The Emperor Has No Clothes: The Hidden Crisis of Medical Harm

Hidden and Ignored

Medical harm is no longer hiding in the shadows and alleys after dark. Once whispered behind closed doors or tucked away in the dead of the night, when those harmed would silently cry themselves to sleep in pain. It now echoes through Facebook groups, private forums and social media posts, though often censored or dismissed when it gets too loud for the medical-industrial complex.  

People who claimed they or their family were harmed after a medical intervention were successfully silenced by voices of science and medical authority. Gaslighting disguised as concern that sounds something like this: ‘It’s not possible, the studies show this procedure is safe’, ‘Your labs and diagnostics are normal, maybe a psychiatrist or prescription for antidepressants can help?’, ‘I can also refer you to neurology…’.

The Pandemic That Pulled Back the Curtain

The Covid came and everything got amplified. Many more folks started coming out saying they are sick after they received the Covid vaccine, or from the infection itself. Those of us who had already experienced harm and were on the receiving end of the meticulously engineered response from the system watched it unfold like a horror movie we had already lived through.

When I tried to explain that my ME/CFS can be trigged by a vaccine and I shouldn’t be taking any, I was ignored 90% of the time. Once my close friend told me ‘You know you can kill people.’ That’s when I realized that I was up against severe cognitive dissonance that reality couldn’t penetrate.

I knew that we would suddenly see a surge of ME/CFS (Myalgic Encephalomyelitis) and we did. They just called it ‘Long Covid’. I knew people would suddenly learn about POTS, dysautonomia, transverse myelitis and Guillain Barre Syndrome. These terms are now everywhere, but the system still defaults to the same formula: deny, deflect, medicate, rinse, repeat.

Even before the pandemic, finding a POTS specialist was a months-long scavenger hunt. Now, there’s a waiting list of thousands. The system was never prepared to acknowledge this harm -let alone treat it.

Pandora’s Box

The pandemic and the vaccine that was supposed to save us all, not only brought the complex diseases into the limelight, but it also opened the Pandora’s box on medical harm and vaccine injury, which seems to have divided us into camps rather then bring us together to search for answers.

On one side, you have the medical professionals and part of the public clinging to ‘unquestionable science’, never questioning who wrote it, who funded it, or who benefits.

On the other hand, there are the people with lived experiences, dismissed and discarded by the system, being left to fend for themselves and look for alternative treatments.

There’s also a third group that has emerged out of this. The group of scientists, medical professionals and out of the box thinkers who had the discernment to question official narratives and believe patients. Some of them became patients themselves. Some already knew vaccines can trigger ME/CSF, POTS etc. but believed it was rare and didn’t speak up until now.

The Epidemic of Medical Harm

And now it feels like medical harm is hiding in plain sight cloaked in odd, unexplained symptoms emerging in even young people. Many who’ve been speaking out were silenced, deplatformed, shadow banned. Some gave up because managing their chronic illness is a fulltime job or the hate they receive online is detrimental to their recovery.

Vaccine injuries are just one part of medical harm. Procedures sold as safe with rare side effects are performed daily. Around 700,000 tubal ligations or salpingectomies and 500,000 vasectomies are performed every year. Women have been experiencing and speaking up about PTLS for decades, men have reported post vasectomy issues as well. Over 1 million of hernia repairs are done every year, and 90% of them are with a mesh even though we’ve known for decades that mesh causes issues sometimes so dire that patients take their own lives.

And speaking of mesh brings us to medical devices – a major source of harm and a subject deserving its own spotlight: Essure, metal hip implants, and more.

I could go on with listing medical harm examples, but the point of this blog is more to bring awareness to medical harm, engage people’s minds and try to shine a light on a system that may be set up to hide and minimize side effects and harm.

The Emperor Has No Clothes

Let’s dive in. To get to the roots, you have to follow the rabbit holes

The story usually goes something like this: a patient has a procedure, gets a vaccine or is put on a medication. After some time, maybe hours, maybe days, months or years, very obvious symptoms start to emerge. They never felt like that before. They know something is very wrong so they go back to their doctor or surgeon hoping to get answers and treatments.

The doctor or surgeon listens and usually says ‘Hmmm I never heard that before.’ ‘The science clearly says this is not possible. You are just older and stressed.’ ‘The pandemic made us all anxious.’ ‘I believe you’re sick, but it couldn’t have been the medication.’ ‘And even if it was the medication, procedure, vaccine, we will never know, so do not worry about it.’ ‘Here, take this prescription and a referral to specialist and I’ll see you in 2 months.’ This scenario repeats for months or years with little to no improvement.

What gives? Are doctors this cruel or ignorant? Or is it me? Am I crazy?

Many doctors are sweet, kind and genuinely want to help. But why don’t they believe us? The system trains them to believe that ‘science’ is always more reliable than a patient’s story. They are taught that the gold standard of care is evidence-based medicine. Randomized controlled trials, systematic reviews, quality studies and clinical guidelines... And in theory, that makes sense right? We do want care rooted in good research.

But if science is so ‘golden’ and to be trusted above all, why did it not ‘catch’ post tubal ligation syndrome, vaccine injuries, mesh complications, medical device harm, medication harm?

Now we’re getting into the very dark side of the system that’s supposed to keep up healthy and prevent illness, but instead can lead us to depths of despair we didn’t know were possible.

Medical Ghostwriting: The Hidden Hand Behind Medical Research

Medical ghostwriting is a deceptive but widespread practice where pharmaceutical companies hire professional writers to draft medical journal articles promoting their products and minimize side effects. These writers create papers that are then published under the names of respected academics or clinicians who may have contributed little, if anything, to the actual writing or study. This gives the appearance of peer-reviewed science when the content was crafted by drug industry’s marketing firms to manufacture credibility.

The implications can be enormous. Doctors rely on peer-reviewed journals to guide their treatment decisions. When the literature is ghostwritten and biased, entire standards of care can be shaped by marketing rather than real science, putting patients at risk and eroding trust in the medical system. Now we’re getting somewhere!

But do doctors know this is happening? I am not sure, but I would guess some do and some absolutely do not. They are too busy seeing patients and keeping up with the ‘science’. They were trained to trust the literature, not question its authorship. As a result, even well-meaning physicians may unknowingly base their clinical decisions on research that was orchestrated by drug company marketing teams, not independent scientists.

Quick search confirms that ghostwriting was responsible to tens of thousands of deaths and billions in settlements. Vioxx, Prempro, Gardasil, Zoloft, Neurontin, Paxil etc. The ghostwritten studies downplayed cardiovascular risk and killed around 38,000 patient in the case of Vioxx. Wyeth (now Pfizer), published favorable articles on hormone replacement drug Prempro, masking links to breast cancer and cardiovascular disease. One paper says that up to 75% of studies on antidepressants involved some form of ghostwriting despite knowing the increase rates of suicides. Merck used ghostwriters for their Gardasil study and severely downplayed, obscured or omitted risks of POTS and Dysautonomia, CRPS, ME/CFS, primary ovarian insufficiency and even death.

Despite these revelations, there are no federal laws requiring disclosure of ghostwriters, and many journals still lack strict enforcement policies. This allows ghostwriting to continue in the shadows, shaping drug approvals, influencing clinical practice, and misleading both doctors and patients.

And it’s not just drugs - medical devices are often approved without proper testing, thanks to regulatory loopholes like the 510(k) process. Marketing, not science, often leads the charge.

Yes, The Emperor Is Naked

And there we have it. When patients come in with post intervention side effects and harm, doctors rely on often flawed or manufactured studies to prove to patients they are wrong and just made it up in their head. This is where medical schools are taught to lead them. If it’s not supported by science, it’s psychosomatic, or psychological in origin. Or, at best, a coincidence.

Harms are often underreported, dismissed as ‘coincidence’, or excluded from the study entirely. Rare or long-term side effects don’t always show up in trials, especially if the study only lasts a few months. And when people do report harm after a drug or procedure hits the market, the system often labels them ‘anecdotal’ and ignores them. Coincidence and ‘correlation doesn’t equal causation’ become shields against liability. The burden of proof shifts to the patient and many silently give up, internalize blame and focus on searching for answers alone.

I Didn’t Choose This Path - It Chose Me

After years of my own medical harm recovery, supporting a loved one through a life-altering vaccine injury, being gaslight, dismissed, disrespected and living a medical nightmare in real time twice - while spending thousands out of pocket for care that conventional medicine refused to provide, I couldn’t ignore the call any longer. A deeper purpose had found me, and I knew I couldn’t look away.

The harm was too deep, and the silence too loud.

I became a Medical Harm Recovery Coach to challenge crumbling narratives, educate patients, validate their experience, help prevent further harm and teach people to self-advocate in a system that’s set up to abandon them when something goes sideways.

Healing from medical harm takes on many forms. It is not linear; it moves in cycles and some days feel like breakthroughs and others like setbacks. It’s all part of the process. A big part of healing is learning to accept what is, even while still pursuing healing on every level - physical, emotional, spiritual. We can get stuck in clinging to what used to be… or grieving what may never be again. That attachment to the past and how things should have turned out, can keep us locked in pain. 

But healing invites us into something deeper. The archetype of Chiron, the wounded healer, reminds us that healing doesn’t always mean fixing. Sometimes it means living fully with what is. That’s the paradox of true healing: wholeness doesn’t always mean perfection. It means integration. It means becoming more you, not in spite of what happened, but because of it.