I’m having a helluva Sunday. My father-in-law’s in the hospital, it’s 2 degrees out with a wind chill of 40 below, my clothes all smell like latkes, my daughter is having a melt-down, and I screwed up the .xml file for my podcast. The last part reminds me of something—science is hard, and when we step out of our areas of expertise, it’s easy to make some pretty silly mistakes.
If you don’t understand the basics of a subject, it’s easy to form conclusions that seem logical, but these same conclusions seem silly to those who have a deeper understanding of a subject.
With may damned podcast, I’m writing xml files based on templates—little thinking is involved. I’m looking at other people’s code and inserting my own details, hoping it works. If I actually understood the syntax of xml files, I could write a correct one based on a solid understanding of the specifics of the subject.
Medicine is one of those areas in which we all feel we should be experts. After all, we all have a body, and we figure that our bodies follow a logic that we can plainly see—if you prick us, do we not bleed? If you tickle us, do we not laugh? If you poison us, do we not die? It all seems so logical.
Colons are full of poop. Poop is yucky. Therefore, cleaning out a colon is good.
Except that it’s not true. The human body is rather complex, and the study of the aggregate of all human bodies living together (e.g. public health) is more complex still.
Since the world of cult medicine hasn’t bothered to learn real science, they often rest on what sounds “right”. Like poop being yucky, this is often based on a sliver of fact that is horribly misused due to ignorance.
One of the more popular canards propagated by cult medicine leaders and their followers is that modern medical care kills. Rather than exploring what the data are and what they mean in order to find a problem and correct it, they manufacture a problem out of whole cloth and come up with non sequitor solutions.