Your family doctor may be the person you trust the most in this world. My father was a physician in a small North Dakota town. He delivered babies, treated fractures, fitted eyeglasses, and on one occasion had to amputate an arm mangled in a threshing machine. My medical career was spent in large urban hospitals, though I hope I lived up to his standard at least to some degree.

But when I was injured in a head-on collision, I found to my dismay that many of my colleagues offered little support, much less empathy. It this was true for a colleague, what could ordinary patients expect, with whom the doctors had much less in common?

So when people look to physicians, especially to “experts” like Dr. Fauci who have not actually treated a patient since their training a half-century ago, I want to say, “Hold on there, are you sure you trust these guys to have your best interests in mind? Consider two points:

• Read about all the treatments used in the past that we now know were ineffective or even harmful. How many were pleasant, honey for example, or warm packs? Not many. Most were unpleasant, even painful.

There was bleeding, which both common sense and the Bible tell us is dangerous. George Washington went riding in the rain and fell ill. He had trouble breathing, perhaps due to a throat abscess. His doctors bled him repeatedly but he got weaker. Did they conclude bleeding was dangerous and stop it? Did they at least conclude it was useless? No, they concluded they hadn’t bled him enough and continued bleeding him until he died. He was 67. Does this sound just a bit like lockdowns, vaccines, and other current remedies?

• Of all professions in Germany in the 1930s, physicians had the highest percent of Nazi Party members. Not army officers, engineers, or lawyers, but doctors. Years of training in a rigid hierarchy prepared them to take orders, regardless of what those orders were. The Nazi program of euthanasia of the mentally or physically disabled was strongly opposed by churches, but there was no organized opposition by physicians.

There was no shortage of physicians willing to serve in concentration camps. Josef Mengele had both an MD and a PhD, which did not prevent him from doing experiments on unanesthetized inmates in Auschwitz, as well as selecting inmates for the gas chambers. Individual physicians may be the most moral people you can find. But if you consider relying on the medical profession as a group, remember Dr. Mengele.