8 ms·

This call seems problematic. Doctors suffer from a kind of bias-- not sure the name of it-- but they only see people when they have problems. The only time doc

by lawpoop 10y ago

This call seems problematic. Doctors suffer from a kind of bias-- not sure the name of it-- but they only see people when they have problems. The only time doctors encounter the human experience of LSD, magic mushrooms, etc. is when something has gone wrong. Unless the doctor has spent a lot of time at music festivals, burning man, etc. they Sure, alcohol is a very dangerous drug, and causes all kinds of ill health, chronic conditions, emergency room visits, accidents, etc. But, because most doctors have had a typical experience with alcohol, from trying it as a teenager, binge drinking at college, and now social/casual drinking, they think it's safe, because they've had lots of experiences that didn't end with someone going to the hospital. I'm not sure what the best route is for this, but asking doctors to take lead on this doesn't seem like an effective campaign.

akiselev 10y ago
That may have been true in the past but the situation has rapidly changed over the last decade. Amphetamine and opioid abuse stemming from over-prescription is becoming far too common and doctors are now experiencing the full spectrum from people genuinely in pain to high-risk heroin addicts. When the latest public health scare is a drug abuse epidemic attributed to the medical system instead of the black market, it's far harder to ignore the futility of the war on drugs.
- icantdrive55 10y ago
  I'm not so sure amphetamine, and opioid abuse are the result of over-prescribing. I honestly think people are genuinely misserable. They are given a drug that makes them feel just better. Some just want to feel better. Of course, it's easy to blame it on a medication, but if it's not that prescribed pain killer, it will be something else. We need to stop saying we are "The greatest nation on earth." For some, it might ring true, but for the vast majority of us it isn't. It's just a country, with a lot of laws, and becomming very hard to make a living. We are thrown into a society, and just expected to "make it". We were brought up being told; you can do anything if you work hard enough. So many of us are just completely dissalusioned. I won't get into all the reasons. Oh, the reasons. No, we aren't starving to death, but the pressure to live up to the success of past generations is stiffling. We got some hope with the invention of heterocyclic drugs. (Prozac, etc). They failed spectacularly. Doctors went from "The boy geniuses--to mechanics." I look at the average Doctor, as just a luckey guy who got accepted to med. school, and slightly more ethical than the typical lawyer. Hell--I never had a mechanic say this while under my vechicle, "It's an art too?" Yea, I'm no fan of the golden boys. So now, on so many levels Doctors shouldn't be the ones deciding policy. They are just too tied to the money their profession that extorts from us. Extortion might be harsh? It's more like being held hostage? We need to pay them in order to prevent disease, or feel better? (The AMA is basically a huge lobby group. They don't want patients doing anything other than making a office visit, and getting a script.) Do I have a better system? No. That's the problem. That said, I would like to take the power away from doctors. I would like to see a Federal Statute put into place. It would be this: If any patient has been on a drug(maintance drugs mainly--blood pressure drugs, drugs that control diabetes, many psychiatric medications, pain meds, etc) for longer than five years; that person should be able to obtain the same dose of medication without seeing a doctor. Of course antibiotics would be off limits to everyone. And patients would have to provide any required blood work their medication requires. I would further like to see all street drugs decriminalized. Something on the lines of what Portugal did. Thats it. Will it happen? Probally never. We will go on spending a fortune on locking people up for just wanting to feel better, or have more energy. I would rather see that money go into free education, free housing, and free medical care.
- ajb 10y ago
  Mods: sibling comment by 'icantdrive55' is 'dead' for no clear reason.
  - kefka 10y ago
    That's hellbanning for you. It's also a good reason to look at your user page via a private session in your browser every so often, esp if you have no comments to you.
themgt 10y ago
By the same token, doctors are better equipped to understand (to the extent we can) the neurochemical reactions being caused by drugs and how they act on the brain. I would imagine a doctor who e.g. understands how many anti-depressants work by targeting the serotonin system would find it interesting the way many psychedelics also are serotonergic - people are basically just dumping analogues of their own neurotransmitters into their brain. Similarly, look at the relationships chemically between sumatriptan (used to treat cluster headaches), psilocybin and DMT. Or the opioids, stimulants ... substances like coca and kratom that have been used for hundreds or thousands of years and analogues of which are used in medical settings all the time. The argument that these are crazy, dangerous substances with zero legitimate medical value pretty instantly falls apart to anyone who understands how closely related nearly all of these substances are to pharma drugs widely understood to have legitimate medical value. I'd in fact be interested to hear which "drugs" have the least relation to any recognized western medicine. Salvia divinorum?
- kem 10y ago
  I sympathize with the OP, although my concerns are slightly different. I worry that physician groups are trying to shape this narrative in a way that just shifts government-sanctioned power from one group to another. Physicians are not disinterested parties in this, because they have huge financial benefits to gain from official policy being that drugs are a "medical" issue. Once this happens, if nothing changes about the way that the medical system is organized, you'll just have a different group sucking up money and controlling individuals wholesale without sufficient justification. I agree with you up until a very critical point. Doctors are better equipped to understand the neurochemical reactions being caused by drugs than criminal justice professionals. However, they are not necessarily better equipped to understand the neurochemical reactions than other scientific professionals, nor are they better equipped to understand the economic, social, or legal consequences than criminal justice and other professionals. This is what is happening with the medical rhetoric: you have a group of experts in area X, who are currently legally designated as either the only people truly qualified, or in control of those qualified, arguing "drugs are an issue of X." In doing so, they put themselves in control of decision-making in this area, with all the financial benefits that accrue to them, and, more dangerously, simultaneously take control of discourse away from others, because then they become the ones who are only, or who are most qualified to make decisions about whether or not it is an issue of X. Once society deems drug use a "medical disease," then physicians become the people who are only truly legally qualified to make decisions about drug use, and also the only people truly qualified to make decisions about drug use policy. It's an entirely self-serving vicious circle. This line of reasoning is also dangerous, because there is no end to its logic. Given that humans are fundamentally biological beings, any state of human suffering can ultimately be seen as "medical" in nature. Reading this sounds conspiratorial, and I don't mean it to be, but it's frustrating to me that society doesn't recognize the ethical conflict of interest created by current medical certification and licensing systems. Don't get me wrong: the current system for handling drugs is woefully broken. But I worry that labeling drug use as a "disease" will only shift the problems from one area to another, unless that system is also reformed to foster a more competitive, less hierarchical health care community. Drug use problems are a complex, social, biological, psychological, legal, economic problem set that is outside the purview of any particular professional community. The best approach is to just deregulate it, and treat it as a form of human suffering that requires a multifactorial approach. I'm deeply skeptical this will happen, though, given our recurrent need to oversimplify everything.
greglindahl 10y ago
So you're saying that doctors are only capable of evaluating personal experience, and not evidence collected by others? That puts a whole new spin on the medical profession.
- Something1234 10y ago
  No, he's stating that they have a cognitive bias. One that is not easily realized.
roel_v 10y ago
There are several policy areas where doctors feel they have more to add than they actually do: tobacco discussion, whether or not bicycle helmets should be legally required, euthanasia/abortion issues (the moral aspects of it, not the technical ones), ... I think it's a remnant from when doctors were part of the 'upper class' of the village (or even city), along with the priest, the school teacher, etc. Whereas today, in more educated circles at least in my observation, doctors are just body mechanics. They derive most of their status from their pay. (Much less so e.g. in the small town I'm from, where doctors are still respected just for being a doctor - but are paid less). Edit to add: I'm not going to modify my comment above because that invalidates all the responses, but it seems like all responses are taking the wrong message from my post: I'm not making some sort of moral judgement on the work of doctors, what I'm saying is that doctors aren't any longer so special that they're part of the intellectual elite (and hence are consulted on topics being their expertise) just for being a doctor. Sure most doctors do work that's beneficial to many people, but so do teachers, and I don't think anyone is going to claim that teachers have high status in society (because of it, or at all).
- germinalphrase 10y ago
  I feel like this is a narrative for which I am nostalgic despite being too young to have ever really experienced even though I grew up in a small town. I wish that those in my community who serve their neighbors in an important way were more respected socially. Sure, the local paramedic - Sam - doesn't make a lot of money, but everyone knows he's a good guy you can rely on. Everything feels so transactional.
  - ryuker16 10y ago
    many paramedics work for a private company for peanuts. Public figures are still respected. I suppose it's less so because education is more common. The Gulf between a medical doctor and your average citizen was huge
- enraged_camel 10y ago
  It completely depends on the type of doctor. If we're talking about GPs, then sure, their work is mostly standard and they refer anything non-standard to a specialist. But specialists are definitely held in very high regard in their social circle. Surgeons especially. >>They derive most of their status from their pay. No, they derive it from the insane amounts of education, training and hard work they have to put in to get to where they are at. It's basically "crunch time times two" all the time from the moment they start med school until they complete their residency, and only slightly lessens afterwards.
robbiep 10y ago
Doctors, in my experience, are the biggest drug fiends on the planet, behind perhaps rockstars and crack addicts
- omegaham 10y ago
  I'd be doing amphetamines too if they stuck me on 36-hour shifts.
shshhdhs 10y ago
Perhaps a good way to explain the bias that you mentioned is "tunnel vision"?
disordinary 10y ago
The thing is that doctors are hypocrites, they smoke, they drink, they eat junk food, they don't exercise, they do hard drugs and help themselves to unneeded prescriptions, they don't drink enough water, they don't sleep enough, etc. They know what's best for people, but they also know that people can make informed decisions, they certainly do.
Beltiras 10y ago
It's even worse than this. Every panel of experts called to testify on this contains doctors from the treatment/prevention sector and that subgroup of doctors holds even harder on to this bias than a regular practitioner.
tremon 10y ago
Doctors suffer from a kind of bias-- not sure the name of it-- but they only see people when they have problems. Only half on-topic, but it's called selection bias.
martinald 10y ago
You think doctors don't experiment with drugs at university the way they do with alcohol?! At my university the medical students were renowned for their extra curricula "drug research".

by lawpoop 10y ago

akiselev 10y ago

That may have been true in the past but the situation has rapidly changed over the last decade. Amphetamine and opioid abuse stemming from over-prescription is becoming far too common and doctors are now experiencing the full spectrum from people genuinely in pain to high-risk heroin addicts. When the latest public health scare is a drug abuse epidemic attributed to the medical system instead of the black market, it's far harder to ignore the futility of the war on drugs.

icantdrive55 10y ago
I'm not so sure amphetamine, and opioid abuse are the result of over-prescribing. I honestly think people are genuinely misserable. They are given a drug that makes them feel just better. Some just want to feel better. Of course, it's easy to blame it on a medication, but if it's not that prescribed pain killer, it will be something else. We need to stop saying we are "The greatest nation on earth." For some, it might ring true, but for the vast majority of us it isn't. It's just a country, with a lot of laws, and becomming very hard to make a living. We are thrown into a society, and just expected to "make it". We were brought up being told; you can do anything if you work hard enough. So many of us are just completely dissalusioned. I won't get into all the reasons. Oh, the reasons. No, we aren't starving to death, but the pressure to live up to the success of past generations is stiffling. We got some hope with the invention of heterocyclic drugs. (Prozac, etc). They failed spectacularly. Doctors went from "The boy geniuses--to mechanics." I look at the average Doctor, as just a luckey guy who got accepted to med. school, and slightly more ethical than the typical lawyer. Hell--I never had a mechanic say this while under my vechicle, "It's an art too?" Yea, I'm no fan of the golden boys. So now, on so many levels Doctors shouldn't be the ones deciding policy. They are just too tied to the money their profession that extorts from us. Extortion might be harsh? It's more like being held hostage? We need to pay them in order to prevent disease, or feel better? (The AMA is basically a huge lobby group. They don't want patients doing anything other than making a office visit, and getting a script.) Do I have a better system? No. That's the problem. That said, I would like to take the power away from doctors. I would like to see a Federal Statute put into place. It would be this: If any patient has been on a drug(maintance drugs mainly--blood pressure drugs, drugs that control diabetes, many psychiatric medications, pain meds, etc) for longer than five years; that person should be able to obtain the same dose of medication without seeing a doctor. Of course antibiotics would be off limits to everyone. And patients would have to provide any required blood work their medication requires. I would further like to see all street drugs decriminalized. Something on the lines of what Portugal did. Thats it. Will it happen? Probally never. We will go on spending a fortune on locking people up for just wanting to feel better, or have more energy. I would rather see that money go into free education, free housing, and free medical care.
ajb 10y ago
Mods: sibling comment by 'icantdrive55' is 'dead' for no clear reason.
- kefka 10y ago
  That's hellbanning for you. It's also a good reason to look at your user page via a private session in your browser every so often, esp if you have no comments to you.

themgt 10y ago

By the same token, doctors are better equipped to understand (to the extent we can) the neurochemical reactions being caused by drugs and how they act on the brain. I would imagine a doctor who e.g. understands how many anti-depressants work by targeting the serotonin system would find it interesting the way many psychedelics also are serotonergic - people are basically just dumping analogues of their own neurotransmitters into their brain. Similarly, look at the relationships chemically between sumatriptan (used to treat cluster headaches), psilocybin and DMT. Or the opioids, stimulants ... substances like coca and kratom that have been used for hundreds or thousands of years and analogues of which are used in medical settings all the time. The argument that these are crazy, dangerous substances with zero legitimate medical value pretty instantly falls apart to anyone who understands how closely related nearly all of these substances are to pharma drugs widely understood to have legitimate medical value. I'd in fact be interested to hear which "drugs" have the least relation to any recognized western medicine. Salvia divinorum?

kem 10y ago
I sympathize with the OP, although my concerns are slightly different. I worry that physician groups are trying to shape this narrative in a way that just shifts government-sanctioned power from one group to another. Physicians are not disinterested parties in this, because they have huge financial benefits to gain from official policy being that drugs are a "medical" issue. Once this happens, if nothing changes about the way that the medical system is organized, you'll just have a different group sucking up money and controlling individuals wholesale without sufficient justification. I agree with you up until a very critical point. Doctors are better equipped to understand the neurochemical reactions being caused by drugs than criminal justice professionals. However, they are not necessarily better equipped to understand the neurochemical reactions than other scientific professionals, nor are they better equipped to understand the economic, social, or legal consequences than criminal justice and other professionals. This is what is happening with the medical rhetoric: you have a group of experts in area X, who are currently legally designated as either the only people truly qualified, or in control of those qualified, arguing "drugs are an issue of X." In doing so, they put themselves in control of decision-making in this area, with all the financial benefits that accrue to them, and, more dangerously, simultaneously take control of discourse away from others, because then they become the ones who are only, or who are most qualified to make decisions about whether or not it is an issue of X. Once society deems drug use a "medical disease," then physicians become the people who are only truly legally qualified to make decisions about drug use, and also the only people truly qualified to make decisions about drug use policy. It's an entirely self-serving vicious circle. This line of reasoning is also dangerous, because there is no end to its logic. Given that humans are fundamentally biological beings, any state of human suffering can ultimately be seen as "medical" in nature. Reading this sounds conspiratorial, and I don't mean it to be, but it's frustrating to me that society doesn't recognize the ethical conflict of interest created by current medical certification and licensing systems. Don't get me wrong: the current system for handling drugs is woefully broken. But I worry that labeling drug use as a "disease" will only shift the problems from one area to another, unless that system is also reformed to foster a more competitive, less hierarchical health care community. Drug use problems are a complex, social, biological, psychological, legal, economic problem set that is outside the purview of any particular professional community. The best approach is to just deregulate it, and treat it as a form of human suffering that requires a multifactorial approach. I'm deeply skeptical this will happen, though, given our recurrent need to oversimplify everything.

greglindahl 10y ago

So you're saying that doctors are only capable of evaluating personal experience, and not evidence collected by others? That puts a whole new spin on the medical profession.

Something1234 10y ago
No, he's stating that they have a cognitive bias. One that is not easily realized.

roel_v 10y ago

There are several policy areas where doctors feel they have more to add than they actually do: tobacco discussion, whether or not bicycle helmets should be legally required, euthanasia/abortion issues (the moral aspects of it, not the technical ones), ... I think it's a remnant from when doctors were part of the 'upper class' of the village (or even city), along with the priest, the school teacher, etc. Whereas today, in more educated circles at least in my observation, doctors are just body mechanics. They derive most of their status from their pay. (Much less so e.g. in the small town I'm from, where doctors are still respected just for being a doctor - but are paid less). Edit to add: I'm not going to modify my comment above because that invalidates all the responses, but it seems like all responses are taking the wrong message from my post: I'm not making some sort of moral judgement on the work of doctors, what I'm saying is that doctors aren't any longer so special that they're part of the intellectual elite (and hence are consulted on topics being their expertise) just for being a doctor. Sure most doctors do work that's beneficial to many people, but so do teachers, and I don't think anyone is going to claim that teachers have high status in society (because of it, or at all).

germinalphrase 10y ago
I feel like this is a narrative for which I am nostalgic despite being too young to have ever really experienced even though I grew up in a small town. I wish that those in my community who serve their neighbors in an important way were more respected socially. Sure, the local paramedic - Sam - doesn't make a lot of money, but everyone knows he's a good guy you can rely on. Everything feels so transactional.
- ryuker16 10y ago
  many paramedics work for a private company for peanuts. Public figures are still respected. I suppose it's less so because education is more common. The Gulf between a medical doctor and your average citizen was huge
enraged_camel 10y ago
It completely depends on the type of doctor. If we're talking about GPs, then sure, their work is mostly standard and they refer anything non-standard to a specialist. But specialists are definitely held in very high regard in their social circle. Surgeons especially. >>They derive most of their status from their pay. No, they derive it from the insane amounts of education, training and hard work they have to put in to get to where they are at. It's basically "crunch time times two" all the time from the moment they start med school until they complete their residency, and only slightly lessens afterwards.

robbiep 10y ago

Doctors, in my experience, are the biggest drug fiends on the planet, behind perhaps rockstars and crack addicts

omegaham 10y ago
I'd be doing amphetamines too if they stuck me on 36-hour shifts.

shshhdhs 10y ago

Perhaps a good way to explain the bias that you mentioned is "tunnel vision"?

disordinary 10y ago

The thing is that doctors are hypocrites, they smoke, they drink, they eat junk food, they don't exercise, they do hard drugs and help themselves to unneeded prescriptions, they don't drink enough water, they don't sleep enough, etc. They know what's best for people, but they also know that people can make informed decisions, they certainly do.

Beltiras 10y ago

It's even worse than this. Every panel of experts called to testify on this contains doctors from the treatment/prevention sector and that subgroup of doctors holds even harder on to this bias than a regular practitioner.

tremon 10y ago

Doctors suffer from a kind of bias-- not sure the name of it-- but they only see people when they have problems. Only half on-topic, but it's called selection bias.

martinald 10y ago

You think doctors don't experiment with drugs at university the way they do with alcohol?! At my university the medical students were renowned for their extra curricula "drug research".