$1.2 Million a year Richard Baron, King of the Internal Medicine Board, creates straw man to justify removing doctors' ability to practice

He made a dirty deal and now attempts to wiggle out of the spotlight by misrepresenting the situation in the 2/23/23 New England Journal of Medicine.

Baron Munchausen was famous for his tall tales. Let’s examine Richard Baron’s tall tale and see if he can rightly be called Richard Baron Munchausen.

For some unknown reason (that most likely involved a transfer of funds) in the middle of 2021 the Federation of State Medical Boards (a nonprofit that advises state medical boards) followed by the American Board of Internal Medicine, the American Association of Pediatrics and the American Board of Family Practice, (all nonprofit membership organizations that accept funding from outside entities) decided to destroy the livelihoods of their doctor members who did not push COVID vaccines or who used early COVID treatments.

One would have thought this would cause a self-inflicted wound (fewer memberships) and incite controversy in an arena that was traditionally purely bureaucratic, and the polar opposite of controversial.

But these organizations not only did not back down, but have revved up their attacks on independent-thinking, honest doctors.

Unsurprisingly, after going after hundreds of doctors for crimes that do not exist in any penal code nor in any ethical standards, they saw pushback. Attorneys general issued opinions that state medical boards must allow physicians to provide licensed drugs to treat COVID. Some state legislatures voted to prohibit medical boards from reining in doctors and prohibiting COVID treatments. And although the California legislature went in the opposite direction and recently voted to restrict what doctors may say to their patients regarding COVID, the California law has been enjoined, so it cannot be enforced while a case against it continues.

The specialty boards, which are neither state nor federal institutions, began removing doctors’ specialty certifications for the viewpoints they expressed and for providng early treatments. This made it impossible for the doctors to receive insurance payments for services rendered, effectively ending their careers.

And so two weeks ago, “Dr.” Richard Baron, the CEO of the American Board of Internal Medicine, was given a soapbox in the New England Journal of Medicine to press his case against doctors’ free speech. His coauthor Carl Coleman, interestingly, is a law professor who penned a law review article in 2021 explaining how medical boards CANNOT legally restrict doctors’ free speech, and he penned a companion article: License Revocation as a Response to Physician Misinformation: Proceed with Caution, Health Affairs Forefront (2022). Yet here he comes down on the Baron’s side, handily making a switcheroo from the issue of ‘misinformation’ to one of ‘expertise.’

How did these two compromised authors proceed, then?

They used a straw man argument. How can you argue against free speech? Of course, you can’t. So they tried to make this about “medical expertise” and an imaginary war on expertise, in which they are holding down the fort. CYFBI? For instance:

“Efforts to limit the powers of licensing boards are the latest example of a larger movement to undermine the concept of expertise and the institutions that validate it.”

Then they go after the courts in this imaginary war on expertise for limiting the power of federal agencies and correctly requiring Congress to do its job and make the hard determinations that admittedly have “vast economic and political significance.” For example:

Some of the most important challenges to expertise are now coming from the judiciary… the Court held in West Virginia v. Environmental Protection Agency that agencies may not decide questions of “vast economic and political significance” without specific authorization from Congress. The decision is likely to substantially reduce the authority of subject-matter experts within administrative agencies.

Shall we cry crocodile tears for the subject matter “experts” whose politically-driven expert opinions may now have reduced authority? Mr. Baron’s piece is full of similar nuggets. Is the guy tone-deaf? Here is another:

Perhaps the most substantial threat to expertise is that members of the public are coming to believe that facts don’t exist — that all facts are political and therefore a matter of opinion.

Apparently he missed the facts of record-breaking excess deaths throughout the US, Europe, Australia and New Zealand subsequent to COVID vaccinations. He must have also missed the Cochrane metaanalysis showing that no masks work to contain respiratory viruses. He is apparently fact-challenged, unable to relinquish the fake facts upon which the Baron’s sand castle of misinformation-hunting is based. Mr. Baron, the tide has turned and your sand castle is almost completely submerged.

Below is the authors’ final plaintive cry. And I gotta tell you, just for ha-ha’s, a theme of Baron’s Internal Medicine Board is “Building Trust.” Would you trust the overpaid Mr. Baron, who incomprehensibly pays lip service to divergent views, to sell you a used car, let alone make decisions about the healthcare of millions of Americans?

Differences of opinion within medicine are necessary for progress, and both licensing and certifying boards must therefore be careful to leave room for the expression of divergent views. Moreover, there is ongoing debate regarding the extent to which free-speech protections cover professional speech. But despite the existence of divergent views and areas for legitimate debate, there are some opinions that have been so thoroughly repudiated by existing evidence as to be considered definitively wrong.⁵ Constructive debates are possible only within a shared epistemic framework and with a commitment to the idea of verifiable facts. It’s incumbent on licensing and certifying boards to defend the existence of facts and to give the public a way to know when practitioners are making claims that are incompatible with reality.

When it comes to disciplining doctors, boards haven’t always lived up to public expectations — but that’s not a reason they should fall short yet again, especially during a lethal pandemic. Although there are many gray areas in medicine, some propositions are objectively wrong. For example, when a licensed physician insists that viruses don’t cause disease or that Covid-19 vaccines magnetize people or connect them to cell towers, professional bodies must be able to take action in support of fact- and evidence-based practice.

Richard Baron (Munchausen) was equally disingenuous during an earlier interview/podcast with the NEJM, when he was asked where he draws the line between honest disagreement and misinformation worthy of professional fratricide. Then too, he said the line was crossed when doctors treated patients with magnets for cancer. Well, Baron, your target Dr. Peter McCullough did not use magnets when he told the truth about COVID. He never claimed the vaccines magnetize—he claimed that they caused clots, myocarditis and deaths—something he correctly concluded as a cardiologist dealing with the trail of destruction left in the vaccines’ wake. Why do you dissemble so?

The public relies on the medical profession in times of grievous vulnerability and need. For the profession to earn and maintain the public’s trust — along with the privileges associated with the status of being licensed practitioners — medical boards must be able to differentiate practitioners who are providing fact-based advice from those who are not.

By his own yardstick, I suggest that Richard Baron (Munchausen) needs to be let go by the Board of Internal Medicine, as he has sullied its reputation, dissimulated in the NEJM and is clearly incompetent at distinguishing fact from fiction as of February 23, 2023.

Now to the author who is a law professor. According to Professor Coleman’s law review article:

…Unless a licensing board can establish that a physician disseminated objectively false information with knowledge of its falsity or with reckless disregard of whether it was true, professional sanctions for statements made outside the physician-patient relationship are unlikely to survive a constitutional challenge. It is also unlikely that courts would allow boards to impose disclaimer requirements whenever physicians express views that conflict with professional norms.

Having established with an extensive review of the case law that boards will not get away with punishing doctors for their viewpoints, he jumped on the “expertise” bandwagon to throw sand in the eyes of the reader regarding what is actually at stake. Another snake in the grass, but one whose public flip-flop might benefit those of us who are trying to reestablish free speech as a non-negotiable norm in the United States.

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Let’s keep an eye on Professor Coleman’s work, which may be useful in the defense of doctors:

https://law.shu.edu/news/impressive-health-law-faculty-at-seton-hall-law.cfm

“Professor Coleman delivered several presentations on physician dissemination of misinformation, including Does Free Speech Protect COVID-19 Related Misinformation and Disinformation, at the Federation of State Medical Boards’ Board Attorneys Workshop, San Diego (November 2022); Fact or Fiction: Strategies for the Misinformation Age, at the American Board of Internal Medicine Annual Meeting, Colorado Springs (August 2022); Physician Dissemination of Medical Information: Constitutional Limits on State Disciplinary Board Actions, at the Health Law Professors Conference, American Society of Law, Medicine & Ethics, Phoenix (June 2022) and the Federation of State Medical Boards Annual Meeting (virtual), April 2022. In March 2022, he was quoted in COVID-19 Misinformation Tests Doctors’ Free Speech Rights in Bloomberg Law.”