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Viewing 6 posts - 76 through 81 (of 81 total)
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  • #1510836
    Dave T
    Member

    @davet

    .

    #1510839
    George Phoenix
    Member

    @perrito

    Locale: Joisey

    Definitely.

    #1510928
    Dean F.
    BPL Member

    @acrosome

    Locale: Back in the Front Range

    > "making your life very hard and brief" This just sounded silly.

    Silly and true, despite your flippant dismissal. :o) That was one of the few times that I wasn't making a joke in a BPL post. For example, before they got sued into submission the Cancer Centers of America killed a lot of people by pushing 'alternative' therapies over mainstream ones. This may not be an example directly related to the internet, but my point is made. With them as an at least plausible source of information I shudder to think what some alien-probed hemp-obsessed crystal-hugger tries to tell people on forum postings where no one can CHECK HIS CREDENTIALS. (No offense meant to any alien-probed hemp-obsessed crystal-huggers out there…)

    I'm just leery about quacks convincing people to cure their cancer with crystals, or ginseng, or shark cartilage, or some other amazingly useless crap. If a patient is going to die I tell them they are going to die. Then I talk to them about palliation. I don't try to sell them false hope and some "exotic Malaysian herb that the mainstream doctors don't want you to know about." I mean- who are they kidding???

    Yes, I'm sure somebody will now post an amazingly heartwarming story about how eating rhino uterus cured their herpes or something. Anecdotal and immaterial- show me the RCT (we could do that one). And, rarely, good things happen irrespective of eating rhino uterus. I don't claim to know everything, after all, and I have seen unexplained miraculous recoveries once or twice. But 99% of such claims that I have encountered were either misdiagnoses, or someone just lied about having the disease in the first place, or the person involved got the mainstream treatment in part or in total too but left that out of the story, or were already declared to be in remission BEFORE they started hugging the crystals, etc.

    Whew.

    Well, anyway, that's where I'm coming from. That's why I got a little heated. I apologize if I came on strong, but since I annoyed people I felt I had to explain my motivations. I see a heck of a lot more people hurt by quacks than I do by GPs- but I'm a specialist so that may be sampling bias in addition to being anecdotal.

    There are a LOT of quacks out there. And, yes, no small number of them have Dr appended before their name. Some even have MD appended after it. And some MDs just commit malpractice- though not nearly as often as the lawyers would have you believe. (That's a different discussion, though.) This certainly makes life hard for a patient who is looking for options, I know. But the truth is most reasonable people should be able to tell them apart. Most of the time. If some one is telling you something that sounds too good to be true- it is.

    A few months ago I diagnosed a newly-married 32-year-old man whose wife was pregnant with a sporadic stage 4 colon cancer. The kid at CVS looms high on my list of worries. :o)

    P.S. Yes, I looked up the details, but I already knew that the patent clerk was an, er, Unusually Well-Educated patent clerk. :o) Because he is a favorite example of the "never trust an expert" people. And, yes, on an anonymous internet forum I would ask for his credentials if he posted something like that faster-than-light nonsense. Wouldn't you? Einstein's peers sure did, when he published relativity. But a lot of people were working on that problem at the time, so it was no surprise when someone showed up with the solution. Again, that's how peer-review works.

    #1510934
    Lynn Tramper
    Member

    @retropump

    Locale: The Antipodes of La Coruna
    #1510937
    Dean F.
    BPL Member

    @acrosome

    Locale: Back in the Front Range

    Ha!

    Sorry.

    Was I getting too painful? I'll stop now… :o)

    #1510940
    Lynn Tramper
    Member

    @retropump

    Locale: The Antipodes of La Coruna

    "Was I getting too painful?"

    Nope. We were just getting WAAAAY off topic

Viewing 6 posts - 76 through 81 (of 81 total)
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