First, Do No Harm: Why Medical Experts Cannot Stay in Their Lane

The Modern Heretic

In the last few weeks, we have watched something familiar yet utterly appalling unfold.

A Prominent longevity physician’s repulsive emails to Jeffrey Epstein were exposed. A major television network continues to retain him as an advisor.

Storied medical institutions were outed for having solicited and accepting donations from Epstein and his cronies.

The President posted disgusting, overtly racist memes.

And then, another name.

Deepak Chopra — a figure many in integrative medicine have studied with, learned from, cited — also appears in the Epstein files.

As a student of Ayurveda, he was my first teacher.

I remember the reverence. The sense of ancient wisdom translated for modern minds. The invitation to see the body as sacred.

And I am sickened.

Not because humans are imperfect — we all are — but because proximity to exploitation demands moral clarity.

When figures associated with healing appear adjacent to harm, something fractures.

Trust fractures. Safety fractures. The symbolic container fractures.

And once again, many of us in medicine are told:

Stay in your lane. Don’t make this political. Your job is health, not culture.

But here is the truth:

Women’s bodies have always been political.

And so has medicine.

The Myth of Neutrality — and the Biology of Living Through This

Medicine likes to imagine itself as neutral ground. Sterile. Objective. Above the fray.

But neutrality, in moments like this, is often proximity to power without accountability.

What we have witnessed in recent days — powerful men shielded, racist rhetoric minimized, alliances rationalized, misogyny reframed as personality — is not cultural spectacle.

It is a stress exposure.

For many women. For many survivors. For many people whose bodies have historically been targets of exploitation or exclusion.

The nervous system does not process these events as abstract discourse. It processes them as cues of safety or threat.

When sexual exploitation surfaces in elite circles and is met with equivocation, survivors’ bodies register danger.

When racist memes circulate from positions of influence, bodies shaped by racial trauma register vigilance.

When medical leaders align with power while avoiding moral clarity, trust fractures — and trust is itself a determinant of health.

This is not metaphor.

It is neurobiology.

Repeated exposure to injustice, gaslighting, and power asymmetry drives sympathetic activation. It alters cortisol rhythms, inflammatory signaling, sleep architecture, blood pressure, glucose metabolism, reproductive hormones.

The stress of living inside systems that commodify women’s bodies and devalue marginalized ones is not ideological.

It is physiological.

Women’s bodies have always been socially negotiated — legislated, aestheticized, regulated, marketed, dismissed. Which means when cultural power flexes in ways that echo exploitation or racial hierarchy, our biology responds.

If an exposure drives inflammation, it is medical. If an environment alters stress hormones, it is medical. If leadership culture erodes patient trust, it is medical.

We cannot treat downstream disease while refusing to name upstream harm.

And this is precisely why “staying in our lane” is a myth.

Because when you are a physician with a public platform, your lane includes the ecosystem that shapes health itself.

When Medical Experts Have Platforms

If your lane includes the ecosystem that shapes health, then your responsibility does too.

When you are a physician with a public platform — a podcast, a television contract, a bestselling book, a large social following — you are not simply a clinician.

You are a signal.

You shape what is normalized. You shape what is minimized. You shape what is named — and what is avoided.

Your silence communicates values. Your affiliations communicate values. Your willingness to confront or sidestep uncomfortable truths communicates values.

“First, do no harm” does not begin and end at the clinic door.

It applies to the cultural environments we legitimize. It applies to the leaders we amplify. It applies to the misogyny we excuse as charisma. It applies to the racism we dismiss as humor.

Public health is shaped by power, trust, and moral courage.

When medical experts align with influence while declining to address harm, we are not being neutral.

We are stabilizing a system.

And stabilization, in the presence of injustice, is not apolitical.

It is participatory.

This does not require partisan rage.

It requires coherence.

If we speak about longevity but ignore trauma, we fragment the truth. If we optimize hormones but avoid structural stressors, we offer half-medicine. If we build brands on credibility but sidestep moral clarity, we erode trust — and trust, again, is biological.

The oath is not situational.

Integrity cannot be compartmentalized.

If we are willing to educate the public on VO₂ max and ApoB, we must also be willing to speak about the stress physiology of racism, misogyny, and sexual violence.

They are not distractions from medicine.

They are determinants of it.

The Personal Has Always Been Political

Women’s bodies have always been commodified.

From reproductive control to beauty standards to wellness marketing to the monetization of trauma narratives, the female body is currency in systems built largely by men.

To say “don’t bring politics into medicine” is to ask women to ignore the structures that determine who is believed, who is funded, who is protected, who is discarded.

It is to pretend our bodies are not sites of regulation and projection.

They are.

They always have been.

As a White-Presenting Woman Physician

I am white-presenting. I hold MD after my name. I have authority and a platform.

I do not consider myself simply white. My lineage is more complex than that. But the world reads me as white. And that confers power and insulation.

That reality obligates me.

It obligates me to name racial bias when I see it. To speak to the health impacts of sexual violence. To refuse neutrality when neutrality protects harm. To reflect lived experiences — not only my own, but those of the women who trust me with theirs.

Authority without accountability is dangerous.

Healing without truth is fragile.

Women Have Always Carried Medicine

In my research for Plant Medicine: A Modern Science-Based Guide to Ancient Wisdom, Medicinal Herbs and Healing Plants, I keep encountering the same truth:

Across cultures and centuries, women preserved healing knowledge even when institutions silenced them.

They gathered herbs when systems failed. They created safety when structures were unsafe. They translated chaos into coherence.

They understood what modern medicine is only now quantifying:

You cannot separate the social from the somatic.

The body metabolizes injustice. The nervous system encodes safety or threat. Healing requires truth.

The Invitation

This is not about virtue signaling.

It is about integrity.

If we are going to speak about longevity, we must speak about trauma. If we are going to speak about hormones, we must speak about stress and systemic bias. If we are going to speak about resilience, we must acknowledge what women are being asked to metabolize.

My commitment is this:

To provide science. To provide context. To provide a safe container. To provide skills rooted in both data and ancient wisdom. To tell the truth — even when it disappoints us.

Especially when it disappoints us.

Because the personal is political. The political is physiological. And medicine, at its best, is brave.

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