There’s an organic vegan foods place right down the street from me. They have tasty and healthy foods, and the prices aren’t bad. On my first visit there, actually at another location due to renovations, I read some woo on the menu about the enzymes in raw foods and their healing effects, as well as the harm caused by chemicals produced when foods are cooked. I could kind of see a point there, but it’s a weak point.

The second time I visited, then nice and close to my apartment in their normal location, I was waiting at the register, staring over the woman working there’s shoulder, where I found a sign with big letters exclaiming that “Doctors kill people” or some other such nonsense. I should go take a picture. It then quoted very selectively an article from the Journal of the American Medical Association (commonly JAMA) on death from iatrogenic causes (i.e. death caused by a health care provider’s mistake(s)). Combined with other BS written in the menu and various places throughout the store, the conclusion the customer should make is clear: Doctors are wringing you for money and sometimes killing you and you fall right into their trap when you don’t eat raw (live) foods.

Imagine how I felt as I handed over my School of Medicine (I’m a grad student in the SoM, not a medical student) ID for my student discount.

To you, dear readers, the folly of all of this should be self-evident. Firstly, how many people would even be alive to die of iatrogenic causes without modern medicine? That’s not to say that mistakes aren’t made, or to excuse them, but indicting the whole of modern medicine and abandoning it to imbibe solely in raw foods is lunacy. Secondly, who published the article? The JAMA! It’s a self-policing article! If anything that should inspire more confidence in modern medicine, not less.

Despite my love of good vegetarian food, that’s not a place that gets my money anymore.