Too Much Trust of Doctors
Bill Powell explains the explains what the 23 Executive Orders mean for you:
16. Clarify that the Affordable Care Act does not prohibit doctors asking their patients about guns in their homes.
Did you know that the AMA is one of the largest anti-gun establishments in this country? Personally if I had a doctor ask me about guns in my home, if I could control myself from bashing the bastard in the face, I’d walk out without paying. Just another good reason to stay away from these quacks.
Allow me to coin a new term, “Credentialism Creep”: Credentialism is a fairly modern problem, the supposed certifying of ‘experts’ whom we can trust. While it’s certainly a good idea to establish one’s expertise before making policy suggestions, handing out credentials isn’t always the best way to go about it. Doctorates, for instance, are a modern invention – somehow we had great scientists and inventors before they existed – and when you listen to the nonsense coming out of Academia, it’s clear that most of them have no clue what they’re speaking about.
And yet the public at large considers them to be ‘trusted’ sources on all things True.
So now we come to doctors: in theory the AMA assures quality in the medical industry; in reality, like all certification agencies, is a protectionist cartel – just compare the doctors per 1000 population rate of today, versus a century ago. You think you’re buying quality, what your actually getting is something 3X the price with an apple logo on it. The reason that an industry cartelizes – whether it’s the AMA or Registered Hair Dressers, is to help increase the price-point they’re able to charge, by driving away competition.
This excess credentialism is followed by mission creep – pulling more and more under their sway, claiming broader and broader expertise, to justify their existence. Ergo, Credentialism Creep.
In the US and Britain the medical establishments are advocating idiotic policy decisions banning guns and knives – they arrogantly presume that treating an injury makes them experts on the nature of violence, familial conflict, and social ills. The CDC – the Center for Disease Control has taken sociology into portfolio; they presume to apply models for infections agents to social ills.
They are experts on everything under the sun, it seems. While I’m not familiar enough with American gun laws to discredit their opinions there (Mr Correa does that far better than I could) there is one statement I’ve heard here in Canada which absolutely drives me up the wall.
“The one common factor in these traffic fatalities is excess speed.”
I can’t tell you how many times I’ve heard a jackass in a white coat opine on traffic patterns, driving, and speed laws. Somehow these men have become experts on driving, despite never leaving the hospital to visit the accident scene themselves, and they’re happy to dictate policies which conveniently turn into more speed-fine revenue for the state, and excuses to stop-and-frisk anonymous drivers.
However, unlike these ‘exeperts’ I am a Professional Driver. I am a military-trained driving expert, Dangerous Goods and Troop Lift qualified, with thousands of hours behind the wheel, and a clean driver’s abstract, and to boil everything down in a car accident to “Excess Speed” is a fatal simplification.
In fact, two of the scariest incidents I’ve been involved in on the road involve a lack of speed.
The first happened along Crowchild Trail here in Calgary, a quasi-highway with a speed limit of 80 km/h, and multiple over-passes. Coming around a bend, over a hill, I suddenly ran into gridlock traffic, requiring hard breaking. The cause? A short ways down the road the cops had thought it a good idea to pull someone over in the far-left lane, regardless of what that would do to the remainder of traffic.
I repeat – around a blind corner the cops had a car pulled over in the passing lane. They’d created conditions which were an accident waiting to happen.
The second was on Highway 63, “Accident Alley”, en route to Fort McMurray and the oil fields. The government is finally – thankfully – twinning this single-lane Highway which goes on for three hours, with nothing along the road the entire way… and a speed limit of 90 km/h which nobody adheres to.
I was driving with a fellow driving expert, and combat veteran who knew what to do behind the wheel; but we were driving a work vehicle, and they pencil-necked commuters back at our companies office had installed GPSs in the vehicles to ensure that we drove ‘safely’. My coworker in particular was paranoid since – due to seniority and expertise, he was the most highly paid Field Tech, and they were looking for an excuse to fire him for this reason (file under The Modern Economy). As such we were both anal-retentive about doing 3-over-the-speed-limit without exception.
Because of this we had a stack of semi-trucks tailgating us, growing angrier by the minute.
Finally a double-dashed line opened up, and the flatbed behind us decided to pass. The road was wide open, nobody oncoming, but in his angered state he merged back in too early – a “Fuck you” to the F-350 that was driving like a grandma – and nearly would up clipping us.
My coworker made a sharp jerk onto the shoulder, dodging his trailer by less than a foot. His fast reaction time saved out life. If he’d been a split second slower the flatbed would have put us into a roll, and directly behind us – riding our tail-gate – was another pissed-off semi that would have flattened us.
We narrowly missed death that day, thanks to his driving ability. The primary cause? Failing to drive to the conditions. Highway 63 is straight and level, the road is smooth, but the three-hour length of it drives people to frustration; you wind up with stacks of vehicles 12-deep, stuck behind the one trucker with a massive load and a top speed of 80. The government response to this frustration has been to lower the speed limit, increasing the frustration.
If we’d died that day the doctors would have blamed ‘excess speed’ on the part of the flat-bed. Yet the true cause was our lack of speed, failing to drive to the conditions because of the rules imposed upon us by the bean counters at our office.
Doctors are experts on medicine, not driving or weapon implementation – and yet in their hubris they frequently opine on them, ‘Credentialism Creep’, in their quest to be the high-arbiter, the universal priest who tells us How To Live.
These men should be ashamed of themselves; blood is on their hands. And don’t even get me started on the idiotic drunk driving laws they advocate…
I’m not even comfortable with the idea that these legalized drug pushers are anything more than quasi-experts on “medicine”, and by “medicine” I refer to the drugs they push/prescribe.
Data published in J.A.M.A. issues both in 2000 and in 2010 conclusively argued that medical errors cause a minimum of 250,000 “iatrogenic deaths” per year in the U.S. alone. In other words, errors by these credentialed “doctors” cause a quarter million patient death per year who would not have died were it not for the error committed by the credentialed health professional/drug pusher.
Google “iatrogenic deaths” and you will take a trip to the nearest naturopath the next time you feel a bit under the weather. Doctors kill.
Growing up with a mother who’s a family physician and step dad who’s an emergency room physician, I can certainly second this. Now I think my mom is a very intelligent woman, but some of her beliefs seem so naive. She never genuinely questions the world. Yet growing up I heard others, parents of friends, etc etc, almost in awe of things she said. I took that to be normal for awhile, like some sort of thing parents do with their kid’s friends parents, but then realized it was in large part because she is a doctor.
My step dad I think is a little more grounded, perhaps because he worked for several years as a heavy duty mechanic before deciding to go back to school to become a doctor (whereas my mom went to school for like 11-12 years, and while I respect what she does I feel like she has a very limited worldview from it). But still, some of the stuff he says just seems so blatantly wrong.
And of course very few people ever challenge them on these things because they’re doctors. I don’t think they consciously recognize it because they’re actually reasonably humble, but they’re not used to people disagreeing with them. I used to fight with them A LOT when I was younger… and of course I was ALWAYS “wrong”. To be honest I think that kind of messed up my confidence… institutions (like school) were right first, they were right second, and I was right third (or not at all).
* “I took that to be normal for awhile, like some sort of thing parents do with their kid’s friends parents, but then realized it was in large part because she is a doctor.”
^ this was particularly true with parents of my friends from poorer families
Also, on the speed thing, I think you nailed it with not driving to the conditions being the leading cause of accidents. I know, either directly or through others, people who drive recklessly down Alberta highways at 150-200 km/h and I can’t help but think they’re retarded. Certainly, some open stretches of road in good conditions warrant higher speeds than the posted limit, but 180 km/h all the way to Calgary or Fort McMurray from Edmonton is not a reasonable speed. Unfortunately, the dominant narrative here is that it is simply the speed which kills. If they were driving down perfectly flat pristinely paved stretches of road with no intersections/minimal traffic, no rain, no snow, and no occasional wildlife running onto the road it would be fine. But that’s a racetrak, not a highway, and the conditions of the highway should be observed in making a sensible judgment about speed. Unfortunately, to take away speed limits would be difficult because you’d be handing greater interpretive power to police to decide who is not “driving to the conditions”, and we all know how well it works when you give broad interpretive powers to law enforcement. You have the good apples who will be completely decent and respectable officers, and the bad apples who will be unrepentant assholes on a power trip.
Also from Calgary. I can picture the spot that this likely happened at. Southbound near 33rd? Just past the Bow Trail exit?
It’s very similar to the Toronto 400-series. The SLimit there is 100 but few people are driving under 120 on a sunny, warm day. Perfectly straight, hot asphalt and we’re supposed to be driving at 65mph? Try heading down to Montana and coming back north from Helena to Kalispell through the back roads if you want to have some driving fun. Wow.