TigerDoc

That’s kinda the internet in a nutshell now. Real headline + missing context + implied motive + everybody mentally fills in the last 20%.

Thanks for that. It goes to show that there's a LOT of info out there and can even get overwhelming. Page 1 is kind of a potpourri of different things that may or may not belong together - Lyme disease being real and awful, alpha-gal syndrome being real, biotech firms researching ticks, Gates funding weird biotech stuff, distrust of pharma companies, DARPA existing and then “therefore they’re secretly dropping millions of ticks from planes”

Some of those claims are established, some speculative, and some are just vibes holding hands with each other. Not saying people shouldn’t ask questions, but these kinds of threads tend to blend “possible,” “researched”, “discussed”, and “proven to be happening” into one giant stew.

I agree on informed consent as an ethical standard for institutions/governments/etc. I was thinking more about standards for us as citizens trying to figure out what’s true in that murky middle ground between “totally impossible” and “definitely proven”, especially in confusing and misleading digital environments like OP arises in.

yeah, I think this is where a lot of the tension online comes from now. People see enough real examples of elite/technocratic overreach that “nothing is impossible” starts to feel emotionally true. But if we lose the distinction between “I could imagine this happening” and “there’s good evidence this is happening”, things can get sideways pretty fast.

I do think there’s probably a difference between “powerful people sometimes pursue risky technocratic ideas” and “there is currently a massive covert tick deployment operation happening all over North America” (e.g. Legend's observations seem worth considering). It feels like online discourse collapses those categories together pretty quickly sometimes.

I agree. But if we had more well-trained people providing therapy there would probably be more of a demand for it.

That’s fair criticism of the analogy. Psychiatric meds are definitely messier than antibiotics because outcomes are more subjective/probabilistic,
treatment can be long term, side effects matter a lot, “working” isn’t always obvious or binary. I just don’t think “messy/complex/imperfect” automatically gets us all the way to “therefore these medications never meaningfully help anyone." I see them help people frequently, actually.

I actually agree with a lot of that. Having credentials in one area definitely doesn’t make somebody automatically wise or correct about everything else. Doctors, teachers, lawyers, professors, etc. are still just people with egos, blind spots, biases, personal issues, politics, all the normal human stuff.

Where expertise does matter IMO is narrower than people sometimes think. If I need heart surgery, I’d rather have somebody who’s done 5,000 of them than somebody who hasn’t. But that doesn’t mean the surgeon suddenly has deep insight into every social or political issue on earth.

I just don't buy into the idea that if experts don’t possess complete mechanistic understanding, then the product is illegitimate/corrupt. We saved a gazillion soldiers' lives with penicillin before we had a clue about how it was killing bacteria. It would've been better to have had the explanation, but it was defensible to give the treatment because research showed that it worked even though they didn't know how.

I think there’s definitely truth to that criticism. Part of the problem is modern medicine is very compressed/time-limited and patients are often coming in exhausted, overwhelmed, not sleeping, anxious, wanting relief ASAP and with a model for what's going to give it. A prescription is sometimes the fastest thing available even when everybody knows it’s not the whole answer. I think doctors are most helpful when they treat meds as one tool instead of THE tool and also push basics hard: sleep, exercise, substance use, relationships, purpose, routines, social connection, etc. You're right about the relationship. That's what ultimately helps good docs convince people to tackle the more complicated stuff when they realize a med isn't the whole solution.