There is a question I hear often—sometimes whispered, sometimes asked with frustration: “If this helps people, why wasn’t I ever taught about it?” It’s a fair question. And the answer is usually less dramatic than people expect. Medical school is not designed to teach everything that might help the human body. It is designed to teach what fits within a very specific framework: approved treatments, standardized protocols, and interventions that can be regulated, studied in narrow ways, and defended legally. This does not make doctors malicious. It makes the system cautious.
Modern medical education is built around liability management as much as healing. Students are trained not only in biology and pharmacology, but in what they are allowed to say, recommend, and prescribe without putting themselves or their institutions at risk.
Anything that falls outside that boundary—no matter how long it has existed, how many people use it, or how compelling the anecdotal outcomes—simply doesn’t make the curriculum.
Silence is not always suppression.
Often, it is omission by design.
Medical schools rely heavily on peer-reviewed literature, regulatory approval, and standardized funding pathways. Tools that cannot be patented, tightly controlled, or neatly categorized tend to be excluded—not because they are proven harmful, but because they exist outside the educational model.
Students are not encouraged to explore what they cannot later defend in court.
So entire categories of tools—historical remedies, off-label uses, cross-disciplinary substances, or methods discovered outside institutional research—are quietly left out.
This creates a blind spot.
Doctors graduate with extraordinary knowledge in certain areas and almost none in others. When patients later bring up tools they’ve researched or encountered elsewhere, many doctors are genuinely unfamiliar with them.
Unfamiliarity often gets mislabeled as danger.
And danger gets communicated as dismissal.
That cycle can feel personal to patients—but it usually isn’t. It’s structural.
Medical education is not neutral. It reflects economic realities, regulatory frameworks, and risk tolerance. It rewards what can be standardized and penalizes what cannot.
This is why you will hear doctors say, “There’s no evidence,” when what they often mean is, “There’s no approved pathway for me to engage with this.”
Those are not the same thing.
I want to be clear: this is not an argument against doctors or training. Modern medicine saves lives every day. But it is incomplete—and it knows it.
Most doctors will tell you privately that medical school taught them shockingly little about nutrition, detoxification, environmental load, or non-pharmaceutical interventions. These topics are considered “adjacent,” not central.
So when people discover tools that helped them outside the system, they often assume something nefarious is happening.
Usually, what’s happening is simpler:
If it can’t be regulated, monetized, insured, and defended, it doesn’t get taught.
That leaves patients and parents navigating gaps on their own—often clumsily, sometimes wisely, and frequently without guidance.
My role has never been to tell people what to do.
It has been to name the gaps honestly.
To say: This wasn’t taught—not because you’re foolish for asking, but because the system was never designed to teach it.
Understanding that distinction matters. It replaces anger with clarity. It allows conversation instead of conflict.
And it opens the door to a more mature question:
What might we learn if we allowed education to be curious instead of cautious?
That question doesn’t threaten medicine.
It invites it to grow.
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