Quick Study* Analysis: Is Calley Means Making It All Up? (A Fisking)

tl;dr: You have to get the basics right to get the subtle facts correct.

David Gornoski asked me about this video clip this morning:

(Video and transcript in the post by Camus.)

It’s apparently a clip of Means being interviewed by Joe Rogan.

My reply started: “Seems to be all BS.”

Let’s go through it, as far as I bothered to go (bold and italic emphasis all from from (Camus, 2024):

“There's a couple really important dates that happened that are historical that I think set this structure really intentionally….”

“The first was 1909, the Flexner Report.”

OK, it wasn’t 1909, but 1910. Not very material, but as we shall see, falsus in uno, falsus in omnibus (false in one thing, false in everything).

“So literally, John D. Rockefeller's personal lawyer wrote the report for Congress that basically set the standard today for medical education.”

Gee, if you’re going to go downhill, do it all at once, I guess.

• He wasn’t Rockefeller’s personal lawyer, he was an educator who ran a school.
  “Abraham Flexner (1866-1959) was an educator and scholar par excellence, but not a physician.” (Chapman, 1974)

• He didn’t write the report for Congress, but for the Carnegie Foundation for the Advancement of Teaching.

(Flexner, 1910)

Rockefeller did finance part of the implementation of the report:

“Two years after the Report appeared, Flexner joined the staff of the General Education Board, which had been established with Rockefeller money in 1902, and immediately brought medical education into focus. In 1919 he persuaded Rockefeller to set aside $50 million for the specific purpose of implementing the Report's recommendations and with this backing he set to work with a will.” (Chapman, 1974)

There’s no evidence I can find that Rockefeller had any influence on the content of the report.

Much of it had already been done before the report had been published.

“The length of medical education was estimated to be four years, on top of basic science education and primary college graduation, a requirement which the Committee on Continuous Medical Education (CME) of the American Medical Association (AMA) had already agreed upon in 1905.” (Stahnisch, 2012)

Means continues:

“And it literally says, in the binding guidelines, that holistic health and nutrition and anything about interconnectedness of the body is pseudoscience.”

There are no “binding guidelines”.

(Flexner, 1910)

Flexner does go through “pseudoscience” in chapter 10, “Medical Sects”. He describes

• Allopathy

• Homeopathy

• Eclecticism

• Physiomedicalism

• Osteopathy

“Scientific medicine therefore brushes aside all historic dogma,” (Flexner, 1910), which includes allopathy. It’s an interesting section, but there isn’t a single thing there which fits Means’ description, or to which I would object.

“It says we need to name the condition and cut it out or prescribe it.”

I can’t find that part.

“So they're still going by the recommendations of 1909. We still follow the Flexner report.”

We’d probably be better off if we were, but we have deviated from it.

“The Flexner Report of 1910 and Its Impact on Complementary and Alternative Medicine and Psychiatry in North America in the 20th Century” (Stahnisch, 2012), has a slightly different view.

“In general, the report triggered a much-needed reform in the standards, organization, and curriculum of North American medical schools and also resulted in a strong emphasis on formal analytic reasoning and positivism in medical science.” (Stahnisch, 2012)

It suggests that the impact of the the Flexner report was largely positive:

“The development of Complementary and Alternative Medicine and Psychiatry after the publication of Flexner’s 1910 Report to the American Carnegie Foundation was manifold and in certain respects was also fruitful. …Flexner’s work led to the closure of colleges, hospitals, and programs in which “unconscionable quacks” were working who had been “a disgrace to the State,” as the author of the report wrote.” (Stahnisch, 2012)

Means summarizes:

“Some policy, I mean, and we can get to policies, but like rescinding the Flexner report and having updated scientific education and standard of care guidelines based on what we've learned since 1909 about the majesty of the interconnectedness of our body is a really good first start because we're binding under a law, just demonstrably, just like, again, not conspiratorial. John D. Rockefeller's personal lawyer wrote this report.”

Again, to be polite, baloney.

“Why? Because John D. Rockefeller is the father of the pharmaceutical industry and created pharmaceuticals from byproducts of oil production and was the first investor into Johns Hopkins and other major medical schools, University of Chicago and started the modern education program for health.”

This is more nonsense. Johns Hopkins was named after the man who financed/founded the university, in 1873 and it was not Rockefeller, who at the time was engaged in his business, not philanthropy. He was not the founder of the pharmaceutical industry, it long predated his birth in 1839.

Rockefeller did have an enormous impact on early Medicine, and from what I have read, it was almost all positive.

Unless you like unscientific, ineffective quackery.

“And the medical schools that he created were basically a distribution system to him.”

Means is spreading falsehood after falsehood in this interview. Camus describes it as a “great history lesson by Calley Means”, but it’s all baloney.

I could go on, but you get the point. And that’s just the start of the segment!

(Camus, 2024)

* Yes, this isn’t quite a study, but nevertheless…

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References

Camus [@newstart_2024]. (2024, October 22). Great history lesson by Calley Means: "There’s a couple really important dates that happened that are historical that I think set this structure really intentionally. The first was 1909, the Flexner Report. So literally, John D. Rockefeller’s personal lawyer wrote the report for https://t.co/RSCfeUJt1Y [Tweet]. Twitter. https://x.com/newstart_2024/status/1848777977456464075

Chapman, C. B. (1974). “The Flexner Report” by Abraham Flexner. Daedalus, 103(1), 105–117. https://www.jstor.org/stable/20024193

Flexner, A. (1910). Medical Education in the United States and Canada: A Report to the Carnegie Foundation for the Advancement of Teaching. Wm. F. Fell Co. http://archive.carnegiefoundation.org/publications/pdfs/elibrary/Carnegie_Flexner_Report.pdf

Stahnisch, F. W., & Verhoef, M. (2012). The Flexner Report of 1910 and Its Impact on Complementary and Alternative Medicine and Psychiatry in North America in the 20th Century. Evidence-Based Complementary and Alternative Medicine : eCAM, 2012, 647896. https://doi.org/10.1155/2012/647896