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| Not all doctors are incompetent... |
Maybe it’s not fair to label this as being “conspiracy
minded”, but the subject in question is a member of that camp’s philosophy. I
also should point out now that since my viewpoints so far has the seemed to be
in complete opposition to Alex Jones that I am not in any way saying that these
things are not occurring, as I do understand that I have no knowledge of what
my neighbors are doing behind closed doors, let alone what happens in top-secret
on the national stage. I guess that part of my problem with this is the
conspiracy camp’s extremely condescending label of “sheep” for those people who
are apparently “asleep” or “kowtowing to authority” or “locked into the system ”.
Perhaps I just get a little bit of joy from picking apart their logical
fallacies, as you shall see in this mind-boggling conundrum of logic that isn’t
exactly what you could label as “conspiracy”, but it is certainly plucked from
the same point of view as those expressed daily at Prison Planet.
With regards to what I’m going to say about wheat, I’m not
contesting that. In fact, from the little bit that I’ve heard and all the
hullabaloo surrounding gluten, I’m actually giving this the benefit of the
doubt and it is not what this blog post is concerned with.
A friend of mine recently visited his doctor for a routine
checkup and I believe was discussing his recent weight loss and had mentioned
how reducing/eliminating wheat from his diet was credited as being the cause.
He then told me how he expected his doctor to disagree with him and was
surprised that the doctor agreed.
Did you spot the problem with that? While those two
sentences make perfect sense grammatically and probably wouldn’t even raise an
eyebrow if scanned over quickly, that is a confounding flip-flop in logic.
Let’s decode:
A layman is expressing hereto unknown medical knowledge to a
medical professional with the expectation that said medical professional is
either too stupid to understand it or is too indoctrinated into “the system” to
comprehend it without dismissing or ridiculing it. This is only the first
layer.
The second layer applies to the expectations of the layman,
who said “I was surprised that he agreed with me.” Why should anyone be
surprised that someone who has a minimum of 8 years of rigorous study just to
get a PhD have the knowledge that a layman can get from a Google search?
Admittedly, a layman does have a certain open-mindedness when peering into
fields in which he has little to no knowledge, but that sort of open-mindedness
is of the brand that gets you duped and conned. Any professional or semi
professional poker player can attest to this, as they bear witness daily to
what happens when outsiders stumble into their domain.
The part that is unclear is whether or not my friend was
impressed with himself or the doctor, in which case neither scenario makes much
sense. If he had to convince the doctor that his relative inexperience somehow
trumped the doctor’s pseudo-scientific worldview, then by default, doctors aren’t
nearly as stupid as they are believed to be by conspiracy enthusiasts. On the
other hand, if he was happy that the doctor somehow validated his Internet
knowledge, then by default, doctors actually aren’t so stupid or hopelessly
entrenched in the system after all and you should vaccinate your children
without fear of autism.
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