Story at-a-glance
- Information overload crisis — Today’s endless data flood overwhelms the mind, triggering instability and reliance on simplistic narratives — ancient meditation practices build the inner stability needed to navigate this chaos clearly
- Filters create reality — The mind adopts filters to simplify reality into something the conscious mind can process, inevitably removing many critical details while creating a biased and inaccurate perception of reality
- Rigid divisions — In politics, this filtering causes people on both sides to be rigidly convinced their truth is correct. Likewise, it makes doctors worship vaccines and be unable to recognize the harms of pharmaceuticals, even when their own patients are injured
- Patient-focused healing — In medicine, many diagnoses can only be made if a physician works to move beyond the filters they were trained in and instead directly see the complexity that each patient brings to the encounter
- Path to clear perception — Cultivate intuition for key data, recognize source biases, drill to core truths, and expand awareness through nervous system health — all of which are essential for discerning reality in our hyper-connected, impactful era
A recurring theme in human society is how often groups hold diametrically opposed viewpoints, yet both are absolutely certain they are entirely correct, and the other is completely wrong. In each instance, this means that at least half of the people involved are wrong and incapable of seeing evidence repeatedly presented to them.
For example, recently, ACIP (the panel that advises the CDC on the vaccine schedule) decided to reevaluate the newborn hepatitis B vaccination because:
•Decades of evidence suggest it causes significant harm (e.g., it targets myelin1), yet no formal studies have ever assessed if the harm exists — despite continual requests for them.
•The public justification for newborn mass vaccination is that it serves as a safety net for the roughly one in a million instances where a hepatitis B positive mother is not tested for hepatitis B, infects her child during childbirth, and the partial protection the vaccine provides will prevent the child from going on to develop a lifelong hepatitis B infection. Yet, there is no evidence that thirty years of this policy has reduced hepatitis B.
ACIP hence proposed making newborn vaccination optional for mothers who tested negative for hepatitis B. However, due to the religious fervor around the vaccine, this met widespread resistance, and at the meeting, medical representatives showed they were incapable of conceiving that the vaccine could cause harm because their entire focus was anchored to preventing the (one in a million) case of newborn hepatitis transmission.
Likewise, once ACIP’s completely sane recommendation to stop vaccinating newborns of hepatitis B negative mothers was enacted, it was treated as an existential catastrophe by both the medical profession and the media and the ACIP chair was fired by his Texas hospital.2 While much could be said about this, I wanted to highlight that:
•A key theme in Robert Mendelsohn’s 1979 book Confessions of a Medical Heretic3 was that anyone who challenged medical dogmas was expelled and treated as a heretic (e.g., doctors who tried to save COVID patients from Fauci’s remdesivir protocols were fired and had their licenses targeted).
•Doctors (at least prior to COVID) typically only spoke out against the medical profession at the very ends of their careers to avoid being canceled.
•The largest victims of this cancel culture are patients, as the doctors being excommunicated are typically those patients would most want to see at their most desperate moments — which is a key part of why trust in physicians and hospitals decreased from 71.5% in April 2020 to 40.1% in January 2024.4
Early Recognition
Throughout my life, I’ve been able to see what was in front of me while noticing most people couldn’t. In time, I realized that if the crowd followed something, it was likely wrong, yet, even when this was pointed out, most people would continue to seek safety in mirroring their peers (whereas roughly 10% of people instead were self-directed and were much less susceptible to external pressures or the crowd dictating their actions).
This is why I (and many other dissident physicians I’ve spoken to) realized within days of the COVID vaccines hitting the market that they were extremely dangerous (as each day I had multiple people come in with significant reactions to the shot, and within a month I began hearing reports around the country from people who knew of someone dying suddenly from the vaccine).
In contrast, I saw colleagues I respected (who were trapped in a near religious jubilation about the “95% effective” vaccine ending the pandemic) be completely unable to acknowledge any of the injuries — even when patients no-showed and their relatives stated they’d died suddenly after vaccination.
Realizing this would never be reported in a “credible source,” I decided to spend the next year documenting all of those reports so I would have something to show skeptical parties, and a year later, since nothing equivalent had been done, in February 2022, I published it on a brand new Substack, it went viral and that’s essentially how I ended up where I am now.
Note: While compiling those cases, I noticed numerous cases strongly suggesting people were getting injured by mRNA vaccine shedding — something that by every known mechanism was impossible. Trusting the early signal, I then spent nearly two years investigating it and with Pierre Kory’s help, was able to build a strong enough case shedding was real (e.g., hundreds of similar reports following a predictable pattern and mechanistic proof) that it is now recognized by many.
This touches upon a critical point — to solve a problem, you must have the ability (and willingness) to see a wide sea of possible data points, then have the intuition to know which ones to focus on. Likewise, you also need to have the courage to act upon what you know is true, even if everyone is telling you not to.
Why Reason?
When navigating controversial topics with high ambiguity, I believe that it is critical to avoid getting attached to any specific interpretation.
Regretfully, I routinely see people in every segment of society arrange data points into a logical chain arriving at a predetermined outcome, despite many logical jumps they make not being rational. Once this happens, they get aggressive in pushing that belief onto others but simultaneously can’t see they are doing it (despite immediately noticing it in those they disagree with).
This touches on a deeper question people rarely ask: “What is your actual basis for seeking to believe something?” I’ve found the most common reasons are: to eliminate discomfort from the world being difficult to understand; to seek comfort belonging to a group; to validate one’s ego; or to gain power over others.
Note: This ties into evolutionary psychology’s view that reasoning evolved primarily for gaining power within social groups.5 Likewise, research shows that more intelligent people, while excellent at arguing, are much less able to perceive data contradicting their deeply held beliefs.6
In my case, I had no interest in those reasons and wanted something that could provide a deeper level of fulfillment to my life. I hence decided to construct a functional means of discerning truth that was humble, flexible, and well-designed enough that I would gradually move towards the truth.
Information Overload
One colleague has advanced a compelling theory to explain why a palpable madness seems to be gripping our society: so much information is available now that it has exceeded the processing capacity of the human mind, causing people to destabilize inside, and as the information glut increases, this problem will worsen.
A basic safeguard that the mind has against this is plastering a simplified explanation onto reality or siding with the crowd. Unfortunately, the current demand on the mind is exceeding that buffer — so we are beginning to see a lot of mental “glitches” emerge that many have never previously encountered.
Fortunately, many meditation traditions have recognized this underlying process for millennia and developed methods for cultivating the internal stability needed to bridge that gap — methods that have been invaluable in my personal life, in practicing medicine, and in writing this newsletter; without them, I simply could not have done my life’s work.
Focusing on Value
In many environments, a massive amount of data is present that the conscious mind cannot track. However, the subconscious directs your focus to what has “value” for your conscious mind.
One classic example is the “Cocktail party effect,” where you can be in a room where many conversations blur together, yet somehow zero in on the one conversation where your name was mentioned.7 One reason put forward as responsible for this is the “reticular activating system.”8,9
Note: It’s debatable if the RAS is ultimately responsible, but I will use it to convey the central points of this essay.
The RAS filtering function has been hypothesized to have evolved so early humans could rapidly detect food and danger in their environment. We no longer face those high stakes, but the RAS persists, now seeking things our culture has habituated us to value — money, products, or potential mates (particularly since dopamine-focused marketing revolves around conditioning the RAS to seek those things out).
In human interactions, recognizing the importance of the RAS is immensely valuable because your words and actions are often far less important than what the other party has been primed to look for.
If someone’s initial impression of you is positive, their RAS will filter for things showing your value; if negative, it will filter for signs you should be disregarded (e.g., this is why people trapped in abusive relationships often don’t register the abuse while citing a couple of semi-decent things the abuser did as proof they’re a good person).
Note: This concept is often described as “confirmation bias” (where you only see things that support your pre-existing beliefs).10
Filters Create Your Reality
Much of the reality we believe to be true is not representative of objective reality — rather our RAS creates filters that show us a selective slice of reality. Unfortunately, people rarely grasp they are doing this, leading to the recurring phenomenon of people “watching the same film but seeing a completely different movie.”
Sadly, the media excels at priming people to have a very specific filter and then selectively feeding them only information that affirms it. A few clear recent examples of this priming-and-reinforcement cycle are:
•”The sky is falling because of COVID-19.”
•”The COVID vaccines are 100% safe, and the only way back to normal.”
•”Ivermectin is just horse dewormer and has no place in treating COVID — or cancer.”
•”Trump is literally Hitler.”
•”Biden is sharp as a tack and mentally fitter than ever.”
•”Climate change means total societal collapse is imminent and already unstoppable.”
Note: The most appalling facet of this was the priming being so powerful, a self-reinforcing belief structure was frequently created that led to those trapped within it demonizing and excommunicating those who saw the world differently.
Furthermore, this dogmatic way of relating to the world takes away much of the vibrancy of life. In contrast, I’ve found being humble enough to recognize something I’d observed many times and thought I understood actually had a depth to it I’d never seen before brought joy into my life.
Likewise, while this societal programming trains us to fixate on intellectual ideas, most of human communication has nothing to do with specific information being conveyed but rather what is going on in the body, mind, and spirit of each participant — a realm which both brings genuine satisfaction to those who engage with it and is where a dialogue must occur to shift deep-seated beliefs within either party.
Filters and Medicine
“Medical gaslighting” describes the medical system injuring someone, then telling them the injury is all in their head (which is truly awful to go through). Remarkably, this has been a mainstay of Western medicine for at least 140 years, indicating this issue will continue to recur as medicine relies upon treatments which entail significant harm.
There are many explanations for this dynamic (e.g., doctors don’t want to expose themselves to liability or admit to themselves they harmed a patient). I believe the primary issue is filters, as when doctors are trained, to simplify the overwhelming deluge of information they are bombarded with, they are given foundational beliefs about medicine which “coincidentally” end up supporting the medical industry.
For example, doctors are trained to see stomach acid as a non-essential nuisance rather than critical for digestion, justifying lifelong acid-suppressing medications even though increasing stomach acid is often the easiest way to cure reflux — something Senator Ron Johnson recently testified cured his reflux.
Likewise, when patients come in, rather than directly perceiving what is there, the most common response is for physicians to quickly cycle through each filter they’ve been trained in for assessing patients.
So, since almost none of medical training teaches filters for identifying pharmaceutical injuries (but it does teach filters for recognizing psychiatric illness), doctors often can’t see clear signs their patient has a pharmaceutical injury but will rapidly conclude the patient’s ailments are due to their own psychological problems. I advocate for three strategies to avoid doing this:
•Seek outside training in filters that identify complex medical conditions (e.g., chronic fatigue syndrome, SSRI antidepressant complications or spiritual imbalances like early medication psychosis).
•View everything as a manifestation of some underlying process and focus on identifying that process rather than any specific symptom.
•Have a perceptual framework that provides sensitivity to perceive subtle signs while maintaining awareness of the entire patient rather than seeing them as filtered diagnoses.
Note: Vaccine induced microstrokes are quite common, but subtle enough they can only be detected if you are either trained to look for them or able to see the entire patient and recognize something is “not quite right.”
Perceiving Without Filters
In ancient China, there was a saying — it is easier to raise an army of 10,000 men than to find a general to lead them.11 This reflects that on a battlefield, there are so many things occurring that if a general loses sight of one, it can crush their army. Likewise, to quote the Art of War:12
“Amid the turmoil and tumult of battle, there may be seeming disorder and yet no real disorder at all.”
The modern world is much safer, so there’s less pressure to maintain continual awareness of our environment and much of this ancient skillset has been lost. Similarly, meditation phrases like “If you could be fully present to an ant for the time it took to walk down your nose, you would be enlightened” illustrate that so much is going on around you that your mind filters out it is actually extraordinarily challenging to be fully aware of what’s right in front of you.
In medicine, those with this broader awareness tend to be the most able to connect with patients and recognize things they were never trained to look for. Conversely, this capacity decreases as people become more disconnected from their bodies, deplete their nervous systems, and predominantly live in their minds — all of which characterizes the modern digital age.
Unfortunately, there is no incentive to cultivate this awareness as profit-driven medicine has increasingly turned to automation (profitable tests, imaging, and treatment algorithms) in place of human connection. In turn, I’ve lost count of how many people I’ve diagnosed with relatively straightforward issues that dozens of respected physicians missed because they were trapped within the perceptual filters of their algorithms.
Note: AI may change this, as much of what doctors have been automated into doing can be done by AI. For doctors to retain value, they’ll likely need to go beyond algorithmically regurgitating guidelines and focus on the unique qualities only a conscious human can bring to healing.
Filters and Information
Whenever humans are exposed to excessive information (which can be a surprisingly low threshold), they lose the ability to be present to it all. Instead, their RAS uses a pre-existing filter that detects what has value to them (and in many cases decides which half of an argument they will hold an overwhelming conviction for).
In politics, this manifests through “nuanced ideas and simplistic truths.” Nuanced ideas require putting several premises together to understand the broader point. Simplistic truths state a single premise the audience already agrees with. The advantage of simplistic truths is most audiences will understand them and emotionally support the speaker.
The disadvantage is that they cannot address complex subjects. Critically, I find for many complex issues, if their nuance is fully understood, both sides will frequently reach shared positions they can adopt. However, since only simplistic truths are typically utilized, so many things remain indefinitely polarized.
Note: Many qualities necessary for perception become harder to perceive with shortened attention spans. Sadly, the visual media has conditioned this into us (through rapid scene transitions) and while medical injuries (e.g., vaccines frequently caused ADHD) further compound this.
Conclusion
Because we live in an overwhelming sea of information, being fully present to all of it is nearly impossible. People typically focus on what their RAS is primed to spot and whatever elicits potent emotional triggers. Neither helps if your goal is to determine what’s actually true. The ways I’ve found to get around these issues:
•Develop an intuition for which data point, article, or book to focus on. Many successful analysts (e.g., in finance) have told me they have a similar intuitive capacity.
•Get a natural sense of the biases behind different sources — every source has them, and if you can be conscious of it, it makes it much easier to benefit from studying them.
•Recognize diminishing returns (e.g., I stopped reading genres of literature or news once I saw its repetitive nature had reached a point I wasn’t really learning any new information).
•Drill to the core of what you’re reading about. This is the same process I use with patients (and for heart-centered writing).
•Always consider if what’s presented can justify the claim or they are simply unclear data points arranged together to suggest something (a standard which can “prove” almost anything).
•Allow your mind to expand to become fully conscious of large amounts of information without withdrawing (e.g., I am only able to write many complex pieces when my mind loosens enough for this expansion to occur). This is the most important and often hardest skill to develop, and I’ve often found avoiding substances, rejuvenating the nervous system, having healthy sleep, using blue light filters (e.g., f.lux13), and avoiding unhealthy lighting (e.g., fluorescent tubes) all help.
Our modern era is fraught with challenges never seen before in history, and it is necessary for us to navigate it with clarity and balance — particularly since our actions in this hyper-connected era have become immensely impactful and able to easily ripple far into the future. I thank each of you for being on this journey with me.
Author’s Note: This is an abridged version of a longer article which goes into greater details on the points mentioned here. That article, along with additional links and references can be read here.
