Latest news with #medicalJournals
Entrepreneur
22-07-2025
- Health
- Entrepreneur
From Misdiagnosis to Mission: How One Man's Ordeal Became a Blueprint for Perseverance
What followed was not just a lapse in judgment; it was a decades-long system failure. Dean became the unseen patient. The ignored anomaly. No one had time to read the story. But like any great founder building something against the odds, he—and his tenacious family—refused to give up. Opinions expressed by Entrepreneur contributors are their own. You're reading Entrepreneur India, an international franchise of Entrepreneur Media. When Dean Gregorie first developed a small hump below his neck at age sixteen, few paid it any mind. His mother, though, saw more. Weight gain. The round face. The bone-deep fatigue. To her, it spelled something far more complex: Cushing's disease. But when she voiced her concerns, doctors smiled politely and waved them off. "Teenagers gain weight," they said. What followed was not just a lapse in judgment; it was a decades-long system failure. Dean became the unseen patient. The ignored anomaly. No one had time to read the story. But like any great founder building something against the odds, he—and his tenacious family—refused to give up. Seeing What Others Miss The early symptoms were dismissed with lazy diagnoses: poor diet, lack of exercise, and normal adolescence. But Helen Gregorie was relentless. She scoured medical journals. Dug through case studies. Her instincts shouted, "Cushing's." But doctors, operating within conventional playbooks, refused to explore a rare diagnosis. In startup parlance, they ignored the outlier data, clinging to averages instead of curiosity. Dean was a patient who was overlooked not because of ambiguity, but because of predictability. If he had been a product, he would've been shut down in beta without anyone reading the specs. The Burn Cost of Delay Over the next two decades, Dean cycled through over fifty medical professionals. His symptoms worsened: purple striations, skyrocketing blood pressure, relentless fatigue. And yet the narrative never changed. "Lifestyle," they told him. Imagine pitching the same idea to dozens of venture capitalists, each one dismissing it for a reason you know isn't true. Dean wasn't lazy or noncompliant. He was fighting a disease no one bothered to look for. Still, he climbed the corporate ladder in the automotive coatings industry. He earned promotions. He delivered results. But his body was breaking. And behind every workday win, there was a night spent battling exhaustion, shame, and the creeping belief that maybe it really was his fault. A Systemic Breakdown By 2013, his body sent a blunt memo: collapse. Dean landed in the ICU with diabetic ketoacidosis. An endocrinologist was consulted, but not to solve the underlying mystery—just the emergency. Despite glaring signs—signs his family had documented in detail—no one ordered a test for Cushing's. Even after introducing a second endocrinologist, even after infections ravaged his system, even as his skin tore in a workplace fall, nothing changed. It wasn't until 2019 that a single primary care physician broke the inertia. He reviewed his whole history, acknowledged the pattern, and ordered the cortisol tests that would finally unveil the truth: Cushing's disease. Twenty-three years after it all began. Recovery Is Not Linear The tumor was removed in 2020. But there was no triumphant return, no swift rebound. Recovery was glacial. Dean's body, once flooded with cortisol, was suddenly starved of it. Cortisol had to be administered by medication. Energy flatlined. Nights stretched long and restless. Then came the back pain, unrelenting and tied to years of untreated structural damage. "There wasn't a morning I woke up feeling better," Dean says. "There were just mornings I woke up and decided to try again." Sound familiar? Founders know this rhythm. Recovery isn't always exponential growth; it's the grind. The grit. The decision to show up despite the metrics still being red. Turning Pain into Platform This book, Surviving Cushing's Disease: A Young Man's Journey, is Dean's first act of advocacy. Not a TED Talk. Not a foundation. Just this: a deeply personal, unapologetic account of what it means to be invisible in a system designed to treat averages, not anomalies. In its pages, the symptoms of Cushing's—unexplained weight gain, thinning skin, recurrent infections—are given shape and language. Not to diagnose, but to awaken awareness. Dean's story is not a callout. It's a call forward. Startups, Survivors, and Second Opinions Entrepreneurs can draw from Dean's journey as much as patients can: Follow the fringe data : When something feels off—even if others don't see it—pursue it. : When something feels off—even if others don't see it—pursue it. Pressure test the system : Experts are invaluable. But they are not infallible. : Experts are invaluable. But they are not infallible. Leverage the pain: Your hardest chapters may become your most powerful pages. Because sometimes, the most resilient visionaries don't wear lanyards or give keynotes. They survive in silence for years. Then one day, they write. And someone else learns how to speak up. Click here for Amazon Website:
Medscape
10-06-2025
- Politics
- Medscape
HHS Journal Ban Won't Stop Corruption — It'll Make It Worse
Robert F. Kennedy Jr has threatened to bar federal scientists from publishing in top medical journals. This move risks backfiring on two major fronts. First, it will only accelerate private industry's sway over the scientific record. Second, launching new, government-run journals will demand vast resources and years of effort — and still won't earn the credibility of established publications. With nearly five decades in medical and scientific writing, editing, and publishing — across nonprofit and commercial organizations, legacy print and digital platforms, and both subscription-based and open-access models — I write from experience. To see the flaws in Kennedy's proposal, we need to understand what works and what doesn't in science publishing. Primary, peer-reviewed medical/scientific literature has evolved and thrived in a culture of self-criticism, through letters columns, corrections, retractions, and open debate. The New England Journal of Medicine (NEJM) , The Lancet , and JAMA remain the gold standards in medical publishing because of their rigorous peer review, global reach, and editorial independence from government or corporate influence. Here's where RFK Jr's main objection with the current system seems to lie. The Secretary has portrayed medical journals as hopelessly corrupted by industry. Extensive firewalls, guidelines, and rules have been established to govern the relationship of industry to medical journals. They rest largely on honest disclosure with authors, editors, and readers paying attention. Cracks in those barriers are not unknown. But the solution lies in strengthening these firewalls, not sidelining them. A ban on government employees from submitting to NEJM , The Lancet , JAMA, and other top-tier titles will deliver more power — not less — to pharmaceutical, device, and biotech companies to set the scientific agenda. Far from reducing 'corruption,' such a misguided policy would magnify the role of the very stakeholders RFK Jr decries. And if federal grant support diminishes, the research that is published will become increasingly supported by industry, compounding the mistake. The notion of creating new government-owned medical journals from scratch is not an absurd idea. But Kennedy's illusion of fast-tracking NIH-affiliated "preeminent journals" that stamp federal‐funded work as unquestionably legitimate is a gargantuan endeavor. Building editorial boards, peer‐review standards, submission platforms, indexation in PubMed, and marketing to researchers worldwide takes years of work from countless individuals and would cost a substantial amount of money. Even then, a journal's reputation rests on trust and perceived independence. Readers judge not only the science but also the integrity of the editor–owner relationship. The hazard is that the owner (the government) would have to be trusted by the readers, or no one would bother reading these publications. A government 'house organ' would likely be viewed skeptically if the federal government can withdraw or prohibit publications at will. Banning federal scientists from submitting to journals the administration doesn't like does not cleanse the literature of industry influence — it deepens those ties. And while government-run journals might one day exist, they won't arrive fully baked, credible, or conflict-free. Better to invest in the proven mechanisms of editorial independence, enhanced peer review, and clearer disclosure than in a rushed, state-controlled alternative destined to struggle for trust and impact. If RFK Jr wants a better list of reforms, here's what I suggest: Take on predatory publishers and their fake journals, fake authors, and fabricated institutions and references — a threat that existed even before generative chat powered by artificial intelligence (AI). Take aim at rapacious mainstream publishers, whose excess profit margins and subscription price gouging represent a financial drain on researchers, readers, and academic libraries. Crack down on excessively large author fees to have an article considered/reviewed/published. Promote the publication of reproducibility studies. Raise the alarm about the use of AI in peer view and the creation of manuscripts — including the data in them. These steps aren't as sexy as proclaiming publishing bans for government scientist or launching new journals on whose mastheads you can put your own name. But they have the virtues of solving real problems and not making existing problems worse — which, as a physician, seems like something I've heard before somewhere …
