I'm not saying we should trust them blindly or anything but I'm tired of millions of doctors toiling away every day, doing their jobs perfectly, and then one or two will do something wrong (which I will agree can have catastrophic effects and we should not downplay any of them) and then suddenly we are being taught that all doctors are quacks and nutjobs and shouldn't be trusted.
It gets even worse though, because the people screaming "DON'T TRUST THEM" the loudest are the people who have abandoned the concept of evidence-based or science-based medicine in favor of, well, basically whatever they want to believe works. Look at who's screaming this the loudest - it's the people who think homeopathy works. That acupuncture works. That reiki, theraputic touch, traditional chinese medicine, naturopathy*, Miracle Mineral Supplement, and the like work. Now, these are things where there either is scant evidence that they work, or strong evidence that they
don't work. Many are based on prescientific, vitalistic concepts - in order to believe reiki, TT, or acupuncture work, you need to believe in a sort of completely undemonstrated life force concept, the kind of thing that science abandoned decades ago - while others are based on complete misunderstandings of how medicine or the body works. Homeopathy being a famous example of a medicine that does not work because it cannot work, because it violates several well-established principles in chemistry and physics.
Hell, here's a little alt-med story for you. Mercola.org once endorsed a man by the name of Tullio Simoncini, who believed that all cancer was in fact
candidiasis that had gotten out of control** (so did NaturalNews, by the way, and you can find articles about this guy on basically any major alt-med site). A yeast infection. For anyone in the room who knows nothing about cancer, let me make something perfectly clear:
cancer is not a ****ing yeast infection. In fact, in a stunning case of actual aptitude from the legal system when it comes to quackery in Italy, he was charged and convicted with manslaughter and fraud after his bull**** treatment (based on injecting baking soda into the tumor) led to the death of a patient in 2006.
These are people who know next to ****ing nothing about medicine, and seem to go by the guiding principle of "If it's scientific, can be backed up by peer review, and is recommended by doctors, it's eeeeevil!"
And this kills people.
This is why, @
B
Braydon
, I find your particular brand of "cynicism" so toxic. Doctors are not saints. They cannot inherently be trusted as perfect human beings. That said, by and large, they
are trustworthy. And they're our best shot in dealing with disease, as you would, you know, kind of expect when talking about people who spend 8 years studying the human body. Advising people to stay away from them, and pushing them towards "alternatives" which
demonstrably do not work... That's not okay.
*Naturopathy is not simply "getting medicine from natural substances" as some seem to believe. There actually is a scientific discipline based around that; it's called
pharmacognosy and has made some truly remarkable discoveries. Naturopathy, by comparison, is a cornucopia of herbal medical cures and quackery that may or may not actually do anything.
**For anyone wondering how he came to such a ****ing ludicrous conclusion, let me explain: he saw a tumor. He noticed that it was white and lumpy. He thought, "Huh, you know what else is white and lumpy?"
This is not a joke.
Simoncini realized that all cancers acted the same way no matter where they were in the body or what form they took. There had to be a common denominator. He also observed that the cancer 'lumps' were always white.
What else is white? Candida.
