A few months ago I read Matt Hongoltz-Hetling's If it Sounds Like a Quack, which eviscerates the self-labeled "medical freedom movement." Now I'll gift-link you his piece in the NYT, which illuminates the lethally dangerous insanity of this so-called movement with the story of one woman with breast cancer who decided to forego scientific medical treatment for a fraud, and paid with her life.
"Medical freedom" simply means that the man who murdered her, whose name is Robert Oldham Young, has absolute impunity for his crime. Now the Secretary of Health and Human Services is making the federal government a co-conspirator with Young and his ilk in what amounts to mass murder. Well, the American people voted. I don't know if this is what most of them wanted but I know a lot of them did. There were Kennedy for President signs all over my neck of the woods, and when he dropped out and endorsed Orange Julius they were all swapped out for signs touting the Kennedy's new cult leader.
So we have to ask, what is the attraction? Why do so many people believe that biomedical scientists and physicians have somehow gotten it all wrong? One significant data point people might want to consider is that the human life expectancy doubled during the 20th Century. A diagnosis of cancer was a sentence to a quick death until the late 20th Century, and that didn't change because people adopted diets to de-acidify their bodies. It's true that medical procedures often have adverse side effects, that hospitals are cold and unpleasant places, that physicians can be brusque and medical concepts can be confusing. Sure, you'd rather not go through chemotherapy or surgery. On the other hand vaccination is very rarely worse than a two second pinprick and maybe a mildly sore arm for a day, which is one hell of a lot better than smallpox or polio, and in fact most physicians are kindly and caring, even if they aren't the best communicators. And swallowing pills is very easy. In fact people are happy to swallow worthless "supplements" every day, even when they won't swallow the pills the doctor prescribes.
I actually find this very puzzling. Maybe someone can enlighten me. In the meantime, Robert Kennedy Jr. is a menace to humanity. Every senator who voted to confirm his appointment (i.e., 100% of Republicans), is complicit. Not a single one is fit to hold public office.
1 comment:
I agree on all points. This all seems to harken back to our recent discussions of the Plains Ape (i.e., us), who has been conditioned through hundreds of millennia to respond more to stories than to fact. The Allegory of the Cave is a fairly recent explanation of this phenomenon, and as far as I can tell, it still applies -- if you can get enough people to be ignorant enough. That, we have achieved in the US -- with Fox and its heirs. With an official echo chamber for ignorance that supports racism and cultism, we're in a world of shit.
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