Opinion ‘But I Saw It on Facebook’: Hoaxes Are Making Doctors’ Jobs Harder

https://www.nytimes.com/2020/08/28/...l?action=click&module=Opinion&pgtype=Homepage

One of the authors Spencer contracted Ebola.

 

Short article, two excerpts to give an idea of content:

 

This outcome is to be expected. Fewer and fewer people go to see doctors about a health problem and leave the consultation with treatment that will actually cure them. Curing people isn't economically viable. Instead, pharma companies want people to be just well enough to stay alive (and work to pay for pharma meds) but still be sick enough to need pharmaceutical treatment. Another problem is that when people leave doctors' surgeries having been fobbed off and told their problems are all in their heads, why would patients trust the doctors?

Not curing people is also convenient to governments and insurance companies. It means that old people and sick people don't use up much-needed housing stock for decades, and pensions are paid out for less time. People staying alive much beyond their retirement date means that there are too many "useless eaters" and "useless breathers" around.

All these interested parties - the medical profession, the pharma companies, governments and insurance companies - can't have it both ways. People want to feel well, and if doctors can offer them nothing to make that happen then it is just human nature to go looking for answers that you can't find by "officially approved" methods.

Edit : Typo

 

I didn't see this on Facebook I saw it on Twitter :

https://twitter.com/user/status/1299637558054465536

 

Undoubtedly social media can spread harmful medical information, but it can also spread useful information and importantly counteract existing harmful information too.

Would we be seeing NICE here in the UK rewriting its ME/CFS guidelines if not at least in part for the social media campaign?

We are only just learning to use social media, and some are learning to abuse it. However any system to police it needs to ensure it does not just become a way for vested interests to impose control, and to ensure that the baby is not thrown out with the bath water.

 

That's probably playing an even bigger role than I suspected. Especially with the growing use of the MUS approach, people simply get used to not only medicine being useless and indifferent at helping them, a choice made by not doing serious research and relying on absurd beliefs about the magical power of the mind, but actually insulting about it turns them off medicine completely. The normal expected course would be that medicine take proper care of recording all those failures and actively be researching them. When people realize medicine is actually doing the exact opposite of that, entirely on purpose, they understand that medicine is unable to help, encouraging them to go to unofficial voodoo, since at least it's not insulting like the official voodoo.

Medicine seems to have decided that being insulting to people is the right thing to do, a kind of "tough love" approach, speaking truth to people who believe themselves sick when they are "clearly" not. Well, this is the indirect downside. Along with the direct downside of ill people remaining ill, it adds up to a crisis of confidence that can only be corrected by recognizing the catastrophic failure of this approach, something medicine usually does the other way around, instead doubling down even further. This MUS/FND/BPS ideology is truly the biggest failure of expertise in human history.

In normal circumstances this may not be that big of a factor, but mixed with all the propaganda this is just fuel for mistrust that actually goes all the way to actively defy medical advice. Once you've been blatantly lied to your face by a medical professional, it's really hard to trust again. Medicine, especially psychosomatic ideology, clearly finds this irrelevant and so is willfully blind to the problem, the original failure also makes it impossible to realize the problem because it encourages blindness to outcome, to never look at what happens to "those patients".

 

I like that terminology - official voodoo and unofficial voodoo. If I can remember it for longer than five minutes I might use it again.