Lying to doctors is in general a very bad idea. Lying to them about what drugs you are taking is dangerous. Part of their job is so know what drugs will interact with what other drugs or diseases. Lying to doctors makes them much less likely to be able to do that well.
I have made it clear that I do not share your faith in the medical priesthood. Adding to what Mass Driver has already said I will suggest that pharmacists are also a whole lot better (on average) than doctors at avoiding potentially dangerous drug combinations.
I make that conclusion partly based on what I discovered while working in medical education. You know, trying to teach evidence based practices to a bunch of middle aged men (for example) who happened to have done a medical degree 25 years ago and since then have been too busy to significantly educate themselves beyond what they read in the edu-tisements from the pharmaceuticals. But if you prefer anecdotal evidence I have personally had to tell a doctor “No, you can’t give me that, I will get Seratonin Syndrome and I will die.) My pharmacology professor also deal with a doctor who was trying to medicate his daughter with a drug that was known to interfere with his daughter’s medical condition. He had to warn the doctor “No. No, it’s NOT safe. If you do not change this prescription I will sue you. By the way, I have a PhD in Pharmacology.”
Doctors are just people. If you want to ensure your optimal health, and your safety you need to take personal responsibility for your own medical treatments. As I originally suggested this will involve finding competent experts you can trust (and even doctors go to other doctors). But it doesn’t mean you are best off submitting to whatever treatment has managed to make (or buy) its way into being the default mainstream practice.
Seeing doctors is primarily about a ritual affiliation with high status people, not about optimal health. When it comes to everyday things like treating infections and identifying common maladies I will take a doctor at his or her word. It is something they deal with every day and deal with well. But when it comes to any psychological condition or any condition that is uncommon you need to both shop around and to do your own research. It is often easy to find correct contrarians. Usually this is either because a) Medical practice has not caught up with research, b) optimal treatment is not in patent, c) formalized traditions (eg. performance metrics) make the payoff for doctors different from optimally treating patients or d) the “nobody ever got fired for buying IBM” effect.
The anecdotes with finding situations where doctors make serious errors could be well counter-balanced with the cases where a misguided patient’s research effort turned up a solution that has an equally bad effect. It’s not at all clear that on the net, serious personal research into a case by a non-doctor is better than a decision of an average doctor. Especially considering that in the more important cases (assuming you recognize the importance), you can ask several doctors independently.
You seem to be assuming a degree of knowledge about medicine that most humans do not have the time, ability or resources to obtain. You also seem to be attacking a strawman argument. I haven’t argued that “you are best off submitting to whatever treatment has managed to make (or buy) its way into being the default mainstream practice” but rather that actively lying to doctors is a bad idea. And I’d extend that to any other common profession that involves expertise. Lying to your lawyer? Bad idea? Lying to your car mechanic? Bad idea. This isn’t an argument related to the apparently high status of doctors. But simply put, most of us do not have the resources to investigate every single detail (just as we can’t all be competent lawyers or car mechanics or plumbers), and actively lying to those people will frequently create problems.
I have made it clear that I do not share your faith in the medical priesthood. Adding to what Mass Driver has already said I will suggest that pharmacists are also a whole lot better (on average) than doctors at avoiding potentially dangerous drug combinations.
I make that conclusion partly based on what I discovered while working in medical education. You know, trying to teach evidence based practices to a bunch of middle aged men (for example) who happened to have done a medical degree 25 years ago and since then have been too busy to significantly educate themselves beyond what they read in the edu-tisements from the pharmaceuticals. But if you prefer anecdotal evidence I have personally had to tell a doctor “No, you can’t give me that, I will get Seratonin Syndrome and I will die.) My pharmacology professor also deal with a doctor who was trying to medicate his daughter with a drug that was known to interfere with his daughter’s medical condition. He had to warn the doctor “No. No, it’s NOT safe. If you do not change this prescription I will sue you. By the way, I have a PhD in Pharmacology.”
Doctors are just people. If you want to ensure your optimal health, and your safety you need to take personal responsibility for your own medical treatments. As I originally suggested this will involve finding competent experts you can trust (and even doctors go to other doctors). But it doesn’t mean you are best off submitting to whatever treatment has managed to make (or buy) its way into being the default mainstream practice.
Seeing doctors is primarily about a ritual affiliation with high status people, not about optimal health. When it comes to everyday things like treating infections and identifying common maladies I will take a doctor at his or her word. It is something they deal with every day and deal with well. But when it comes to any psychological condition or any condition that is uncommon you need to both shop around and to do your own research. It is often easy to find correct contrarians. Usually this is either because a) Medical practice has not caught up with research, b) optimal treatment is not in patent, c) formalized traditions (eg. performance metrics) make the payoff for doctors different from optimally treating patients or d) the “nobody ever got fired for buying IBM” effect.
The anecdotes with finding situations where doctors make serious errors could be well counter-balanced with the cases where a misguided patient’s research effort turned up a solution that has an equally bad effect. It’s not at all clear that on the net, serious personal research into a case by a non-doctor is better than a decision of an average doctor. Especially considering that in the more important cases (assuming you recognize the importance), you can ask several doctors independently.
You seem to be assuming a degree of knowledge about medicine that most humans do not have the time, ability or resources to obtain. You also seem to be attacking a strawman argument. I haven’t argued that “you are best off submitting to whatever treatment has managed to make (or buy) its way into being the default mainstream practice” but rather that actively lying to doctors is a bad idea. And I’d extend that to any other common profession that involves expertise. Lying to your lawyer? Bad idea? Lying to your car mechanic? Bad idea. This isn’t an argument related to the apparently high status of doctors. But simply put, most of us do not have the resources to investigate every single detail (just as we can’t all be competent lawyers or car mechanics or plumbers), and actively lying to those people will frequently create problems.
Please refer the correct interpretation, as made by Larks earlier.
I suggest, instead that I my response was sufficiently wide ranging as to ensure that some parts of it were simply not a direct reply to you.
Please refer the correct interpretation of my claim , as made by Larks earlier.
Please refer the correct interpretation, as made by Larks earlier.
I suggest, instead that I my response was sufficiently wide ranging as to ensure that some parts of it were simply not a direct reply to you.
Please refer the correct interpretation of my claim , as made by Larks earlier.