Are politics and medicine entwined? A report published this week in JAMA Forum suggests these two fields actually have connections. Are you scratching your head? The link between the two is revealed in a few snippets from that report. Read the following:

In the nearly 50 years that Gallup has queried the public about trust in professions, 2025 has broken new ground and overall trust in physicians has never been lower. Between 2019 and 2024, trust in physicians decreased by 12 percentage points, even after a surge in 2020.¹ The pattern of decline reveals social and economic fault lines; trust has fallen most among people without a college degree, who are overwhelmingly Republican. Between 2019 and 2024, trust in physicians decreased by 13 percentage points among those who have not attended college compared with 9 percentage points among those with a college degree. Only 44% of Republicans have high/very high trust in physicians compared with 65% of Democrats.

Popup thought: Are the people without a college degree Republican because they are under-educated? Or because they haven’t been swayed by courses taught by overwhelmingly liberal college faculties?

Here I’ll add a clarifying note about the polling mentioned above: The question Gallup pollsters asked responders to answer was to rate the “honesty and ethical standards” of various occupations.” Responses to that question were assumed to reflect the trustworthyness of various professions. (I’ll paste a graph showing the large range of occupations included in the poll at the end of this post, so you can see how highly your line of work is trusted. Be prepared! Some trust ratings are brutal.)

There may be another reason for the disparity of results between Republicans and Democrats. From my observations people tend to get much of their political information from sources they usually agree with. I would bet that more Democrats than Republicans read the New York Times, and vice versa for the New York Sun. Similar rankings seem likely for TV viewers watching MSNBC or Fox.

This new JAMA Forum article I mentioned at the beginning does give one clear example of how politics can influence one’s opinion.  “Anthony Fauci, MD, became a household name and was viewed by some as a dedicated public servant and by others as a politically motivated figure who misled the public. Research by Political Scientists Neil O’Brian and Thomas Kent showed that reading a news story about Fauci being aligned with the Democratic party led Trump voters to evince lower trust in their personal physician and less confidence in the medical system, whereas voters for Biden had increased trust in both.” Not surprisingly, an asset for one party became a liability for the other.

Woolly-headed reasoning?

 The authors, Marcella Alsan, MD, PhD, at Stanford University, and David Cutler, PhD, at Harvard, dissect the influence of these political differences at some length (and at times with what I would argue is woolly-headed reasoning). They also offer suggestions on how physicians might improve the trust of their patients, focusing their discussion primarily on socioeconomic factors that they believe have played a role. (They seem to have forgotten that similar socioeconomic factors were present 50 years ago when trust of physicians was much higher.) Should you be interested in their article, it can be found by clicking here. Warning: be prepared for some academic nonsense, such as a discussion suggesting that patient trust of doctors can be increased by having medical journals solicit stories from physicians working in specialties, geographic areas, or with populations where trust is low. (Readers aren’t told how those stories would improve trust in anyone’s doctor.)

Nor do the authors mention what has ignited seismic changes in medical practice, medical affordability, and satisfaction with our medical care. All of these took a big hit when the government nosed into healthcare. Big Gov produced big changes! For example, health care spending,  which was was $550 per person in 1975, jumped to more than $11,000 per person in 2017. That’s right, health spending increased by more than 2,000% over 42 years (click here for a post about that). Beyond that, governmental and insurance company regulations have loaded physicians with an avalanche of time-consuming paper work, a burden involved in countless cases of burnout. Not surprisingly, a stressed doctor isn’t the easiest one to trust. (See here for a discussion of physician burnout.) And let’s not forget that those medical insurance companies have generously contributed to blowup in our medical costs. (See here for some thoughts on that.)

Cheer for the nurses!

But the news is not all bad for our doctors. As Alsan and Cutler tell us, “Physicians are still more trusted than most professionals. Television reporters, members of Congress, and lobbyists rank particularly low; trust in judges and members of the clergy has dropped the most since 2000. Nurses continue to be ranked as the most trusted profession, which has been true for a quarter century.”