Dr. Death and the Deadly Underside of the American Dream

I have been watching Peacock’s miniseries Dr. Death with my wife after the kids are asleep, having consumed the podcast that inspired it in one big binge. 

The story of Christopher Duntsch, a former spine surgeon currently in jail for the horrible crimes he committed against his patients, is a riveting melodrama of unfettered arrogance at its most dangerous and unhinged as well as a David Cronenbergian exercise in body horror. 

Scenes of Duntsch in the operating room are purposefully hard to watch but Dr. Death might work best as a bleak exploration of the patently false nature of the American Dream. 

Reduced to its bare essence, the American Dream is that we live in the land of opportunity, a noble meritocracy where, with hard work, ambition and vision, anyone can accomplish anything their heart desires. Any garbageman’s son can be the next Steve Jobs or Barack Obama. They just need to want it bad enough.

That is patently not true. If you want to be an NFL linebacker and you’re five foot eight and weigh a hundred and sixty pounds it doesn’t matter how hard you work or how badly you want to play professionally: your size will keep you from ever being able to realize your aspirations. 

On a similar note, it doesn’t matter how impressive your training is if you are so incompetent in the operating room that you end up killing or maiming or otherwise injuring vulnerable people, as Duntsch did over and over again.

Yet Duntsch nevertheless aggressively pursued his American dream of making a vast fortune and changing lives for the better as a spinal surgeon even after his toxic combination of extreme ineptitude and God-like arrogance resulted in the destruction of the spines the disgraced former doc was supposed to save. 

The story of Christopher Duntsch is one of white male privilege taken to its murderous extreme. Duntsch’s appalling record as a surgeon should have rendered him unemployable, a toxic pariah. There are many mechanisms in place to keep things like this from happening, including the human conscience, but Duntsch was a sociopath able to kill and maim without remorse or regret.

Duntsch was a handsome, cocky straight white man with a medical degree, so people deferred to him and believed his words when his actions told a vastly different story. 

In that respect one of Duntsch’s deadliest weapons was his smile. It was that killer smile, as much as the former doctor’s comforting words, that made his patients feel like everything was going to be alright and that they weren’t just in the hands of an unusually skilled surgeon but a goddamn miracle worker. 

Duntsch’s patients believed his honeyed words because we are socialized and conditioned to be deferential towards doctors but also because they wanted to believe that he was capable of all of the wonderful things he was promising. 

Duntsch’s patients weren’t the only ones who wanted very much to believe that he was capable of the miracles he promised. The disgraced former surgeon’s bosses and administrators similarly wanted to believe that he was a rising star, a medical supernova, whose brilliance would make them millions and separate them from the rest of the pack. 

We live in a society where acting like you know what you’re doing and talking like you know what you’re doing are more important than actually knowing what you’re doing in many ways. 

Duntsch exploited that to his professional and financial advantage for far too long. In the operating room and in private offices he talked a great game but when it came time to actually treat spines Duntsch was completely lost. He didn’t know what he was doing and people died and were maimed as a result. 

Dr. Death’s harrowing cautionary warning of the dangers of arrogance untethered to ability and humility couldn’t help but make me think about another man who professed to be way more competent than he actually was: Donald Trump. 

One of the many poignant, transparent lies Trump told the world and himself was that despite not being a doctor, or a scientist, or even particularly intelligent, Trump nevertheless had a unique grasp on medicine that served him well when COVID hit. 

That’s why Trump felt so infernally confident recommending Hydroxychloroquine and injecting sunlight or disinfectants as treatments for COVID 19 while downplaying the pandemic’s severity. 

People died because of Trump’s arrogance, just as they died because of Duntsch’s pathological narcissism and sociopathy. Unless we stop deferring to the non-existent expertise of cocky white men like them many more people will die unnecessarily and even more lives and bodies will be ruined. 

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