His years inside the medical sausage factory have made Kurt Harris a medical nihilist:
A medical nihilist posits that in a world where the entire medical system (alternative and complementary not exempted) disappeared in some selective rapture, that the net effect would be positive for the economy, and no worse than neutral for the aggregate level of health and wellness.
(This does not mean that some medical interventions are not highly useful, just that in the aggregate they are balanced out by all the negative ones — the side effects and the nutritional advice, etc.)
I didn’t go through decades in the medical profession, but I think I’m at the same place. I’ve adopted Harris’ paleo diet, for starters, and I’ve lost forty pounds and I feel much, much healthier. So much of what we’re told is just wrong, and now when the wife and I interact with the medical profession, we are treated to disbelief and condescension (well, my wife more than me — I’m 6′ 4″ and most doctors are small) when we try to discuss nutrition/diet and health.
Find doctors “disbelieving and condescending”? Try talking to Man in the Street about Art Devaney, Robb Wolf, Cordain, Mark Sisson, or any of the Paleo Posse.
The answer you’ll get is “I just want a pill to make it better.” Then, they hop into a car with an Obama or Bush bumper sticker (mutatis mutandis for day and age). Change, my arse.
As with government, we get the medical care we deserve. Nay: we get the medical care we ask for.
“Seek freedom and become captive of your desires. Seek discipline and find your liberty.”
Great excerpt. I have read through most of Harris’s archives including the excerpted post, but I did not particularly notice these paragraphs at the time.
Another way to put this in perspective is to think back to the bleedings and other various ineffective, or actively harmful, medical practices of another era. Those doctors thought themselves exceptionally knowledgable and effective. We have come a long way since then, and most of us probably can think of times we have been extremely grateful for Western medicine, but Harris’s thought experiment is extremely provocative and interesting because it forces us to think about all of the “silent” costs.
The view Harris expresses here is so shocking because most of the failures and shortcomings are effectively hidden from public consciousness, whereas the successes are so vivid and memorable: we all know someone whose life was saved by anti-biotics, but we don’t think about all of the people who have been essentially misled into bad health through the influence of bad medicine.
Harris loves to talk about “n=1″, i.e. anecdotes where, although the data set is small, larger implications seem to unfold from it.
With that in mind, see the following quote from a review of a book by Iris Chang’s mother about her daughter’s life and suicide. (Iris Chang, you will remember, was the young independent scholar who committed suicide several years after the publication of her unsettling book “The Rape of Nanking”.)
“Ying-Ying’s [Iris Chang's mother's] conviction is unshakable: “I believe Iris’s suicide was caused by her [prescribed] medications.”"
n=1 supporting the medical nihilist position….
This is more than n=1. A study showed that the number of autopsies has radically decreased in recent decades because… 40% of the time they showed that the doctor had misdiagnosed the cause of death! And doctors don’t want to be proven wrong!
Via Andrew Sullivan.