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I particularly enjoy the way he handles those who attempt to falsely attribute to him thoughts and ideas he does not hold, because the ardently leftist crowd wants so desperately to find him guilty of an unreasonable political correctness violation (the far right is also capable of false thought attribution, because they, too, want to come up with a reasonable rationale for being hateful). This is a perennial problem with answers posted in response to questions on Quora (attributing some awful agenda to the author of a question when the question makes the answering party consider an uncomfortable truth about their rigid ideology that creates an intolerable dissonance).Here’s the best article I’ve seen about him (surprisingly, coming from the far-left Israeli newspaper, Haaretz!):Jordan Peterson. Has a simple explanation for his extraordinary popularity: In a culture that sanctifies victimhood, he proposes that people confront life’s inevitable pain unflinchingly. Lars Pehrson/SvD / TT NEWS AGENCJordan Peterson, PC's Fiercest Critic, Explains Why You Should Stand Up StraightHaaretz talks with the provocative professor turned influential YouTube philosopher about why the world would be a better place if we’d just go back to good old Enlightenment valuesByGadi TaubFeb 21, 2019ZURICH – What does it mean to be a star in the intellectual world? If an academic is a star in his lifetime, it usually means that he’s invited to lots of conferences, cited in professional journals or even in the public media. Sometimes, more rarely, he also writes books that reach an audience beyond a small circle of experts. Say, someone like Yuval Noah Harari or Francis Fukayama. But Jordan Peterson, the Canadian psychology professor from the University of Toronto, has gained fame on a much larger scale. We’re talking rock star, a bona-fide celebrity.Jordan Peterson. 'I’m a very practical person so I always look for the simplest possible approach to a problem' MARK SOMMERFELD / NYTHis 2018 book “12 Rules for Life: An Antidote to Chaos” has sold two million copies in 45 languages. The accompanying lecture tour has been selling out worldwide. But YouTube is Peterson’s main platform and his videos rack up tens of millions of views.We caught up with him in Zurich a few weeks ago where his daughter Mikhaila (named for Gorbachev) had surgery. Mikhaila is also his business manager, which is quite a job. This is an international operation that involves event production, marketing and PR. Haaretz was given a limited window between media interviews and a lecture Peterson was due to give that evening.The 1,200-seat Volkshaus concert hall is sold out. At 7:45 P.M., 1,200 Swiss men and women wait in an orderly line that winds down the block. Across the street, there is a protest against Peterson, so the Zurich police are deployed there.The doors open and the hall quickly fills. Security personnel with walkie-talkies roam the aisles, alert for possible disrupters willing to pay $75 a ticket for the chance to interrupt Peterson’s talk. Finally, an unseen announcer intones, “Ladies and gentlemen … Jordan B. Pe-ter-son!!!” and a hearty round of applause erupts. Then Peterson, tall and slim, wearing a three-piece suit, takes the stage, wearing one of those Madonna-style cheek mics.Then comes a 90-minute lecture about why, in so many folk tales, femininity symbolizes chaos while masculinity symbolizes order, one of Peterson's main themes. Like many other lectures by him, this one too features his idiosyncratic mixture of evolutionary biology, empirical social sciences research, his experiences as a practicing clinical psychologist and Jungian cultural analysis.A crowd hears Jordan Peterson speak in Toronto, 2018. Mark Sommerfeld / NYTThe components are integrated conversationally, with passion, for Peterson comes across as a sensitive and emotional man (at the end of the interview, we had to stop for a moment when he got choked up while speaking about his children).But ultimately, if you consider his profound respect for religious faith, his dislike of revolutions and social engineering, his faith in meritocracy, and what Unamuno called “the tragic sense of life” – Peterson can be seen as following in the tradition of Edmund Burke: conservatism that is anti-revolutionary but not anti-liberal. And yet, labeling him a conservative, as so many of his detractors do, is also imprecise. In his view we can't make do with order, for a measure of chaos is essential to innovation, creativity, adaptability.Peterson has a simple explanation for his extraordinary popularity: In a culture that sanctifies victimhood, he proposes that people confront life’s inevitable pain unflinchingly. So here is Peterson in a nutshell: Life is suffering. We can only bear it if life has meaning. And meaning is created when you take responsibility – by confronting hardship and firmly steering your ship forward, even against waves that will, ultimately, overwhelm it. This is a message people are “hungry for” in our times, he says.Peterson has focused on the subject of meaning for many years. His previous book was entitled “Maps of Meaning: The Architecture of Belief.” We’ll come to this. But first, I suggested to him another reason for his celebrity: We're all living under a tyranny of political correctness and not only did you defy it, you also never cede the higher moral ground to its champions. You’re not apologetic in front of the identity crowd.“No, I’m not I’m not a fan of the identity crowd people… Learning an ideology that a halfwit could master in two weeks doesn’t make you moral.”But that’s the spirit of the times. For example, students increasingly begin questions with "as a": "As a member of this group, I am offended that you say this or that."Jordan Peterson at an event in Toronto. The anger Peterson arouses derives in part, undoubtedly, from his rejection of the idea that gender roles are wholly the result of social construction.MARK SOMMERFELD / NYT“I’d say I don’t answer questions formulated in that manner. Let’s say your goal is to tell the truth and someone asks you a question that has a trap in it. I’m not playing that game. That doesn’t mean I would necessarily be smart enough all the time to notice that was happening and to formulate that response; it's happened to me with journalists all the time.”The American Psychological Association recently published new guidelines for psychological practice with boys and men that says “traditional masculinity" is "harmful.” You were not very happy with this.“I’m absolutely ashamed to call myself a psychologist in the aftermath. They said it was guidelines for the psychological treatment of boys and men, but that isn’t what it is; it’s a social justice treatise on how you better think if you’re a psychologist if you don’t want to be pursued.”But is there really nothing to be said for this approach? How about curbing aggressive instincts?“Definitely not! You just can’t damn instincts. It’s not helpful. You’re going to get rid of aggression? You don’t like ambition? You don’t like purpose? You don’t like persistence? … I think [the authors of the APA article] justify reprehensible weakness by an all-out assault on the idea of strength and competence, and that they clothed that in virtue… It’s a nauseating document.”Peterson returns to this topic during his talk at the Volkshaus. An excess of masculinity isn’t the problem – that is an “anti-truth,” he says. Because one of the most reliable predictors of criminal behavior is fatherlessness. That is by far “the biggest risk factor for long-term delinquency antisocial behavior and violent criminality.”No, I won’t shut up!Jordan Peterson was born in 1962 in Edmonton, Alberta, and grew up in Fairview, in the far north of Canada. The winters of his youth were long, dark and difficult, with Siberian temperatures lasting for days on end. Perhaps that's one key to his tragic outlook on life.His father Walter, a taciturn teacher, used to go hunting in the Northern Plains and sometimes took his son along. Jordan’s father taught him to read when he was just 3, which he remembers as a pleasant experience. His mother Beverley was a nurse but worked as a librarian. A woman with a good sense of humor, her son liked to make her laugh. Peterson has described her as agreeable, to the point where she often finds it hard to stand her ground.Jordan Peterson says young men attend his talks to turn their lives around - דלגAs he describes his own practice as a therapist, he is out to help his patients learn to do just that: stand their ground.At college, Peterson became enchanted with literature and philosophy, and was drawn to the works of thinkers with a profound sense of the tragic: Solzhenitsyn, Dostoevsky, Nietzsche, Carl Jung. The first subject he researched was modern totalitarianism, in an effort to understand how human beings could perpetrate such monumental horrors upon one another. The huge "piles of corpses” in the 20th century immunized him against utopian temptations. Then he turned to other subjects. He wrote his doctoral thesis in psychology on alcoholism, but became increasingly interested in culture and mythology, in the tradition inaugurated by Italian philosopher Giambattista Vico.For years, Peterson has been filming his courses and posting the videos on YouTube. One can thus join his University of Toronto students in pondering the deep and common patterns of meaning which, he believes, underlay all civilizations.But he really gained renown following Canada’s passage of Bill C-16 in 2017, which added “gender identity or expression” as a prohibited basis for discrimination, and advanced the demand that transgender people be addressed by their preferred pronoun. Peterson posted an hour-long YouTube video explaining why he wouldn’t agree to be told how to speak. In no time, of course, he was accused of being a transphobe, a misogynist, a racist, and later also an “mean white man.”It helped little that he said – repeatedly – that he addresses transgender students in his class in their preferred pronoun. He just would not accept the law that dictated how to speak. A huge uproar ensued. But Peterson's tone – at once assertive, unapologetic and patiently polite – effectively withstood the shrill self-righteousness of the guardians of the faith. To everyone's surprise, he never lost his balance.That took a lot of fortitude. In the dozens of interviews with him on YouTube, many of them hostile, the most recurring theme is probably this: “That’s not what I said.” Since political correctness is largely a game of exposing real and imagined prejudices – Aha! Gotcha! – putting words in someone’s mouth it is the name of the game. And so Peterson was accused of thinking, feeling and saying much that he never thought, felt or said.What was surprising about all this, was that the progressive tsunami failed to drown him. Instead, he surfed into the limelight. The tsunami actually made him a mega-celebrity.How is it that something meant to silence him ended up doing the opposite? I think this was, roughly, what was at work: Anyone who has listened to Peterson honestly knew he harbored no hatred of transgender people, gays, women or minorities. This was most obviously a false, and malicious, accusation. Peterson the therapist is against the cult of victimhood – not against victims. Because, in his view, making victimhood the center of identity is bound to backfire. It traps you, and prevents you from overcoming whatever your predicament may be.This being the case, the attempt to frame his critique of victimhood as a kind of defense of his "white male privilege" smacked of dishonesty. And so the more he was absurdly accused of racism or misogyny, the more it seemed to many that he was right. It became plain that social justice warriors were actually advising us all not to improve our lot, so as not to lose our precious victimhood.This was no longer just an argument: It morphed into political theater, a scene that repeats itself in numerous interviews as, resolutely and unapologetically, Peterson rebuffs attempts to attribute to him a position that is not his, malice that he does not harbor, mistakes he did not make. Again and again, he patently corrected his interlocutors: “That’s not what I said.”These endlessly repetitive verbal battles also illustrated the growing gap between the literal meaning of words like “racist,” “transphobe” and “misogynist,” and their function in popular discourse. They’ve become a means of silencing, rather than labels for actual opinions. As Israeli political scientist Dan Schueftan has quipped: The new meaning of the word “racist” is "I have no answer to your argument, but I demand that you shut up."Demonstrators hold signs in support of trans equality outside the White House on Oct. 22, 2018. BloombergAnd as the progressive attacks increasingly seemed less like arguments and more like attempts to silence Peterson, more and more people came to feel that his opposition to C-16 and his insistence on freedom of speech were not just necessary but actually urgent. After a while the subtext subsumed the text and it all boiled down to this: "Shut up!" and then, "No, I won’t shut up."Political correctness is a direct and steep slope from politeness to dishonesty and lies. And Peterson esposed the fact that we have begun to swear at truths we don't like, rather than facing them.And so between one “That’s not what I said” and another (“I didn’t say women are chaotic, I said that in many mythologies femininity symbolizes chaos”), Peterson has exposed the shame and self-censorship, the depth of conformism, and the lack of honestly and courage in our academia, our press, our political discourse. Which explains the tremendous hostility that he elicits.Capitalism vs. serotoninThe social media era has spawned the horror of online witch hunts, where anonymous accusations fly and virtual public executions proceed at lightning speed without anything like due process. But it has also opened up new options for defending oneself. When you have an audience like Peterson’s and the ability to reach it over the heads and under the noses of established media, when you’re borne aloft on huge waves of popularity – you can’t be easily silenced. Even a petition signed by 200 faculty members in 2017, calling for his dismissal from the University of Toronto, couldn’t budge him from his job.Not that he doesn't invite trouble, as with his recurrent attacks on the very heart of the contemporary hegemony. For example, the feminist axiom that we, in liberal democracies, live under an oppressive patriarchy. I didn’t ask him about this since it was a shame to waste our time on this conversation, which, I think, I can fake reasonably well by now, having heard him go through it so many times. It usually goes something like this:Peterson: Western society is not an oppressive patriarchal structure.Journalist: But don’t you agree that men hold most of the political power and most of the property?Jordan Peterson debate on the gender pay gap, campus protests and postmodernism - דלגPeterson: A small group of men hold it. Most men have little power, if at all. In fact, they are more disproportionately represented at the bottom of the social ladder. Nearly all deaths on the battlefield are of men. The vast majority of fatal workplace accidents – men. The vast majority of suicides, of homeless people, of prisoners – men. You want equal representation? How about equal representation in jail, or among coal miners or repairmen working with high-voltage wires?Then the journalist would ask: What about the gender pay gap?And Peterson would respond: There is no gender pay gap. That’s a statistical fiction.Journalist: Are you denying the fact that women earn less than men?Peterson: There is a discrepancy between because women work fewer hours on average, in professions that pay less, in less senior positions, and because they devote more time to their family. Very few men, and even fewer women, are prepared to sacrifice everything for the single-minded pursuit of a career.Journalists: Because our education system creates gender bias.Peterson: No. As freedom of choice increases, women turn more, not less, to "female" professions, as studies in Scandinavian countries have repeatedly shown.Journalist: So you’re saying that women are less talented.Peterson: That’s not what I said.And so on.The anger Peterson arouses derives in part, undoubtedly, from his rejection of the idea that gender roles are wholly the result of social construction. The insistence that they are to a large extent biologically determined strikes at the heart of progressive optimism. That optimism presumes that anything can be changed with the aid of enlightened social engineering, that nothing about us is immutable.Peterson is, of course, not the first to note that such utopian visions have spawned some of history’s greatest atrocities. Anyone who thinks that Marx's egalitarian utopia can be realized without Stalin's or Mao's violence, he thinks, is either unbelievably arrogant and foolish. Though any decent person, Peterson thinks, should strive for equality of opportunity, equality of outcome can only be achieved with brutality. Hierarchies are natural, and are not just older than capitalism, they are far older than humanity.If you want to understand their origin, you must go back some 350 million years at least, before the dinosaurs, to serotonin-based nervous systems, like that of lobsters, which react to relative social standing: Climbing up the social ladder, via competition, causes a release of serotonin and boosts the lobster’s vitality, like it does to us. And like us, lobsters respond to treatment with medications like Prozac. Hierarchies emerge from our most basic and natural strivings. We cannot eliminate them, nor should we try. We should only aspire to keep them based on competence, not domination.You mentioned that chimpanzees can tear each other apart. Their violence is natural. Are human impulses also inherently bad?“Human beings are inherently good and evil and society is inherently good and evil and nature is inherently benevolent and rapacious, and that’s paradoxical and it’s terrible, but you’re stuck with it.”Joe Rogan - Jordan Peterson's Carnivore Diet Cured His Depression? - דלגHow would you describe the kind of therapy you do?“Mostly behavioral. I’m a very practical person so I always look for the simplest possible approach to a problem.”Suppose I came to your office for the first time. What would that first session look like?“The first thing I’m going to do is assume the position of rather radical ignorance, which is what behavioral psychologists do… I’m going to listen to you for a long time before I dare to specify what the problem might be, and we’ll decide that together dialectically.”Stand up straightAt first glance, Peterson’s book “12 Rules for Life” – which just came out in Hebrew translation (Shibolet Press) – looks like a natural follow-up to behavioral therapy. Ostensibly, it’s a self-help book full of practical advice, some of it quite banal. The rules range from “Stand up straight with your shoulders back” (Rule 1), to the more surprising “Do not let your children do anything that makes you dislike them” (Rule 5).Reviews, predictably, run the full gamut: from fans who view Peterson as a guru, to detractors who see him as evil, a charlatan, a reactionary or the opposite – just another optimistic and sentimental North American psychologist telling you to listen to others, the think positive and set small achievable goals. “Compare yourself to who you were yesterday, not to who someone else is today,” Rule 4 suggests. And “Pet a cat when you encounter one on the street,” says Rule 12 (which obviously wasn’t born of experience with Israeli felines).But the rules really act as pegs on which to hang discussions that, as usual with Peterson, combine various disciplines and genres. So we get neurology and hermeneutics blended with free association, literature, evolution, politics and philosophy. They are highly accessible and mostly popular without being dilettantish.Every chapter is like a sermon, a conversation. The depth is not uniform, but the prose flows and exudes the author's clear, friendly voice. But above all, here too, Peterson is preoccupied by the question of meaning and how it makes us see life as worth living, despite suffering. This is, for him, the ultimate question. And on this subject he has a wealth of fascinating thoughts and surprising associations, alongside logical (or faith-based) leaps. It is still a work in progress, with many tributaries still in need of being worked out.Your argument that we need meaning to cope with suffering – is it a philosophical argument or…“No, it’s a theological argument.”I’ll rephrase then: Is it a theological or a psychological argument? Do we need meaning or do we need a sense of meaning?“We need real meaning; meaning is real.”The illusion will not help."No, the illusion will hurt. Illusions don't help."But can’t the sense of meaning stem, for example, from belonging to a group?“Yes, definitely. What I'd say is: The sense of meaning or the purpose is implicit [in the group's activity]. You don’t know what it is, but it’s in there. It’s like, you’re a member of a wolf pack and the pack is doing something; you don’t know what it is, you’re just a wolf. But if you’re a person and you’re associated with a bunch of other people, you find meaning [but] it doesn’t mean you can articulate it.”It’s not certain that that’s enough for making the leap from the subjective feeling to the objective answer. But for Peterson, in a profound sense, there’s an answer, and it can be called “God.” In any case, it is inseparable from faith, which in his opinion is essential, for both meaning and in order.In “12 Rules for Life,” he writes that faith is the understanding “that the tragic irrationalities of life must be counterbalanced by an equally irrational commitment to the essential goodness of Being.” I was sorry after meeting him that I did not cite this in answer to his argument about the harmfulness of illusions of meaning.So do you – like Rousseau, or Kant, or even William James – in effect offer a pragmatic argument for God’s existence? Do we have to believe in God because it’s beneficial?“That question always stops me,” he says, after a silence. “You need to aim at some transcendent ethic, you have to do that, and the reason is that the transcendent ethic is the way that things are put right. It’s not an illusion, it’s not a mere rational construct, it’s not an invention, it’s none of those things. It’s something that you discover, and you discover it despite yourself.”Because the concepts Peterson uses are taken from a host of disciplines, they are not easy to place. But they are what his intellectual project has been based on. Its aim: to come up with a shared pattern of meaning, which the biological, the psychological and the cultural-theological all reflect in different ways.The mythopoetic truth in folk tales is found in archetypes in the unconscious, which are in turn based on our biological makeup. In other words, within our nervous system, subconsciously and beyond our control, meaning is embedded, grafted onto our hardware. And that meaning assumes narrative patterns in the psyche, expressed through archetypes that reflect our system of urges. They in turn find an echo, a reflection in the formative narratives of every culture, throughout generations. Peterson's quest for the underlying maps of meaning is by no means a modest one.Peterson: “One thing Nietzsche proposed when he talked about the death of God and the potential for catastrophe that would emerge as a consequence was that people would have to create their own values. We would have to replace the external valuation scheme that religion provided with something that was psychological, let’s say. And Jung knew where Nietzsche was wrong because of what he learned from Freud.“What Jung learned from Freud was that we weren’t masters in our own house. That we’re beholden to psychological phenomena that are beyond our voluntary control. We have a nature and that expresses itself within us, in ways that we cannot control rationally. It’s phenomenological reality, but it’s reality nonetheless, like the reality of a dream. You don’t invent your dreams. Like an involuntary sense, they manifest themselves in the field of your imagination.”But Freud was secular. Freud thought God is a childish invention of those who refuse to grow up and give up their father.“Yes, he thought religion was a grand wish fulfillment. But it’s a very shallow criticism and that’s why Jung and Freud broke and Freud produced what’s essentially a religious system as a replacement [in the guise of his psychoanalytic theory].”According to Jung, says Peterson, you don’t just discover your own values: “They manifest themselves to you. Jung felt that the religious instinct is operating within the psyche. You can understand this if you start to watch yourself. You’ll see that you’re guided by forces that operate within you that you do not control. You can bargain and negotiate with them like Abraham negotiated with God in the Old Testament [about the fate of Sodom]. You’re not passive, you’re not the passive puppet of your own intrinsic desires. But you’re not the master of them by any stretch of the imagination, so you have to cooperate with them.”So between the archetypes and culture, on one hand, and natural impulses on the other, is there room for free will and agency?“It’s bargaining. It’s a struggle. You’re contending with Titans.”I want to end on a personal note. Is there a moment that you particularly remember that represents your fatherhood, your way of being a father?“All the time.”That was when we paused. His eyes welled up and his voice cracked.“A sensitive subject this week, because I was in the hospital … with my daughter, and we were not sure how the surgery would go and… it’s kind of an overwhelming experience.” (The surgery was an ankle replacement, which was being done for the second time.) "My daughter was unbelievably ill for like decades. It’s been brutal.”Mikhaila Peterson has an autoimmune disease with very serious symptoms and psychological effects whose origin is also partly physiological. The disease, which attacks the joints, is accompanied by paralyzing depressions. During certain periods could stay awake only with the help of Ritalin, for a few hours.Her parents went crazy, her father recalls. “We used to give her hell: ‘Why the hell can’t you get up?’ ‘You’re sleeping your life away.’ It’s like while she was sleeping 8-10 hours a day, we didn’t know exactly where the weakness of character ended and the physiological degeneration began; neither did she. You fight to find that line. One of the terrible things about having a chronic illness is that you also get hell for it all the time because people mistake it for weakness of character.”In a podcast interview with Joe Rogan, Peterson said that the family were convinced Mikhaila was dying. But she didn’t give up. She began to experiment with nutrition, and reached a curious conclusion that's been mentioned in interviews with Peterson ever since: After a roller coaster of skin rashes, depression, paralyzing infections and other symptoms, she found a solution on her own: a diet of only red meat and water. Nothing else. Not even salt.The symptoms disappeared. Peterson, the scientist, is awestruck because there is no explanation as to why this works as it does. But Mikhaila convinced even him to try the diet. He’s been on it for some months, but is less strict than she: He salts his meat and drinks sparkling water, too. It has had a great effect, he reports. His proclivity to depression, the unreasonable difficulties he had getting up in the morning, the extra weight – they've mostly disappeared. Still, he stresses that he doesn’t recommend the diet to anyone.But the struggle to restore Mikhaila’s health also opens a window on Peterson’s battle against victimhood as a basis for identity. The entire issue seems much more personal when you think about a parent fighting for his daughter’s life, who's realized that in order to continue the battle, she must not sink into an abyss of self-pity, at the bottom of which there can only be despair, perhaps even death.So here is your first rule for life: Stand up straight with your shoulders back.*****************************************Great job, Dr. Peterson!

I seriously considered voting for him.People have made a big fuss about xenophobia and racism and bigotry, insults and now major flip-flopping, which certainly matter, and I’ll let others make relevant points on that.I was looking at the more “executive” qualifications since that’s actually the job Trump is asking us to give him. There are lots of jerks and poor excuses for human beings who happen to also be great executives who get things done well and bring great things and needed change. Steve Jobs was not the most adorable personality all the time but he arguably fostered amazingly useful change in personal computing. That overrode the negatives. So I thought to look more at what Trump is like that impacts his ability as an executive. This is what I found:RED FLAG #1: business dealingsThere have been a number of in-depth business media reports on Trump’s many business dealings, and the consensus is it is far from an impressive track record. He’s not the self-made man starting from nothing. Trump has always boasted about getting merely a $1 million loan from his father Fred Trump to start his businesses. But it has been revealed through Trump organization documents that he actually got closer to $145 million, and engaged in fraud to even steal more from his father during his father’s Alzheimer’s years.Trump boasts of being a master at the “art of the deal” but a substantial amount of evidence points to major mistakes and disasters, such as building up not just one casino in Atlantic City that was on shaky financial ground, not two, but three that all competed with each other. What was he thinking??? His father, Fred Trump, had to bail Donald out with a multi-million loan, and that still wasn't enough for the casino businesses to all come crashing down. Why did it crash so spectacularly? The “house” is designed to always win. But Trump had vastly over leveraged the deals and the Atlantic City casino commission even saw this even before he opened the Trump Taj Mahal.UPDATE: I found out Trump actually bragged about how he made a killing on his casinos in spite of their financial collapse, and he did it in two ways:He intentionally shifted ownership to a worthless LLC that passed the loans to another company he set up, thereby shafting the lenders royally.He didn’t pay contractors.In other words, he’s without a shred of morality or decency in business dealings.His steaks, alcohol, clothing, magazine, shuttle, and a number of other businesses have all been failures. Trump University is now headed towards criminal court as the law suits are now including counts of racketeering under the RICO Act which if successful could force him to sell assets for lack of the potential 9-figure penalty.UPDATE: Trump U plaintiffs got a reported settlement of around $25 million despite Trumps boast that he’d never settle.Things only started turning around when his children came on board to help run some businesses and the Trump® brand became the dominant product. It was a clever thing getting out of selling anything but the name, but the worth of that name may be practically zilch after this election if recent polls don’t improve.UPDATE: Nobody seems to be buying the Trump nameplate anymore, and several buildings have actually taken the name off at the insistence of the residents.Some financial media have calculated that if Donald had put his loan from his dad into the S&P 500 and left it there he would have actually done about the same or better. Meanwhile, lots of others in the same business in New York have done much better than Trump.UPDATE: The Southern District of New York is waiting for Trump to get out of office so they can arrest him on charges of fraud relating to his business dealings going a long way back. Specifically, they have evidence of massive understating AND overstating of property value given to a large mansion he owns for the purposes of getting a better insurance rate on the one hand, and getting favorable loan rates, both of which are fraud felonies. These were pointed out by during congressional testimony by Michael Cohen who had direct knowledge of the applications.Trump’s financial ties with Russian oligarchs close to Putin are not public knowledge—yet—but it seems clear that he’s gone to Russia to feed his need for credit. No bank in the West will give him anything anymore. Not good. What’s the deal??UPDATE: There IS evidence, here’s some: Trump and the OligarchThe Russian connections, and his ties to business all over the globe are all huge potential conflicts of interest with the job of President.Donald Trump's foreign ties may conflict with U.S. national security interestsUPDATE: There is now an investigation into the massive amounts of inauguration funding (WAAAY more than any other president-elect) and the foreign people who donated.There is also a very serious investigation into the NRA’s role in funneling millions of dollars from Russia into the Trump campaign. This is, of course, strictly illegal money laundering.UPDATE: The Jeffrey Epstein bromance story before Trump shafted him on a real estate deal (and deeply pissed off Epstein) has yet to be made public but it can only go in the direction of sordid. Trump acolytes and worshipers don’t seem to care.Addendum: Here’s a rather comprehensive panorama of Trump’s businesses reviewed by the son of a banker who had to deal with Trump’s debts: Why do people forget that Donald Trump is a successful businessman?ConclusionThe real art of Trump’s deals seems to be his ability to con others. His mastery of getting others to pay for his businesses while he sneakily shifts responsibility for the debt and weasels out the back door with as much money he can grab before it goes under. This shifting of losses has also been on the backs of numerous contractors who have collectively taken huge losses and many have been forced out of business by Trump’s non-payments. On one property in Florida the liens for non-payment have accumulated to the point where it recently went over the amount needed to force a sale of the property to pay them off.Interesting story: In lieu of paying his notoriously ruthless lawyer Roy Cohn (former advisor to disgraced Senator Joseph McCarthy[1]), Trump once took off his cuff links and insisted Roy have them for his work on a case saying they were diamonds and platinum worth $50,000. Roy kept them until he died. His estate had them evaluated. They turned out to be fake diamonds in a base metal, cheap junk. There was a similar story from another person who Trump owed money, was given cufflinks with the same smooth story about their supposed value; same cheap junk. A perfect example of the Trump way of dealing with people.It’s Trump’s habit to not pay people. Cities in which he wants to hold a rally have had to demand security costs payments up front because he just doesn’t pay after the event, leaving municipal bill of hundreds of thousands to be paid by taxpayers. He’s even doing it to his campaign staff:One secret of Trump's low-cost campaign: free laborIs this also his magic secret sauce for making the country “great again”? Maybe, he’s already floated the idea of “renegotiating” the national debt, which every economist and financial advisor I’ve read on the subject have said is a recipe for economic suicide due to nobody lending to the US again.UPDATE: January 2020: The Federal deficit is about to break the $1 trillion mark, definitely going in the opposite direction FAST that Trump said it would.Interesting note: Trump is known in NYC banking circles as the King of Debt.Update: The coronavirus bailout to businesses which Senate Republicans wrote in secret before even allowing the full Senate to vote on it, and which got shot down twice before finally getting some compromise wording that would at least give some oversight to how the money is used was signed into law by Trump who added a “signing statement” that he would not enforce the oversight of spending that money. Think about that. Most of that money is going to the people who don’t need it: venture capitalists, stock holders, hedge funds.[2]— many of the same people who also caused the 2008 crisis. Dëja vu.There are always ups and downs in business and lots of entrepreneurs start businesses that don’t make it, but there’s just too much wreckage and bad blood in Trump’s business wake. I doubt any major corporation would even consider hiring him as CEO, no matter what the business. I can’t see anything in his business resume that would make me believe that he could ever deliver on his promise to “make America great again.” Certainly not his economic plan which would make George W Bush’s plan brilliant by comparison.Some might say that the December 2017 tax bill unleashed great prosperity. What they don’t say, or don’t know, is that much of the benefit of that tax bill went right to the accounts of the most wealthy who didn’t even need a tax break to survive while virtually nothing “trickled down” to the ordinary workers. It went to stock buybacks, offshore accounts, and other non-investment in the economy. The large majority of economists admit this.RED FLAG #2: words matter, they mean things, except when they don’tTrumps 1987 book “Art of the Deal” was actually entirely written by his ghostwriter, Tony Schwartz, whose name also appears on the book. That’s not the problem, lots of “autobiographies” have to be written by a ghostwriter to make them acceptable for publishing. The problem is that Trump now claims that Schwartz didn’t write it (he wrote every word) which is laughable because Trump had no experience in writing books, and Schwartz was even named on the book. This was yet another bald faced lie in a string of lies and playing loose with facts that continues to grow so fast that the political fact-checkers have been working overtime and haven’t been able to keep up. There are just way too many to list here, and others have tried to list them (See Washington Post’s running count of Trump’s false statements). What is most telling is that Trump has scored the poorest ability to speak the truth of any major political figure the media has covered, by a wide margin.Donald Trump's fileCompare that to Clinton’s which turned out to be one of the most truthful and accurate of all candidates in the primaries, surprisingly even slightly better than Bernie Sanders:Hillary Clinton's file on PolitiFactAddendum:One commenter suggested I edit out what the fact-checking U.S. politics website PolitiFact reveals about Clinton’s record on the campaign trail as “a common misconception and not true.” As a justification, he says, “She knows politics all too well so she can generally navigate in a way that would support that narrative but she scripted and doesn't make herself open to scrutiny. What the commenter fails to understand is 1) you don’t need to be an insider politician to fabricate pants-on-fire whoppers, and 2) fact-checking is an endeavor to set the record straight and is completely unrelated to whether a statement is delivered scripted or off the cuff. As an example of this, we can look at Trump’s scripted speech on immigration which is also generously sprinkled with inaccuracies, skewed facts, partial facts, and downright pants-on-fire false statements. See Trump Still Off on Immigration and the Trump campaign’s Twisting of Clinton’s Immigration Plan. It doesn’t get more scripted than an ad. Note also that Trump’s scripted statements are actually somewhat less littered with skewing and outright fabrications than Trump off-the-cuff because they are not his own thoughts but speeches carefully fabricated for him with some actual research instead of Trump’s memory serving him wrong. (See Trump’s daily “briefings” for the coronavirus where he typically includes several glaring inaccuracies and outright fabrications per day.)This apparent Trump supporter continues, insisting that we “Gotta get past trump and be critical of hillary on the emails and the foundation.” I can’t do that, I’m just not prone to hypnosis on talking point guidelines, whether induced by Trump or his Breitbart-scripted ads or news media or by the Party that obsequiously accepts Trump’s rhetoric as gospel truth. And when I bash Clinton, it is certainly not about helping Trump, nor hypnotically induced. It’s my own critical thinkolator working, sorry.Regarding the Hillary emails and foundation, the commenter concludes, “Those are problems I will not support and will hold people accountable for regardless of party.” Aside from being way off the topic, this shows a major assumption that the emails and foundation are real problems of executive misbehavior. My view of the emails “scandal” is that it was technologically naïve to think private servers are secure. But like Bernie Sanders’ view, I see the “emails scandal” as just another nit picking distraction from far more important issues the Republicans distract from (similar to the seemingly endless commissions and panels and reports and inquiries into the Bengazi incident, which wasted something like $10 million of taxpayer money and found essentially nothing sinister). Plus, the FBI said she was sloppy but not culpable of any crime. It has no relation to the Petreus case as partisans try to portray since there was no intent to commit a crime as there was in the Petreus case. Regarding the Clinton Foundation I’ll accept what is in Wikipedia because such a high profile issue gets thoroughly edited by friends and foes and ends up a battle of sources and proofs and counter proofs so evidence from all sides can be viewed. Reading that, it’s hard to say there is anything substantially sinister as the National Enquirer and Breitbart claim. In fact, it’s fairly impressive what they’ve accomplished and how it’s been handled despite being such a large operation. (Update: Clinton’s foundation has been exonerated in federal inquiries, as well as the “emails scandal.”) Back to my main points…An important aspect of being in business is that your word is kept. That builds trust among partners. But Trump has alienated even America’s partner nations. The British Parliament even seriously debated whether they should allow Trump to enter the country. That is remarkable because there was no debate in favor of Trump, only whether it was legal and ethical to keep him out. The Queen was gracious to Trump but if you know Royal subtleties you’d know she mocked him in the process.Trump’s estimate of his net worth is around $10 billion, while Forbes estimates it generously at around $3 billion. How could Forbes be so far off? Well, Trump once said that his net worth changes daily, based on how he “feels”. Hmmm. Self-hypnosis? Or what suits his needs?Conclusion: I can’t trust what Trump says to be true. If you can’t trust an executive, it undermines the whole business. The profusion of bluster and bravado he produces hasn’t fooled intelligent people who see right through his carnival barking routine of inducing a hypnosis in his followers of a “feeling” of being “great again” without even spelling out what that really means.UPDATE: As of August 25, 2019 Trump has been President for over 2 years 7 months and has racked up over 12,000 verifiably false public statements recorded by the Washington Post, a truly astounding amount.RED FLAG #3: others CAN be smarter and more knowledgeableTrump is well known to not only not go with the advice of experts, he often would not even listen to them. And apparently it’s a very deeply ingrained habit. He might hire a consultant, but then would brush aside the advice and do what he intended in the first place.So why is that not good? Lots of people go with their gut feeling, right? Yes, and so did George W. Bush when various Middle East experts told him that taking out Saddam Hussein would be worse than leaving him where he was. As terrible a tyrant as Hussein was (killing lots in his own country, suppression of the Kurds, invading Kuwait and waging a war against Iran, etc. etc.), the advice was based on the argument that Hussein actually was a counterbalance to other dangerous forces in the region. Taking him out would upset the balance and lead to all sorts of unpredictable instability that could easily be much worse. That was enough of a reason to not invade. This reasoning was not a secret at the time, it was presented and discussed in the major news media, but the demons of war kept drowning out that voice of reason in Bush’s ear. It’s pretty clear now that it was a horrendous mistake to take out Hussein because it created a power vacuum in Iraq that was filled largely by Iranian influences as well as Al Queda (which wasn't established there before) that morphed into ISIS. The hundreds of thousands killed in the war, the destruction of the Iraqi economy and the aftermath, and the draining of the US Treasury back into a deep deficit added salt to the wound. All because Bush refused to listen to Middle East experts.From Trump we’ve heard what he would do already in the Middle East, just bomb the sh!t out of “them”, and also their families, and torture them “like you wouldn’t believe” because he thinks torture works despite being told even those who ran the torture program now say torture didn’t work, plus it’s illegal according to international law. Leaving aside the questions of legality and immorality is effectively saying the ends justify the means. This was Machiavelli’s approach to ruling. Not an attitude beneficial to the free world.UPDATE: The Iran deal was thrown out by Trump. That deal was arguably better than just letting them go ahead and build nuclear weapons NOW, which they are doing, and then creating yet again another Middle East war that could easily metastasize into a regional or worldwide conflict. That spiked tensions in the regional shipping lanes, and also oil prices.Then there’s the wall thing. If Trump really is so smart and clever and intelligent and the best most brilliant genius he claims he is, then he must be joking about the wall, it must be to just show the world how gullible people are about believing wasting that much money would make any significant difference. It’s utterly ludicrous that Mexico would pay for it. The large majority of illegals came into the country legally and just overstayed their visa. Of course, Trump would know that if he had simply consulted Immigration Services, which I doubt he even bothered, which brings me to the next point.According to some estimates it would be far more costly to the government alone to deport all the illegal aliens, in addition to the major economic damage it would cause, than to just make some kind of sensible workable policy to grant some legal residency status and potential path to citizenship with deportation penalties for screwing up. This simplistic approach of Trump to deport everybody is nonsense, destructive to families, the communities, and the economy, and only creating stress and hysteria on all sides of the debate.UPDATE: Trump’s real agenda is a racism-based immigration prevention policy. Family separation and kids in cages like animals. The USA has lost all moral high ground in the view of the world thanks to Stephen Miller, Trump’s muse on immigration policy.UPDATE: There have been by far more serious scandals and criminal behavior amidst the Trump administration’s appointees than any previous administration. Several have had to “resign” in disgrace. “We’ll get the best people.” It’s looking like the USA has become a banana republic.RED FLAG #4: gotta know what you’re doingTrump has repeatedly shown an abysmal lack of knowledge about how government actually works, how international relations work, how the economy works, what the limits are on the office of the President, what the laws are on many issues, how to cooperate and work with involved people to solve problems, and even how to run a political campaign without tripping over his own words. He just doesn’t (and apparently can’t) educate himself anywhere near what is required to responsibly be the leader of the United States of America.Now it’s true that it’s possible to be the CEO of a company without knowing a whit about how the company’s widgets are made, but you’d have to know or learn something quick about how a business must operate, have some sense of good finance, have some knowledge of the market and the competition, and so forth, just to avoid stupid mistakes. But to be a great CEO, you have to know a LOT about the whole business from the ground floor to the executive offices, about the economic sector it’s in, about human interactions and how to motivate people, and have a distinct and consistent vision of where to take the company to make it prosper. It’s a multi-skill set.Trump’s skill set seems to be limited to how to perpetrate fraud and corruption. The Ukraine “perfect phone call” was the classic example, and even many of the Republican Senators who acquitted Trump did so despite privately holding their noses at the stench of corruption revealed. They acquitted out of shear political motives: fear of Trump retribution — a classic mobster reaction — and fear of Trump voters who don’t know better or don’t care.Update: Trump’s massive bungling of the coronavirus response is another glaring example of his narcissistic personality disorder getting in the way of effective executive decision-making that has played out over months of opportunities to show real leadership, as Governor Andrew Cuomo has shown.The fundamental problem with Trump is that his ability to learn seems to be hampered as evidenced by his incredibly short attention span. His mind is not steady, and as a result he can’t think deeply. It’s not that he doesn’t want to spend time on details to get the big picture, it’s that he literally can’t. You can see this short attention span for yourself in his non-teleprompter speeches. He’s all over the place. And people close to him in his campaign have noticed that Trump tends to talk about the last thing someone said to him, not the conclusion of discussions.Trump’s biographer for The Art of the Deal, Tony Schwartz, who lived with Trump for 18 months so he could gather enough material just to write the darn thing said that he had to just live with the guy to gather that material because Trump couldn’t sit and talk at length or in depth, his attention would go flitting around like a flustered and sometimes angry bird from one thing to the next. In fact he described Trump’s attention span as being “frighteningly short.” (This seems to explain Trump’s favorite way to communicate is Twitter—maximum 140 characters. He reportedly doesn’t even use emails. Too long?)This is extremely alarming. It takes a cool mind and keen steady intellect to absorb all essential information before making good decisions. It takes seriously strong focus to get a clear picture from all the complexity placed on the desk of the President. A channel changing bored fidgety mind is absolutely not the right mind to decide far reaching policies that affect millions.His reading list covers so little territory. MeinKampf, according to his ex. The Bible, allegedly, which is easily doubtful. And Schwartz says Trump did read The Art of the Deal, made a few quips in the margins before it went to press. His attention span there was probably due to it being a book about himself.His Twitter account seems to be a major source. And of course “the internet” and apparently Breitbart News Network in particular considering he hired the head conspiracist there as his campaign manager. Breitbart? I thought it was just another Trump “sarcasm” joke when I first heard that.RED FLAG #:5 “the best” … until it’s “the worst”Trump lives largely in a binary world inside his head. Everything is either “the worst” or “the best”, perfect or terrible, good or bad, hot or cold, left or right, us vs them. There is no nuance, no gradations, no subtleties. Nothing in between. It’s ludicrous hyperbole at best, and a dangerous habit for any president. There are numerous videos of Trump praising people as “great” “the best” and later “the worst” “terrible”. One of them is Hillary Clinton, with Trump specifically praising her from an interview by Wolf Blitzer in Trump’s office in 2007:http://i.a.cnn.net/cnn/2007/images/03/16/trump.blitzer.transcript.31707.pdfBLITZER: Thank you very much. Let's talk politics. All right? A lot of people thinking about politics right now. I'm going to mention some names: give me your thoughts right away. Hillary Clinton.TRUMP: Very talented, very smart. She's a friend of mine, so I'm a little bit prejudiced. She's a very, very capable person and I think she'll probably be the nominee. We'll see, but I think she'll probably be the nominee.BLITZER: Is she ready to be commander-in-chief?TRUMP: I think she is. I think she's a very, very brilliant person, and as a senator in New York, she has done a great job. Everybody loves her. She just won an election with a tremendous majority and she really — she's become very, very popular in New York. And it wasn't easy.BLITZER: Barack Obama.TRUMP: Well, he's a star. I mean, he's really done an amazing job in a very short period of time. The question is experience, and do people want to have somebody get in that doesn't have the great experience? But certainly he's made an impact.Fast forward to 2015 and the only difference is whether the other person is perceived as a political threat or not. But Trump is right about the question of experience, although he doesn’t think it applies to himself.Trump’s biographer Tony Schwartz was “great” until he came out during the convention with his stinging interview in the Atlantic. Then he became “the worst.” http://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2016/07/25/donald-trumps-ghostwriter-tells-allUPDATE: Numerous supporters of Trump, who he praised highly, have since come out publicly saying he’s really bad at the job, ruining the country, and/or needing to be impeached. Typically they are people who have left before saying anything but Justin Amash had to leave the Republican Party because of the heat from his congressional caucus (not his voter base). Paul Ryan. Scaramuchi is the latest.RED FLAG #6 Who’s in charge?He doesn’t seem to really want the job of being president, but if he had anything to do with how to pick the VP, he’s not being straight with the American people about it, which means we’d end up with Mike Pence, Mr. Still In 1994, as the actual president. This was revealed when one of Trump’s sons interviewed a potential VP candidate and the candidate was told he was actually being offered the job of handling all domestic and international affairs. Rightly so, the candidate asked what would Trump do. His son replied, “Make America great again” which is about as nebulous as what’s left after handing off domestic and international affairs. It sounds like Trump isn’t actually interested in the job, he just wants to go do “deals” on a perpetual holiday. What board of directors would put up with this??RED FLAG #7: It’s not supposed to be about “ME ME ME”In my many years I’ve seen some real sociopathic personality disorders but Donald Trump has managed to get Harvard University psychologists to not only publicly say he has this disorder but to even use him as a classic case study in their classes, ticking off every metric on the chart. He has an ego that’s visible from Pluto.Of course, lots of executives have big egos. What is troubling about Donald is he also has exceedingly thin skin (metaphorically). He’s so sensitive about his personal image, especially of being wealthy, that he is deeply prone to distraction by any personal attacks, sending off rants on Twitter when he should be focused on campaign strategy. What if he were to get distracted by loud protests while some unrelated crises were needing urgent full attention as president? It could be a tragic disaster. Or, worse yet, suppose Kim Jong Il taunts Trump? Or Putin? Or ISIS? We could witness a nuclear vendetta all for the sake of his fragile ego. Maybe he’s already realized this weakness and has given the job of response to the important issues to Mike Pence. Maybe he hasn’t.UPDATE: Nope, he hasn’t. Pence may not even make it on the 2020 ticket.National security experts have concluded already that Trump is what is termed “an unwittingly recruited agent” of Putin after seeing their publicly expressed mutual admiration exchange several months ago. Putin is a master of strategy and intrigue, a political chess player having been trained by the KGB, while Trump is still trying to figure out how to win at checkers. It’s no wonder that a long list of Republicans in the national security services have signed a letter saying Trump is a threat to national security.CONCLUSION: I think Trump is a fascinating guy, and in some ways I like him (there is always something good you can find in people), I just think it would be utterly foolish and incredibly dangerous to let him in the Oval Office to be leader of the free world, in charge of activating nuclear codes.UPDATE: Yep, it was foolish and dangerous. Now with all the legal problems mounting against him, he HAS to win the 2020 election or face serious prison time. He’s ruined relations with many of the USA’s best friends, and has coddled several dictators. Constitutional violations galore. He even believe what evangelicals have called him: “God’s chosen one” and “The king of Israel” and other flattering blasphemies because he’s rubber stamping their bible thumping crackpot judge picks (half hour debates in the Senate thanks to Mitch McConnel instead of the 7 days debates).Bet on a cornered rat to survive the election at any cost unless there is impeachment and a Senate conviction first. At this point, there is no conviction among the Senate majority. Constitutional responsibility? What constitution? They would seem to be happy with a dictatorship.Footnotes[1] Joseph McCarthy - Wikipedia[2] Watch CNBC's full interview with Social Capital CEO Chamath Palihapitiya

In a lot of ways, I do believe telemedicine is the future of healthcare, especially with the radical shift in how healthcare itself is transforming towards a more digital landscape.Instead of 50, I’ll just give you the 9 reasons I personally feel telemedicine works the best way for both doctors and patients. This is from a piece I recently wrote for a health-tech blog as well.Patients have started believing in the veracity of telemedicineMost of the recent surveys conducted around telemedicine have revealed that patients are actually warming up to telemedicine, wherein they don’t have to wait for long hours at the doctor’s office and can avoid commuting altogether, given the fact that they can avail medical care just by having a smartphone, at any given time. At mfine, holistic care is just a touch on the phone away, whether you’re at a metropolitan city or a remote village, and this ease of access to every user is what we strive for.Telemedicine is fully legalTelemedicine is recognized by the Government of India and is considered as both a health service and an information service. The legality of Telemedicine and E-prescription is derived from combining the following Indian Government acts and rules:Drugs & Cosmetics Act, 1940 and Drugs & Cosmetics Rules, 1945The Information Technology Act, 2000 (IT Act)The Indian Medical Council Act, 1956 (“MCI Act”) and The Indian Medical Council(Professional Conduct, Etiquette and Ethics) Regulations, 2002 (“MCI Code”)The interpretation of the above is that the laws applicable to medical practitioners while practicing medicine are the same laws that are applicable while practicing and providing services through telemedicine.The quality of care with telemedicine is top-notchQuality is the air to the lungs, without which any healthcare platform is bound to sink, let alone telemedicine. With telemedicine, quality is the force that drives one to provide maximized standards of virtual care to their patients. The endeavor is to make diagnoses that are effective and unequivocal, with evidence-based guidelines and novel clinical treatment technology, for cases that can be handled with virtual care. There’s no ambiguity in the fact that not all cases can be treated with virtual care and telemedicine, in no way, claims to do so. Using apps that offer telemedicine, you can consult top doctors anytime, anywhere, and get digital prescriptions that not only include your medication but also your diet and lifestyle recommendations, post-consultation. You can manage all your health reports, prescriptions, and medical history at one place on the app and any doctor you consult on the app is equipped to know and understand your complete medical history, just like your family doctor would.People are breaking free from the belief that a ‘physical examination’ in healthcare is always a must!It has been believed for the longest time that in order to diagnose any condition, a physical examination is a must! While that’s true for some conditions, there’s a plethora of other conditions that don’t need physical assessments. The right medical history and symptoms of the patient are enough for a doctor to make the right diagnosis and provide an effective treatment plan for many minor urgent conditions. At mfine, we also believe that providing immediate diagnosis and treatment alone doesn’t sum up a doctor-patient consultation. Follow-up calls and post-consultation check-ins are integral components of our healthcare delivery, which doesn’t necessarily require a physical examination anyway.Telemedicine ensures a long and strong doctor-patient relationshipIf done right, telemedicine actually ensures a strong and effective doctor-patient relationship in the long run with a care plan that stands against the test of time. The focus is on maintaining an individual’s complete health records in one place, wherein it becomes easy for the doctor to access the patient’s medical history easily to evaluate any further health concerns that the patient may come up with anytime in the future. Additionally, the follow-up feature that some telemedicine apps like mfine offer, enables patients to reach out to the very same doctor periodically. The geographical reach is also extensive through telemedicine and the service hours are also extended in virtual care, which sets a benchmark in itself, since health issues never follow a 9 to 5 pattern like our jobs do; it can show up anytime, anywhere.Patient privacy is a top trait in telemedicineData and security breaches have been a grave cause of concern not only in the virtual care sector but also in traditional clinics. In telemedicine, patient confidentiality is integral and this is why folks in telemedicine adhere to data privacy, security, and quality-standards that also form the imperative core of their service.The risk of malpractice is lower in telemedicineTelemedicine actually reduces the risk of malpractice, simply by adding another valid documentation of your treatment, which will forever stay in one place. It also augments the modes of contact for doctors to keep track of their patients. Be it an orthopedic surgeon who needs post-op updates from his patients, or a general physician who wants to know if their care plan worked on the patient who consulted them for a fever or viral infection—in more ways than one, via follow-up calls and reminders, most telemedicine apps strive to ensure patients are provided with holistic care at every stage possible.Triage protocols of telemedicine are greatMost telemedicine giants follow a strict protocol when it comes to providing care for their patients via a virtual medium by specially-trained doctors. The patient signs a “Terms of use” and consents to avail treatment from doctors on the channel. They understand the limitations of the channel and can indemnify doctors in case of any liability arising during care because of the limitation of the channel. The patient also understands that this channel is not for critical care and they should not use the medium in critical scenarios. The care team has strict TRIAGE PROTOCOLS and doesn’t accept any case if it is found to be critical during the process of screening the patient.You get hospital-valid authentic prescriptions too!Truth be told, The Drugs and Cosmetics Rules, 1945, specify the essentials of a valid prescription made against medical consultation and diagnosis service under any remote or telemedicine format. It states that the prescription should satisfy the following legal requirements:The prescriptions should come from a Registered Medical Practitioner.It should follow the guidelines as defined under Section 65(10) in Drugs and Cosmetic Rules, 1945.A prescription in an electronic format may be validated as a legal prescription if it is a secure electronic record affixed with a secure digital signature as prescribed under the IT Act, 2000.Most top telemedicine channels abide by these norms.It is evident that Telemedicine involves several benefits for patients, physicians, and medical institutions, and also plays a major role in the development of medicine and healthcare delivery in India.[1]Footnotes[1] Debunking Top 9 Myths Of Telemedicine Or Online Consultations | mfine