Bad Medicine Could Be in Store for MI's El-Sayed Over Issues Concerning His Medical Background

Abdul El-Sayed is the frontrunner for Abdul El-Sayed, which is scheduled for August. He has gained notoriety—mostly negative—as he aligns himself with radical left-wing and potentially antisemitic factions within the Democratic Party. Some also accuse him of being a terrorist sympathizer, hanging out with figures like Hasan Piker, but we’re not going to focus on that low-hanging fruit today. 

El-Sayed claims he’s a medical doctor, but Politico, of all outlets, published a damaging piece exposing the far-left Democrat as having an inconsistent history in that regard, making it hard to determine if he’s even treated patients. Does he have fake credentials? No, but Mr. El-Sayed, at the very least, has not been completely transparent about a key part of his campaign. He may have the credentials and education of a medical professional, but he’s like Dr. Green from ER (via Politico) [emphasis mine]:

Michigan Democratic Senate candidate Abdul El-Sayed for years has publicly said he’s a physician — but there’s overwhelming evidence that he’s had no experience as a licensed medical doctor.

This April, he gave an interview to a local TV journalist where he talked up his credentials as a physician multiple times. In March, he told a group of Teamsters nurses that he had “been in enough codes to watch who really does the work” and said that same month on a podcast that “I’ve been a doctor my whole career.”

His LinkedIn profile currently says he’s a “physician,” and late last month he called himself “a physician and epidemiologist” at a Council of Baptist Pastors debate in Detroit.

But according to a review of Michigan and New York state medical records, he’s never been granted a medical license in those states. El-Sayed’s hands-on experience treating patients appears to be a short clinical rotation called a sub-internship at a small hospital in Manhattan for four weeks at the end of medical school, he told a podcast in 2022, where he said his “job was to be the, like, worst doctor on the team” and he was “cosplaying a doctor.”

“The perception in Michigan is that he is, at least at one point in his life, a licensed physician,” said Chris Dewitt, an unaligned Democratic strategist based in Michigan. “That apparently is not the case, and it blows up a big part of his campaign.”

 

 

[…]

…his history of suggesting to voters that he served as a practicing physician — with examples stretching back almost a decade — has muddled his personal history, adding confusion to his otherwise impressive achievements. In 2018, when El-Sayed was running for governor of Michigan, Crain’s Detroit Business published a story that also examined his claims of being a physician but not having a license to practice medicine in Michigan.

“I think there’s a lot of ways that one serves as a physician. And I think the work that I have done and I continue to do is true to the core and the ethos of medicine,” El-Sayed told Crain’s Detroit Business at the time. “And when I took my Hippocratic Oath, that is still an oath that I use to guide my work today. I’m a physician because I have an MD, but I’m also a physician because of the work that I’ve dedicated my career to.”

Yet El-Sayed has made his medical credentials a key part of his appeal on this campaign, often highlighting his background in medicine and as a physician — or not correcting people when they mention it. When Sen. Bernie Sanders appeared with El-Sayed last year at a Medicare town hall, the Vermont independent stopped to remind the livestreamed audience why he was backing El-Sayed: “there are no people in the Democratic caucus who are physicians,” he said. Abdul sat silently by and didn’t correct him.

Some bad medicine could be headed for the Michigan Democrat. Will it be disqualifying? Who knows — that state and the Democratic Party overall are unraveling. In Maine, they’re about to nominate a man with Nazi tattoos to run against Susan Collins.