Shut-Up Stupid Sunday: Anti-Medicine

I can remember thinking when I had a TV and saw the ads for prescription drugs, heart meds, depression meds, ect, who’s word should I take? On the one hand you have your General Practitioner who has spent 4 years in pre-med, 3 years in med school, a one-year internship, and a 3 and a half-year residency plus how ever many years in practice. On the other hand you have a 30 second commercial. It’s such a tough decision choosing who’s advice to take.

Somehow these ads either must be effective, or the drug manufactures are making so much money overcharging people that they can afford to blow millions on an ineffective campaign. I think it’s a little of both.

Outside the commercials we have the medical activists that take on misguided causes like the anti-vax movement, cell phones cause cancer movements, healing through prayer and a host of other movements that don’t care if their assertions have been debunked time and time again.

With the anti-vaxers on the one hand you’ve got the CDC, the AMA and a hundred years of research. On the other hand you’ve got Jenny McCarthy.

Now I’d take Jenny’s advise on a lot of stuff, how to feel confident being naked, choosing the film crew for a gang bang, how to get your name so well searched that it will lead 20 people to a website when even the owner of the website can’t find his site by entering your name (I admire the people who have gone beyond the first 18 pages of a search to find me). But on medical advise I’ll stick to the real experts.

These people who continue to push bad medical advise cause the medical field to spend money on ideas that have been 99.9% debunked so that they can be 99.99% debunked, money that could be used in real research to cure what they are on about.

On a more humorous side Digital Cuddlefish posted a poem about the anti-vaxers.

The bottom line about the Medical Profession vs. Drug Commercials, Anti-vaxers, people who believe that cell phones cause cancer is this. Medicine is a science; it’s a complex one because of the extreme number of variables in it, which gives it a lot of gray areas. Since it is a science there are some things that are known and it is ridiculous to argue against the things that are known and have been proven time and time again through experimentation.

So to everyone who thinks the public should take the word of someone because they are a celebrity or can pay to get a drug advertised on TV or their faith says something that is contradictory to hundreds of real scientific experiments I say, “Shut-up Stupid”.