. Now,
he says, aside from public health. So I'll exclude vaccination from this because he's kind of saying
we're putting aside public health. He's not saying that,
you know, if you include public health initiatives like clean water vaccination,
he's saying we're not including that in his calculation. Think about the sheer number of
people like think about yourself from the time you were a little kid, ear infection, sinus infection,
things that before antibiotics would kill many people. Now they don't, thanks to being able
to go to a doctor, be diagnosed and get antibiotics,
dentistry, the number of people that used to die because of problems that start with the teeth,
including how teeth problems create malnutrition where you can't eat, never mind infections in
the mouth, modern dentistry, including fixing cavities. How many people have been saved by that?
How many people are saved by heart bypasses in the United States each year?
Who would otherwise die? 500000 heart bypasses in the United States every single year. Very few have
medical error related deaths associated with them. Just to pick I mean, we could go through all day
10000 cases of testicular cancer each year, which medicine treats with a 95 percent success rate.
That's hospitals, that's medicine saving people. And he actually says in the clip,
you know, I really don't have any idea about this, but he has such a cult of devoted followers that
now they will take this and they will run with it. Peterson also talked about medical
error as the third leading cause of death.
Medical error is a problem, without a doubt, but comparing it to all the people saved by medicine.
And it should also be mentioned that medical error has been dramatically overstated. And when good
studies look at it, medical error is not nearly as bad as some like to claim. Now
there is malpractise malpractise. There is medical error, of course, but a Yale School of Medicine
study found the real number of truly preventable deaths in the US in inpatients is about 22000.
You sometimes hear numbers like 40000 to 100000. Sometimes you hear two hundred and fifty thousand.
That's the number that is sometimes used to say it's the third leading cause of death. This study
suggests that the number of otherwise healthy people who died just because of medical error
could be as low as seventy one hundred and that the rest of the preventable medical error deaths
are in people with a life expectancy of three months, very sick people. Now, that doesn't make
their deaths any less tragic. It doesn't mean we don't deal with malpractise and hold people
accountable. But the point is, we're talking about people who in a
perfect world have three months to live whose care may have been mismanaged in a way that could have
robbed them of time.
It's no less tragic, I get it. But the idea of an epidemic of otherwise healthy people just dying
from medical error, it's quite rare in the United States, the leading causes of death in the United
States are mostly particular types of disease, including cancer or others accidents, including
car accidents. OK, this type of stuff from Jordan Peterson will make some people more hesitant
to get care to get vaccines. And in the end, Peterson again admits he actually has no idea,
but he believes
it's plausible. It's really not plausible based on anything I was able to find about it. So the big
news is that Jordan Peterson is back. Everybody, for better or worse, make of it what you will.
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