Natural selection in action!

[syntaxglitch]

Or: Screw You, Doc

Homoepathy found to be ineffective... just like every educated person has known for decades. Meanwhile, popularity surges, because people prefer feel-good "alternative" treatments to stuff that actually, y'know... works.

Meanwhile, a doctor gets in trouble for hurting an obese patient's feelings. Oh no! She's in critical

Comments

[nanassi]

Actually, I didn't go to the Doctor for the last couple of years because I didn't want her / him to find something with co-pays I couldn't afford.
Same for the cats and Vet for a few years now.
One way to cut the budget, and I suspect that a number of people do this, is to not go to the doctor's. That way one can still afford a social life, which is kind of needed. Mental health and all. Maybe even afford things like a house...

But that doesn't mean one still doesn't want treatment.
So one (I, at least) turns to something that may work and can be afforded, even if one is pretty sure it's snake oil.
I've had to do that sort of thing for over a decade, before my last job.
So sometimes it's not as clear cut as it seems.

[syntaxglitch]

Okay, but I'd think I wouldn't need to tell you how short-sighted and somewhat silly that approach is.

1) If the doctor finds something you can't afford to properly treat, it would have been there anyways. It's not like the doctor conjures illness out of thin air. Knowing you have a condition is still better than NOT knowing, because at least you can take sensible precautions (dietary adjustments, etc.)

2) A healthy mind requires a healthy body. Willful neglect of physical health in favor of mental health is like worrying about putting new tires on a car with a dying transmission. You have to take care of the whole package, especially the fundamentals.

3) Affordable snake oil is still snake oil, and unless it involves absolutely no money or time, you're still wasting resources--the scarcity of which was the original premise here. Foolish.

[nanassi]

As you know, I don't do the snake oil any more.

About 1) Once a condition is identified, it can affect one's rates when one change's jobs. (In the worst cases, one becomes ineligible for insurances.)

About 2) Yes, but that may oversimplify. The two need to be balanced. I neglected my mental health far worst than my physical health, and we both know what that nearly caused.

But that's not my point. I was trying to explain how a tight budget can effect one's choice to go to the doctor or not. I guess that I failed at doing so.

*shrugs*

[imonkey50]

Points you toward the darwin awards :)) If people were logical we'd all be Vulcan's. As Larry Niven, said, "Think of it as evolution in action." A point in case is Jim Jones and the cyanide kool-aid in Jonestown. The people didn't want to think for themselves...

[syntaxglitch]

Unfortunately, most of these sort of people are likely to be ineligible for a Darwin Award; in most cases they won't die until AFTER they've reproduced, and evolution is wholly ineffective at that point--ever notice how physical health is basically all downhill post prime reproductive age?