Medicine + Emotional Reasoning - They Want Others to Disprove Their Unproven Approach
Backassword
“Life itself is but what you deem it.” - Marcus Aurelius
This is not necessarily something new - I have seen this before in my career. A colleague has developed a ‘unique’ pattern of managing a malady and truly appears to believe that it is the proper or best strategy. There is no strong evidence for this; as such it is just opinion (as most ‘facts’ are). When questioned about it, they then demand that you prove that they are wrong. Hopefully. you can see how medicine can get completely off the rails with this approach. It is the exact opposite of Karl Popper’s falsification paradigm. They should have to, using the best available methods, disprove that they are wrong. It is on them, not on me. Also keep in mind that it is easy to be a critic.
Ancient philosophers understood that we don’t see life as it is; we see it as we are through a distorted veil of our hopes and fears among other things. There are numerous cognitive distortions or ‘stinking thinking’ that can fool us into believing our own viewpoint. It is important for training physicians to at least be aware of these biases as critical thinking skills are paramount. Even knowledge of these biases however, is not necessarily sufficient to prevent these biases from slowly intruding into our thoughts and decision making; but not knowing of them is worse. Critical thinking requires forming beliefs based on evidence rather than in emotion. It is imperative that in the search for and the evaluation of the evidence we keep in mind that there may be information that contradicts your initial viewpoint. Look for unbiased sources of medical information. I don’t think there is enough emphasis placed on this during training; maybe that explains what is happening in medicine in this era.
I read Coddling of the American Mind a few years ago and was struck by the author’s observations. They highlighted the emergence of emotional reasoning and in higher education in particular. One can define it as letting “your feelings guide your interpretation of reality” or "I feel it, therefore it must be true.”
Perhaps our current politicians and medical elites were unwittingly bombarded by this educational paradigm during their university days and have put critical thinking skills on the back burner. They think: “I feel that I am right, so it has to be true. If you don’t feel this way also, then you have to prove with evidence that I am wrong.” I can think of no other way as to why they are so adamant that they are right and so unwilling to change their position on COVID despite the obvious evidence, not only in Canada but evidence from around the world that seems incontrovertible.
These government and medical elites were quick to issue mandates for masks, closing schools and businesses, preventing social or religious gathering, preventing humans from celebrating the lives of those that died, destroying the economy, and coercing ‘vaccines’ on people despite the lack of strong evidence for any of these, and other imposed, strategies. There was no discussion amongst our elected leaders. No one voted for this. Unelected people were given this awesome responsibility and they ran with it. Many became media darlings; I cannot know what is in their hearts or minds so I will fall back on Hanlon’s razor and try to be charitable.
There is more evidence that the strategies they have mandated were net harmful to society. As a result, and despite COVID case counts, hospitalizations and deaths being higher than 1 year ago, the move among many Provinces is to remove these mandates. But, some provinces, for example BC, still feel that indoor masking and vaccine passports are necessary. They can flip the switch to adversely affect our lives but we have to be cautious to allow you to live again and make decisions for yourself.
Bottom Line: These government and medical elites quickly enact policies/mandates/directives that are of no use or dangerous, based on emotion (and initially perhaps that was justified - but that was 2 years ago!), but now in some jurisdictions they want ‘more evidence’ so that we don’t roll things back too quickly. What piffle. It is a perfect example of “my emotions tell me I am right with this policy, so now you have to prove me wrong.” That is not ‘the science’ - ‘the science’ works in the opposite direction. You need strong evidence, that is critically appraised evidence, before you mandate policies that have the potential to cause more harm than good. And if you made a mistake, admit it as soon as possible, apologize and try not to make the same cognitive errors again.
First do no harm. Why is that so difficult?