Medical Ignorance

I like to be in control of my health. I expect my doctor to give me the actual numbers from my lab tests - and have battled them over this before.

The problem, of course, is that doctors don't want to give too much up to patients - and they might have good reason.

A lot of us simply aren't very savvy about certain things. For example, many people don't know the difference between a virus and a bacteria - and thus think antibiotics work on viruses. Their demands for treatment contribute to the overuse of antibiotics that reduces their effectiveness.

Others, of course, think vaccines cause autism - no matter how many times they're told any link has been thoroughly disproven.

A lot of people have jumped on the gluten free diet trend, even though there's no indication that cutting out gluten is a benefit unless you're actually sensitive to the protein. But many of them, apparently, don't know what gluten is. And 27% of people think cutting it out will help you lose weight, which is simply not true.

So...yeah. You can't really blame doctors for being controlling when so many people are ignorant of how their own bodies function and what's good for them and what isn't. Sigh.