Monday September 21, 2026 12:30 am est

A wholesome breakfast sets a calm, steady rhythm for your morning, and today’s ideal choice brings together clean nourishment, natural flavor, and gentle energy. After a night of fasting, your body welcomes foods that stabilize blood sugar, awaken mental clarity, and support sustained focus without feeling heavy or complicated.

Begin with a base of creamy Greek yogurt or an unsweetened plant‑based alternative. This provides protein to keep you satisfied and probiotics that support gut health, which in turn influences mood and cognitive sharpness. Add a handful of fresh berries—blueberries, strawberries, or raspberries—whose antioxidants help protect brain cells and encourage vibrant mental function. A sprinkle of chia seeds or ground flaxseed adds omega‑3 fatty acids that reduce inflammation and nourish the brain. A small portion of granola or oats offers slow‑release carbohydrates that maintain steady energy as the morning unfolds.

Alongside this bowl, enjoy a glass of bright, refreshing orange juice. Its natural vitamin C supports immunity and helps reduce oxidative stress, giving your system a clean, uplifting boost. Pair this with a warm cup of coffee blended with unsweetened almond milk. The coffee provides gentle stimulation for focus and alertness, while the almond milk adds a smooth, nutty finish without added sugar, keeping the drink light and supportive of balanced energy.

Together, this breakfast creates a harmonious blend of protein, healthy fats, antioxidants, fiber, and natural morning beverages. It’s a simple, nourishing way to greet the day with clarity, steadiness, and a sense of well‑being.

The American medical profession likes to sell itself as a meritocracy of compassion. In reality, it functions more like an inherited country club. It is a profession of arrogant, filthy rich elitists who have perfected nepotism into a business model designed to keep opportunity, prestige, and wealth inside the same families generation after generation.

If you are an outsider, not from the highest socioeconomic classes, but intelligent, ethical, and with a strong academic record, and you push your way in, you will quickly learn that getting in is not the same as being allowed to stay.

The exclusion starts on day one of medical school. Your new colleagues will ostracize you from their social circles. The insider advice that makes the impossible journey manageable, which professors to avoid, how to study for the killer exams, how the system really works, will be cut off. In a system graded on a curve where every point matters, copies of old exams are held tightly among insiders. You are left to work twice as hard for half the recognition.

Then come the clinical years, and the two-tiered system becomes impossible to ignore. The outsiders are sent to do 36-hour shifts doing the most demanding, grueling work in ghetto hospitals where drive-by shootings happen outside the ER doors and gangs roam the neighborhoods on campaigns of crime for fun. Meanwhile, their wealthy colleagues relax at ritzy, high-class suburban hospitals with standing orders not to be bothered after 11 a.m., where the central drama of the day is a soap-opera style affair between residents. It is not training. It is hazing.

And if the outsider nevertheless keeps working hard and proves himself by passing the competitive medical licensure exams on his own after he gets his MD, that is when the real trouble starts.

That is when the wealthy colleagues finish the job from behind. The classic surprise attack is to declare the outsider obviously mentally ill. Of course he looks disheveled. He has been working himself to death while everyone else shows up to the hospital in high-end designer clothing, climbing out of Porsches, Corvettes and Maseratis between long vacations at their beach homes.

So they hit the beaten-down dissenter with totally fabricated allegations of serious mental illness. They present themselves as the guardians of an honorable profession who simply cannot allow such an unstable hypocrite to earn a nice living, all while they themselves earn hundreds of thousands or even millions of dollars a year to add a little icing to the enormous wealth of their families. It is extra fun money, and a convenient way to eliminate competition.

In the meantime, the victims must struggle to survive cruel, totally inappropriate blacklists, living on the fringes of society, taking whatever work they can find. And that marginalized existence completes the con. To the public, it looks like proof. If he were really a good doctor, why would he be on the outside? Why would his very wealthy colleagues be so successful? 

The public never sees that those very wealthy colleagues are usually the ones who totally lack the kind of holistic empathy and social conscience that patients actually want in a doctor.

That is all part of the game plan to keep the status quo intact in a very cruel profession.

Dr. Howard Howy never wanted to be filthy rich.

He just wanted to be well-off enough to live a healthy, good life. Enough to eat well, to have time to take care of himself, to fish in the glistening sunshine off the Florida Keys and SCUBA dive off Maui and watch the sea turtles glide. Enough to help other people live that way too. He was a mild-mannered, pleasant, holistic human rights activist and environmentalist physician who believed a body couldn't heal if the neighborhood it lived in was sick.

In American medicine, that made him a target.

He got into medical school anyway. Not because his father was a chairman or his uncle owned a hospital wing — his family was middle-class — but because his academic record was strong and his work ethic was undeniable.

On day one, the freeze started.

His classmates already knew each other. Same prep schools, same fraternities, same stories about hard drinking and proving you were powerful. They had the insider advice that makes the impossible journey manageable — which professors to avoid, how to study for the killer exams, how the system really works — and copies of old exams held tightly among insiders. Howy was cut out of the social circles. He was left to work twice as hard for half the recognition.

Then came the clinical years, and the two-tiered system became impossible to ignore.

His wealthy colleagues — the strong, powerful, wealthy doctors in training — were sent to relax at ritzy, high-class suburban hospitals with standing orders not to be bothered after 11 pm, where the central drama of the day was a soap-opera style affair between residents.

Howy and the other outsiders were sent to do 36-hour shifts doing the most demanding, grueling work in ghetto hospitals where drive-by shootings happened outside the ER doors and gangs roamed the neighborhoods on campaigns of crime for fun. It wasn't training. It was hazing.

But he survived it. He got his M.D. He kept working hard and proved himself by passing the competitive medical licensure exams on his own after he got his MD.

That is when the real trouble started.

That is when his so-called friends in the profession finished the job from behind. The classic surprise attack is to declare the outsider obviously mentally ill. Of course he looked disheveled. He had been working himself to death while everyone else showed up to the hospital in high-end designer clothing, climbing out of Porsches, Corvettes and Maseratis between long vacations at their beach homes.

So they hit the beaten-down dissenter with totally fabricated allegations of serious mental illness. They presented themselves as the guardians of an honorable profession who simply could not allow such an unstable hypocrite to earn a nice living, all while they themselves earned hundreds of thousands or even millions of dollars a year to add a little icing to the enormous wealth of their families. It was extra fun money, and a convenient way to eliminate competition.

And then they went after his family.

His own parents and brother had never understood him. They were embarrassed he wasn't a hard-drinking frat boy who joins in sex orgies at the frat parties like the other powerful, strong, wealthy doctors in the country. They wanted a son who bragged about conquests and country clubs. When his colleagues whispered that Howy was troubled, that he was throwing his career away, his family believed the white coats over their own blood. They cut him out of the family estate, completely.

And then they went after Ms. Liu.

Elena Liu, his once-loving girlfriend — an attractive Chinese American journalist from the SF Bay Area. The only person who truly saw his gentleness.

His own colleagues targeted her to help take him down further. They invited her to their parties, pushed drugging and boozing on her, and pulled her into sexual escapades to humiliate them both.

It worked. She drifted away, caught in a haze they had engineered, and he lost her too.

The blacklist did the rest.

Even though Dr. Howy was a perfectly competent, nice physician whom the patients loved — the kind of doctor who listened, who remembered names, who patients actually asked for by name — the blacklist targeted him anyway. It was cruel and totally inappropriate. He could never get the good contracts he deserved and like many of his wealthy colleagues he simply could not afford his own state of the art medical clinic. He was forced to live on the fringes of society, taking whatever work he could find to survive.

And that marginalized existence completed the con. To the public, it looked like proof. If he were really a good doctor, why would he be on the outside? Why would his very wealthy colleagues be so successful?

The public never saw that those very wealthy colleagues were usually the ones who totally lacked the kind of holistic empathy and social conscience that patients actually want in a doctor.

So Dr. Howy never got the healthy, good life he planned.

He does not fish off in the glistening sunshine off the Florida Keys. He does not SCUBA dive off of Maui as he had planned.

Instead, he spends his elderly years half-naked, starving in the ghetto streets of New York City in a day-to-day fight for his survival.

He remains very troubled by the double standards of the US Department of Justice and American politicians and judges who would arrest and prosecute people in other walks of life who violated someone's legal rights in so many ways but who look the other way when politically well connected wealthy elitist doctors turn the system on a decent doctor this way.

Fiction by Dr Harold Mandel