Ars OpenForum

wagnerrp said:

See bolded. "Trust Yourself, Not Your Doctor." It's driving us back two centuries to when you could legitimately be a polyscientist and make meaningful contributions to multiple disparate fields. You could do your own research, but it's going to require years of fundamentals to even start to make sense of what that research actually means.

"Trust Yourself" is really just another way of saying "Trust Me and Buy My Shit."

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Thanks. While I admit to being a polyscientist, medicine isn't one of them. And I do value my doctors' advice. But I am also mindful that for all their training, each doctor is a human just like you and me: each of us knows only what we know at a given point in time, a pitifully partial sum of our education, our experience, and our current researches.

Less whatever we've forgotten along the way.

For instance, here in the US medical schools have not traditionally included nutrition in their training of Medical Doctors. Some might have a cursory one quarter 3-hour course, or they might not. Either way, whatever a given MD might know of nutrition, be it little or a lot, is generally whatever they have deigned to educate themselves since medical school.

Me, I seek out such doctors. But I educate myself as well, the better to appreciate their knowledge, and learn more from our interactions.

Do I trust my doctors? Mostly, but not entirely, which is what I think the Means mean. Consider New Analysis Suggests Adverse Drug Events Are the 3rd Leading Cause of Death in the USA

According to an analysis conducted by the American Society of Pharmacovigilance (ASP), adverse drug events (ADEs) are now the third leading cause of death in the United States. This figure combines ADEs that result from several causes including prescribing errors, prescription drug overdoses, prescription drug misuse, drug-drug interactions, allergic reactions, and adverse drug reactions (ADRs). The ASP launched the “Third Cause Campaign” in response to the new data, estimating that ADEs account for ~250,000 deaths each year, a greater number than deaths caused by stroke and respiratory disease.

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So, who is responsible? I'm not talking criminal liability for malpractice or negligence. I'm talking about -- and I think the Means are talking about -- how do we prevent such tragedies in the first place?

From my personal experience, FDA Drug Labels can be quite informative as to a given drug's contraindications, its possible side effects, and its adverse interactions with other drugs. But -- again from personal experience -- while a given doctor might have read the labels once-upon-a-time, that doesn't mean he or she has re-read them recently and has them fresh in their mind. So who is responsible? Who is the patient's advocate?