Baba Yaga's Worm Soup

It crossed my mind this morning that a strong contributing factor in the distrust of modern medicine stems from the longstanding lack of family doctors. Doctors at clinics don't have the time to get to know their patients and it makes nuanced diagnosis next to impossible. Diagnosing problems in complex dynamical systems is difficult. Problems almost never exist in isolation and the deep understanding of what interactions may be at play can only be developed over time. But for the most part doctors are only given the time for "What's the problem?", "OK. You have disease X, cure Y usually works for that." But working with an incomplete picture it's really easy to be wrong. The patient goes back, often to a different doctor, "Cure Y didn't work", "OK, then. Let's try cure Z" and maybe it is rinse and repeat. Going to a doctor at a walk-in clinic is not very different than being walked through some script of common problems and solutions from a tech support call-centre. And just like tier-1 tech support, you end up with an impression that they don't have a clue what's wrong and aren't listening. If it isn't a cookie-cutter problem tier-1 support is just an annoying series of hoops to get through to get to tier-2, usually the point where people say something along the lines of, "Oh, thank God. Finally someone that's listening and knows what they are doing." That's the family doctor. And with medicine, that's where you should be starting. Getting referred by a walk-in clinic doctor to a specialist is often useless because the clinic doctor may well have focused in on the wrong problem or the wrong part of a larger problem and you're then faced with the hyper-focus of someone with a "when all you have is a hammer, every problem is a nail" approach. You have to start with a good generalist that has the time to have listened, has asked the right questions, and has gotten a good grip on the whole problem. So now that you have been through the tier-1 walk-in clinic doctor and jumped right to a tier-3 specialist who is barking up the wrong tree, it's natural to come to the conclusion that all doctors are idiots. And in some backward country without universal healthcare that conclusion is exacerbated by the idea that these "idiot" doctors are just charging you for nothing and in it to keep you sick and milk you for cash. And when someone has come to that conclusion and has no knowledge of how statistical analysis works, how large-scale studies are done, how drugs are developed, etc. it's not hard to see how the extrapolation happens that all of modern medicine is just a scam and that one is better off with horse pills, reality show hosts, and your babushka-wearing Baba Yaga great aunt's worm-soup recipe.