Should you trust medicine, as an institution? Long story short, no. I mean, not blindly. You might think that you know what I'm talking about, where this post is going to. You don't. Honestly, I bet that you have no idea whatsoever what I'm about to tell you, specially if you do trust medicine. I will start by sharing with you here two perspectives about trusting.
For the first one, I will use an analogy with trusting in relationships . When it comes to relationships (closed romantic ones, open romantic ones, friendships, family, doesn't matter) trust is something that you give a person because you want to. But if you are more than five years old, you know that some people have betrayed others in the past, therefore giving reasons not to be trusted again in the future, or at least to be less trusted.
What I mean by "betrayal"? I mean acting against the trust you gave the person, for example doing something completely unexpected and that is against some explicitly agreed (or implicitly expected) social contract. Maybe the most obvious case is when a person tells you something (sometimes it's even a vow or promise) and then they do otherwise.
Now, if someone does such a thing to you (they do different from what they told you they would), you might keep trusting that person, but will it be the same? You already know that the person fooled you once. Do their words still enable the same trust?
I guess you just said no, so I expect you to act likewise when it comes to medicine as an institution. Of course, an institution is not a person, but it doesn't matter to what I'll argue here. It's just an analogy, anyway, but a useful one. (For sake of brevity, I'll just refer to medicine as an institution as "imedicine", where "i" goes gor "institution".) The fact is that imedicine has betrayed us all (I mean almost everybody, indeed, including the doctors themselves), not once, but multiple times. And I'll show it here, very clearly, in the next post of the "Should you trust imedicine?" series.
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