Bad Medicine

Medical Doctors are mostly practitioners, not academics. However, this doesn't necessarily stop them from dispensing wisdom beyond their training. Normal people are inclined have much higher regard for the general opinions of doctors because they see being one as a proxy for great intelligence, knowledge and sense. The reality is that they have spent seven-odd insulated years learning a whole lot about medicine, physiology and the like, and practically nothing about anything else. A couple of first year half-courses in in the hard sciences and maybe some electives along the way are typically all they get to prepare them for the elevated esteem they will be granted by society. True, some are quite brilliant, and many are well-rounded, but then they probably would have been whatever they studied. Unfortunately, the opposite is often true.

This explains to me why there are so many former or current doctors out there actively promoting or at least condoning "alternative" remedies, the definition of which could be broadly put as those which have failed, often completely, to (a) work, (b) make any sense, and (c) pass safeguards like peer review and clinical trials. No-one with real understanding of statistics and the Scientific Method could take seriously most of these remedies. Indeed, we have a Health Minister whose Soviet medical training clearly permitted graduation without demonstrable critical ability, and worse, a system that allows someone like that to become the number one decision-maker in national health care. Scary. A sad blight on a respected profession. I hate to think what immense diseconomies result worldwide from such ignorance.

Time was a doctor was considered an authority beyond his field. Sadly, the advances of modern medicine now necessarily require a more complete focus on the discipline to the exclusion of general science. Doctors are now better at fixing people, but they are by no means scientific generalists. When enough of them start lending credibility to spurious ideas, perhaps it's time to start changing the undergrad curriculum. And I reiterate my call for all top-level public office bearers to be forced to pass a stats test.