A reader of this blog reported the following conversation with his doctor:
us: We want to put our autistic daughter on a gluten-free, casein-free diet. We have heard that some autistic kids have gotten some benefit from it.
Dr: It’s not something I know about, but there is no harm in it so feel free to give it a try. You know, I had a patient whose parents put her on a ketogenic diet to treat her seizures, and it seemed to help. That goes against everything I was taught in med school, but if it works, I think that’s great.
What’s telling here is the word everything. In medical school, the doctor seems to say, he was taught in a dozen ways that the sun revolves around the earth (or its health-science equivalent). If the alternative — the earth revolves around the sun — explains more of the data, well, “that’s great.” Again, it sounds like 1984: Part of the doctor’s brain has been turned off by repetition of something that supports the status quo.
QUOTE:
“Part of the doctor’s brain has been turned off by repetition of something that supports the status quo.”
That’s very interesting. My impression is that MDs are trained to think in a narrow, focused manner, and to reject as “anecdotal” any patient statements that don’t match the Big Pharma orthodoxy. And conversely, I think that PhDs are more likely to be question-oriented, and to be on a lifelong quest for new information.
But, heck, what do I know about higher education? I flunked out of pre-school.
Jim
The last part is just wacked, ketogenic diets have been a standard treatment for epilepsy for decades, not so popular now since no drug company makes $ by pushing them, but our pediactric neurologist brought them up as a treatment option for our sons seizures once he is weaned.
Might want an MD who at least knows what the medical establishment considers normal.
It`s a little bit of both, doctors are actually trained to think in a narrow, focused manner, becouse of so many knowledge they have to comprehend, and they are also under enormous influence by drug companies.
Hunh. There seems to be a parallel with lawyers, judging from an on-again off-again blogosphere feud that started a year or two ago. The bloggers and commenters who have studied law seem to have specific blocks when it comes to analyzing what people’s words mean, as if law school overrides this particular application of logic and common sense and replaces it with a stylized formula — one which appears nonsensical to non-lawyers.
Now that I think about it, I can see other professions that seem to have similar induced blind spots. Maybe it’s even the rule, rather than the exception?
dustmouse, that’s very interesting. What’s the
“on-again off-again blogosphere feud” about? I agree that “turning off common sense” is a good way to describe what happens. Clark Hoyt, the Public Editor of the New York Times, recently claimed, seriously, that the sentence “he walked into the room and started shooting” does not mean that the two actions — (a) walking into the room and (b) started shooting — happened at the same time. See:
https://www.tinyrevolution.com/mt/archives/003228.htmlÂ