Patients Are Taught to Blame Themselves to Exonerate Doctors
The Mass media promulgates half-truths and distortions so patients will believe that their alleged negligence created their illness.
By
David Gottfried
Nowadays, people are convinced that if they suffer a heart attack it is because of gluttonous eating. Yes, sometimes fat people get heart attacks, but thin people get heart attacks too.`
I believe that misinformation is routinely disseminated so patients will blame themselves and let their doctors off the hook.
Cardiac issues are a fine example of Americans wrongly blaming themselves. Americans don’t understand a damn thing about the causes of heart attacks – or, for that matter, about the difference between causation and a mere correlation. They are silly putty for whatever nonsense the boob tube airs.
Americans are convinced that the ingestion of cholesterol causes hardening of the arteries, and clots, and that if they get a heart attack it is because they ate too much cholesterol. Let me say a few things about cholesterol and a few other things:
One. Doctors, for ages, have said that hardening of the arteries can be caused by the deposit of calcium on arterial walls. But the media hardly ever mentions it.
Two. The French and The Germans eat cholesterol in prodigious amounts, much greater than what we consume, and they have fewer heart attacks. How often do lame-brained news announcers on TV tell you that.
Three. we are told that the consumption of salt will increase our risk of heart attacks; In Japan they eat more salt and have fewer heart attacks.
Four. Medical textbooks declaim that a healthy person is able to regulate his salt levels and to excrete excess salt. If this is true, then eating fries heavily sprinkled in salt should be no problem; the excess will be excreted into the urine.
Five. The media makes people think that their bodies are passive receptacles, as retrograde pseudo leftist hippies would have it, “that you are what you eat.” And so they think that cholesterol levels must be directly related to the cholesterol that you eat. And so they don’t know that the liver makes a lot of cholesterol and that our systems break down the foods we eat into different components.
Six. People think that cholesterol is a sin. And that the less cholesterol we eat, the better. Of course, they don’t know that cholesterol is necessary for the production of male hormones.
Seven: If salt and sugar were such poisons, then why is it that when you go to a hospital one of the first things they often do is shove an IV into your arm with salt and sugar.
Eight: Have you seen the ways doctors and nurses eat – they eat like happy gluttons. Have you ventured into cancer wards; the people are shockingly skeletal.
Nine: I know anecdotes are not the stuff of what serious ideas should be composed of, but hell, Ronald Reagan used anecdotes all the time and he was elected president, and so I will note:
A: My Aunt was a nurse, who was really quite brilliant, and she had a serious chronic illness, and she ate whatever she damn well felt like eating. She liked cake and she ate it with gusto. Some nights, instead of cooking dinner, she would eat an entire Entenmann’s cake as she ridiculed the boobs on the television news.
B: My Uncle was a doctor, and he ate what he felt like eating, and before he left work for the ride home, he often bought two candy bars to savor while he was stuck in traffic on the Long Island Expressway.
C: I knew two black people who told me that they had Grandmothers who had lived to be at least one hundred and who had given birth to more than eight children, had almost no medical care in their lives, and loved to eat bacon and as much fried food as possible.
Also, Americans punish themselves in the name of health: Today, many Americans are all caught up in the vogue of having gigantic enemas. They feel they must cleanse themselves of filth – needless to say, they haven’t read or seen “Macbeth.” I knew a woman who went to a charlatan who gave her deep colonic enemas on a regular basis. She died before she was fifty. These poor fools: They think their idea, that enemas will confer health and well-being, is their unique, brilliant epiphany. Actually, America went through an enema craze in the first couple of decades of the 20th century. The same sort of garbage is constantly recycled. Ah, but let’s not attack recycling; these sorts of fools all know that recycling is next to godliness.
Also, people often succumb to the nonsense disseminated in the media because their powers of critical thinking are often dormant, i.e., they don’t know how to “take apart” somebody’s idea to see if it makes sense. Most often, people are confused and fooled because they assume that when two things are positively correlated, one of those things caused the other thing. For example, Computers were used in Gulf War One. Oil Wells went on fire in Gulf War One. This does not mean that computers necessarily cause oil wells to go on fire. For example, a news story from 1971 said a study showed that people who sleep more die younger, and it was proposed that because they slept so much they did not burn up enough fat and the build-up of lipids clotted their arteries. It never occurred to the mental munchkin who wrote the story that perhaps they slept more because they were sick to begin with. And so I believe that the media exploits the gullibility of our citizenry to implant the notion that they created their illnesses as a means of exculpating doctors from liability.