Girl, you have no faith in medicine

I have always had a healthy distaste for authority. 

Ignore the fact that I'm a white male, heterosexual of middle age born into a healthy, comfortable family in Australia. I’m basically the most privileged section of the population. Authority figures, stereotypically, look like me. Well me if I was boring, dressed in a shit suit that didn’t fit me that well.

It’s not that I am hard done by, or underprivileged.

I’ve just always had this ingrained default rejection of people telling me what to do.

Now, the evolutionary psychologists in the room will tell you it’s my Scottish blood, descendent from warring clansman, struggling under the yoke of a foreign overlord.

Behavioural psychologists will look at my working class, left leaning parents and a 80s Australian upbringing.

Me personally, I would go for coming of age in THE era of angry, anti-establishment music (yes, i know the 60s are known for their revolutionary music, but it was never as angry and loud, and there were no electric guitars, bass drums or hip hop, so 90s wins). 

Wherever it came from, I can certainly feel it, and it is certainly irrational.

What the fuck do I have against authority? Apart from teachers telling me to cut my hair and tuck in my shirt, or hiding from cops after waterbombing houses, people, and cops, I really have no reason to rage against the machine, personally.

I have no time for organised religion, and the hypocrisy of the church was obvious to me at an early age (save your pitchforks and fires for my blog about God - coming soon), but no other personal or family history.

But it’s there.

Switching domains to my professional life, as opposed to my personal identity musings on being a pirate captain, and in some respects, I am part of the “the authority” when it comes to health.

While doctors remain top of the pile, and suffer from a lingering traditional patriarchal system of hierarchy, any health professional that is evidence based, scientific and up to date, will tend to follow guidelines and practices as determined by medical and health regulatory bodies, and so form the “medical establishment”. 

Having been around for a while in this gig, I have seen progress in my corner of health care, as well as advances in adjacent fields. I have also seen monumental cock-ups, ignorant fools and bullshit treatments flogged to vulnerable populations.

But while the medical establishment is not without fault and above criticism, on the whole it is a good thing and people have benefited from it.

So here, dear reader, is the crux of today's blog (finally, you say) - the increase in medical antiestablishmentism and the rise of social media fed bullshit.

While this has been festering along for some while, with antivaxxers, ice bathers and blood-type diets, Covid lit a fire under the rejection of medicine that continues to burn.

The reason for my long preamble is to point out that I get it. I get the feelings of distrust and “fuck you”ism that fuels the rejection of authority. I get that medical fuckups happen often, that profit is the decision maker in many cases, and that there is way more that we don’t know about many things. I also get the lingering, paternalistic, “we know better” attitude of the medical establishment. I’m a victim of it, as a lowly physiotherapist, I am shackled by my lack of access to referral rights as I am a lesser being in the eyes of healthcare.

So fuck ‘em.

Don’t trust them, reject medicine altogether, as it a product of the system and fuck the system.

Right?

No.

And when written like that it sounds pretty stupid.

As do many advocates of non-medical solutions when they get on their soapbox and wave their angry fists.

(please note, dear reader, the intentional avoidance of the term “alternative medicine”. It includes the word medicine, which these things are not, as well as, in my opinion, encouraging this counterculture behaviour when it comes to health by calling it alternative. Alternative music = good. Alternative medicine = bad)

So when they clearly sound stupid, why the growing popularity of bullshit quackery?

I think 2 main things. There are probably more, but these stand out.

1. An increase in bullshit in every field thanks to the sheer noise generated by the modern world. Medicine is not alone. The age of information and interconnectedness is titrating the noise to signal ratio down to barely negligible levels of quality of information.

If real, accurate, important information (signal) was cyanide in this solution of noise, you could drink the koolaid all day and live a long, stupid life. So any idea idiot with a phone, a personal experience they did not understand and zero understanding of survivor, confirmation and selection bias can scream from the rooftops “this happened to me therefore it will happen to everyone in the world - buy your own charcoal enema kit

2. The reality that there are some shitty, greedy fuckers in the world that use vulnerable people to make a lot of money, then seem to be able to do it again and again. Conspiracy theories often start somewhere. There are a tonne of shit stories about medical, pharmacological, general healthcare companies, individuals and policy that are public knowledge where “the little guy” get fucked over. There would be more you don’t know about. There is a vast, deep river of stories of people having a shit experience with healthcare, which tend to be concentrated where privilege does not, like most shitty things in this world.
 

But this does not mean that the ENTIRE PRACTICE OF MEDICINE, HEALTHCARE AND EVERY PERSON IN IT is focused on killing you, hurting you, harvesting your organs or otherwise fucking you over for money.

Rejecting medicine is bad for your health.

So, what is the alternative (ha - I did that on purpose)

To quote my favourite trope of the online illiterate - DO YOUR OWN RESEARCH

This comes with a massive caveat though. 

Please remember, you reading an article from a questionable source on an online platform designed to feed you controversial information does not equate to an entire career of study in a given field. Health professionals make mistakes, become more unaware of things outside their specialty as time goes on, are terrible at seeing where they could be wrong, have massive egos they don’t like hurting AND can be huge dicks. 

BUT

Your 2 days of reading does not make your opinions equal.

It is, however, your health. So be critical. Ask questions. Ask for resources. Ask for other options. Ask about risk, benefits, consequences.

Get a second opinion, get 3.

Ask health professionals how confident they are in their opinions, how much debate within the profession there is about best treatment.

Ask them what happens if you do nothing?

Ask them what the current best evidence says about the proposed course of action and how strong that evidence is.

You don’t have to have advanced medical degrees to get an idea of how confident someone is in their opinion, and how justified that confidence is.

But equally, or even more, important.

Turn that critical eye on the advocates of non-medicine.

What is the source of the information? Has the result been reproduced elsewhere? Is there any objective test, like a randomised, controlled trial, comparing it to something else?

Are the people plugging it selling it?

Are there any independent opinions?

If the reason supporting an opinion, stance or belief is just that it goes against “the man”, is that enough?

If Big Pharma, or Big Medicine, or Big Whatever was really out to enslave the masses, would there not be more evidence of such conspiracies? Literally Everywhere?
   

So now, in a literary style my high school English teacher would no doubt have thought above my abilities, I will now end my blog by referencing the title.

(Bonus points as it is also the title to an alternative music song. So many layers man, seriously, can you win a Pulitzer for a blog?).

There is no place for faith in medicine. Belief one way or the other is irrelevant. Evidence is what you need to follow. And medical programs that have survived the rigours of time and have shown consistent and empirical results - like the world wide vaccination program - should not need to provide any further proof. So I have no faith in medicine, as faith requires belief in the absence of proof. I have evidence and the ability to make an informed decision.

It is non-medicine which requires faith, and just like all faith based hoaxes, would dwindle if we all just flexed our critical thinking muscles a little more.

And, look, let’s be honest, if the twats in the health and medical arenas stopped cocking things up as often it would make that easier, right?