My mother has told me that whenever she steps into her nephrologist’s office, she feels like a schoolgirl waiting to be scolded. She fears annoying the doctor with her questions. She also suspects that the doctor values the number of patients and earnings from prescriptions over her wellbeing
None of my doctors have ever been anything like this. It’s why I have a fair amount of faith in doctors (outside psychiatry - the few doctors I have had negative experiences with have been psychiatrists and even there it is 50-50. I didn’t like the shrinks with my sleazy former employer in the US. But the psychiatrist outside the school was very cool like the therapist. I disliked the two boorish shrinks I came across here in 2012 as well, but not the shrink with my main hospital. She was decent). And while I have cobbled together a DIY mental health strategy, it is AI free and I would still prefer my original shrink in the US who prescribed Adderall which actually helped over my AI shilling sleazy former employer.
A documentary I found via the inimitably awesome Yasha Levine, made it easier to grasp what the deal with the Rosenhan Experiment actually was:
Another strand in the documentary is the work of R. D. Laing, whose work in psychiatry led him to model familial interactions using game theory. His conclusion was that humans are inherently selfish and shrewd and spontaneously generate stratagems during everyday interactions. Laing's theories became more developed when he concluded that some forms of mental illness were merely artificial labels, used by the state to suppress individual suffering. This belief became a staple tenet of counter-culture in the 1960s. Reference is made to an experiment run by one of Laing's students, David Rosenhan, in which bogus patients, self-presenting at a number of American psychiatric institutions, were falsely diagnosed as having mental disorders, while institutions, informed that they were to receive bogus patients, misidentified genuine patients as imposters. The results of the experiment were a disaster for American psychiatry, because they destroyed the idea that psychiatrists were a privileged elite that was genuinely able to diagnose, and therefore treat, mental illness.
Curtis credits the Rosenhan experiment with the inspiration to create a computer model of mental health. Input to the program consisted of answers to a questionnaire. Curtis describes a plan of the psychiatrists to test the computer model by issuing questionnaires to "hundreds of thousands" of randomly selected Americans. The diagnostic program identified over 50% of the ordinary people tested as suffering from some kind of mental disorder. According to Jerome Wakefield, who refers to the test as "these studies", the results it found were viewed as a general conclusion that "there is a hidden epidemic." Leaders in the psychiatric field never addressed whether the computer model was being tested or used without having been validated in any way, but rather used the model to justify vastly increasing the portion of the population they were treating.
Google’s Thomas Insel would totally be a shill for some awful new AI and data driven or VR shilling bs for mental health. A pox on all these creeps.
I am wary of hospital admins - they are usually not doctors anyway. They have MBAs. That’s where the profit driven crap comes in.
And doctors who are influencers..yeah that I would avoid. I love my onc. He is the opposite of that and such a good doctor. He is pretty overworked though.
This article repeats a lot of outdated narratives about aging societies and reads like a pitch for more AI than not. That’s an ad dressed up as a humblebrag. Doctors here are overworked because of overpopulation. You can’t train doctors at the same pace at which people have kids. So the idea is more growth of this noxious kind with stolen medical and academic data and theft from our living and working spaces. More formal discussion of family planning without eugenics in public health, that would help. Unsustainable..this Ponzi scheme worldview. Even though Steve Chu works at the execrable Stanford (which no decent human should going forward), he got that part right.
This is why I am filing complaints about this stuff from the last 14-15 years. I am drafting a post about it for activist HQ to initiate pushback.
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