From food to pharma, Health Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. took on all the suspects he’s long maligned in a report on health threats to kids — along with one unexpected one: Doctors.
Laced throughout the report from Kennedy’s Make America Healthy Again Commission are accusations against doctors — for reportedly being influenced by the pharmaceutical industry to overprescribe certain medications and for failing to treat the root causes of disease. The report, released Thursday, calls out the American Medical Association, the country’s leading physicians’ group, by name for adopting a policy the report claims discourages providers from deviating from standard practices and scientists from studying adverse vaccine reactions.
The surprise focus on physicians — softened in the report by calling them “well-intended” — comes after weeks of furious lobbying by the food, pharmaceutical and farming industries who feared being demonized by the review.
Instead, the report adopts an argument popularized by Kennedy and many of his colleagues in President Donald Trump’s health department during the Covid pandemic, that the medical profession is dominated by groupthink and has been swayed by corporate interests. Doctors fear speaking out against conventional guidance, the theory goes, for fear of being ostracized. That, the report says, has curtailed research into the causes of chronic disease.
“This report brings to the forefront a body of scientific research that has been largely ignored as we have been so busy as doctors in the modern health care system, billing and coding and seeing patients in short visits,” Food and Drug Administration Commissioner Marty Makary told reporters in a call Thursday.
The American Medical Association did not respond to requests for comment.
Kennedy has long opposed corporate influence in the health care world and has surrounded himself with deputies, including Makary and National Institutes of Health Director Jay Bhattacharya, who gained notice for criticizing the public health establishment for government missteps during the pandemic. They’ve claimed that a culture of fear has prevented scientists and other public health experts from questioning why autism case rates have increased.
“Scientists are often afraid to ask fundamental questions, for fear that they might get an answer that will lead to them being smeared by the press, being attacked by fellow scientists and losing their reputation,” Bhattacharya told reporters Thursday. He also called much of medical literature “unreliable.”
The review, which Trump ordered Kennedy to pursue in February to assess chronic disease among children and seek solutions, says the rise in illness is likely the result of ultraprocessed food, exposure to chemicals, lack of exercise, stress and overprescription of drugs. It says physicians who diagnose and treat children with conditions including attention-deficit/hyperactivity disorder and depression are prone to “over-pathologization” of mental health issues in youth, preferring to medicate kids instead of trying to find the underlying causes of their illnesses and alleviate them.
It also criticizes industry-supported education of physicians, which it says “typically promotes drugs, encourages off-label prescribing, and contributes to polypharmacy in kids,” which occurs when they take several medications at once.
The report calls out the AMA for adopting a policy calling for licensing boards to take disciplinary action against physicians who spread misinformation, an issue that became heated during the pandemic when some sought to punish doctors who prescribed off-label treatments like ivermectin and hydroxychloroquine for Covid.
Doctors often experiment in this way, but the FDA said the treatments weren’t effective and discouraged their use.
Punishing doctors for deviating from government guidance “discourages practitioners from conducting or discussing nuanced risk-benefit analyses that deviate from official guidelines — even when those analyses may be clinically appropriate,” the report says.