Stay in your lane

“I wonder: do I want the simple, simple life that I once lived in well?
Oh, things were quiet then
In a way they were the better days
But now I am the proudest monkey you’ve ever seen.”– Dave Matthews

Yesterday’s posting creating a stir on the other site I write for. There are always far more comments over there. Most of the time I simply take this piece and put it over there, but I honestly did the reverse that time. They don’t like long-winded screeds over there and there was commentary I wanted to add on the end.

In this case, the additional commentary was probably necessary. First, I didn’t overtly discuss my intentions to treat a situation with humor. So, a couple of readers assumed the “trial transcript” was actually a trial transcript. That kind of mistake checks out. We’ve done the same thing with our students. If we show them an article by the Washington Post and an article by The Onion side by side, a number of them will identify the piece by the Onion as the legitimate news piece.

This is an honest to God side by side comparison without the labels of what publication the articles came from. However, the same still happens even when you add in the publication names. We have entered upside down land where traditional media sources are considered unreliable and fly by night or satirical publications are given credence. I’ve gone cross-eyed.

The other part of the conversation surprised me some. The site is a site obviously dominated by progressives, but suddenly people that laugh at the whole idea of people taking medicine meant for livestock were getting down and dirty and discussing the reasons why someone would take medicine like that. Apparently, there is a “river fever” I’ve heard nothing about and Ivermeticin works well with head lice. Who knew?

If they would have come here they would have known. The answer to that question is that doctors know. Of course, I don’t want them coming here. I have a pseudonym over there and we don’t necessarily want people knowing our true identities. The idea wasn’t to debate a particular medication, but to debate the idea of what has happened to us.

We treat people the same way we treat traditional media sources. They are somehow meant to be treated with cynicism. Instead, we trust sketchy YouTube videos or casual acquaintances (or even family) that have no training whatsoever. It’s quite literally insane.

Apparently, the local court order was overturned yesterday even though the patient in question was already dead. However, a court in Ohio apparently made the exact same order. They ordered a local hospital to give a patient a certain medication. Occasionally, the law gets involved in insurance matters. Someone may not get treated because their insurance lapsed or a bureaucrat made a treatment decision.

I can’t fathom how the law is supposed to tell an actual medical doctor how to treat a patient. How exactly does that work? If the treatment fails then who exactly is held responsible? If the doctor follows their medical ethics and refuses to do a treatment they never recommended then how does that work? As usual, I don’t think we have judges that have quite thought that dilemma out to its logical conclusion.

They are likely coming from a thought process where we automatically distrust people that are experts. Somehow, they don’t know what they are talking about. I’ve done my research. I know. What exactly do we know? Where did you get your information from? If a treatment wasn’t tested by doctors then how do we know it works? If there wasn’t an official drug trial then how do we know what the side effects are. How do we know the proper dosage? Does the dewormer also work with fleas and ticks?

Thus, we get to the crux of it all. Research is not about doing a Google search and finding an article somewhere that says what you say. How do we know that article was sourced correctly? What was their research based on? Is it research at all or is it a publication similar to the Onion that is doing a giant troll job? That’s the beauty and curse of the internet. Somewhere someone is doing research on the baseball Hall of Fame and they stumbled here.